Early day by virtue of checking out of the AirBnB, we packed up our things, tidied up the apartment and dropped our bags with the proprietor, a very nice lady that lives on the premises.
http://www.rose170.com/
We knew we were boarding the vessel that afternoon so we didn't get into anything to exciting.
Laura found a quick morning activity, a walk through the Berghoff. This was a little neighborhood that was made up of unmarried Catholic women that were involved with the church but not nuns. And after the Dutch adopted Protestantism as the official religion this became a ghetto of sorts for Catholics, and when the church in the neighborhood was handed over to the Anglican congregation of the city.
the Catholics had to build a secret church in some houses. It was pretty neat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begijnhof,_Amsterdam
We walked down the street to get a sandwich from a local cafe. ¾ of us got a grandma's meatball sandwich, which was very good, though I would have described it as a meatloaf sandwich, and I had the curry chicken sandwich just to change it up (I intended to get the grandmas meatball sandwich too, but figured we should get some variety). All of the sandwiches were exactly what we needed inexpensive, tasty food that didn't require much in the way of decision making.
After the sandwich we went accross the street to a bar to waste more time. While drinking the beers we were provided entertainment by the beer deliver guys. All of the taps, and seemingly much of the storage is in the basement of the bar, which isn't all that uncommon, but was unique about this place (and I'm guessing older cities in general), is they didn't have room to waste to put in a whole staircase, so the way to the basement is through a trapdoor in the middle of a bar, and down a ladder. Watching these guys wrestle kegs of beer down the ladder was impressive. They obviously do this all the time, in fact it made me truly appreciate he strong man competitions where they through kegs over field goal posts.
Laura drank her beer quick so we could run to the grocery store and pick up some more snacks and wine for the ship. The ship had a 3 bottles per cabin limit before they would start taking then away. And given the price of alcohol on the ship, bringing on a €8.50 bottle of wine was wise.
We returned to the bar to retrieve my parents and then back the 3 blocks to grab our bags.The proprietor’s son was left in charge of waiting for us to get put bags. He was very surprised to see a family of four when he was in charge of only my/Laura's 2 backpacks, and a small rolling carry-on, my mom's rolling carry-on, my dad's medium duffle and my mom's wierd stuff sack that she has had for at least the 30 years I've been around. So we said our goodbyes and or thank yous and got on the tram to the central terminal. With a transfer to another train we were at the cruise terminal and on the ship in about 45 minutes.
Given how easy it was to get the bottle of wine on board (no one remarked on it at all) Laura and I were tempted to run back into the city to grab some more. But instead decided to nap on the couch.
Given how Iceland never got dark after our 8 hour overnight flight, and Laura and I had stayed up late both nights prior to a location change we never got over the jet lag. So we welcomed having a privet space, and enough room to spread out our stuff. So we napped, basically until the ship was leaving Amsterdam.
We observed the departure and some of the canal/river exiting the area, and returned to our cabin to nap some more.
Eventually we got room service. Knowing that many people went through some kind of journey to get on the vessel, the room service offered the same food that was in the dining room, as many guests may not have been ready to make their way to the public areas of the vessel.
Anyways, the food was ok, again if I wasn't logging what I did and ate, probably wouldn't be writing home about it. The soups were probably the best part of the meal. I had a butternut squash soup that was probably 40% cream/butter and 60% squash, so it was delicious. Laura had minestrone soup. And then for our mains I wanted the spaghetti and I was feeling a little under the weather, and a bunch of carbs sounded great. Laura got the bacon wrapped scallops.
Then we watched the 4 hour epic of the 1996 full text production of Hamlet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(1996_film)
And then went to sleep.
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