Flowers!

Day 6

12052019

We again got to sleep in, and ate some pastries Laura and I nabbed from the grocery store (who incidently didn't take credit cards). Our activity for the day was a tour of the koekenhof, which are the famous tulip fields.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keukenhof

The park is set up to flower at different times so when visitors come they still see something. But the fields themselves hat support the Dutch tulip industry had bloomed in previous weeks and we're thusly empty fields. Which is kinda disappointing. But Washington has their own tulip fields so we can more easily catch those next year.

On the drive out of Amsterdam the guide briefly discussedthe tulipmania of the 17th century. In the 1660-1670s everyone wanted tulips, and a speculative market developed around the harvests. People were buying futures on tulip bulbs, and the futures contracts for the right kind of bulb were trading at the value of a nice house on the main canals of Amsterdam (those houses are now selling for upwards of $1000USD/sqft).

We walked all around the canals viewing the flowers.

We left a little bit or Sicily here too, again in proximity to ducks. I think she would have enjoyed trying to walk into the flower beds to have a pee, mashing the flowers in the process.

We grabbed some fries and curry ketchup as a snack and continued the meandering.

We finally got back on the bus, and napped on the ride back into the city. The return ride took a little longer due to traffic. But I think the propensity for bicycling and mass transit means it wasn't that bad for a city of 800,000.

We headed back to the airbnb, drank some beers that we had picked up at the grocery store (if I didn't mention it before, beer is super cheap, paid like <€7 for 2 6 packs of beer. We headed to another food hall, this one in the mall. https://thefooddepartment.nl/ I know a mall food court doesn't sound very good, but it was great, and the food stalls themselves were more than just Auntie-Anns Pretzels and Sbarro's. Laura and I ate from a Szechuan stall, I got a Jian Bing sandwich, it's like a Chinese shwarma sandwich. It had roast duck, and spices and cabbage and happiness. Laura had a spicy-cumin noodle soup. I watched he guy handpull the noodles that went into her soup. My dad had a lamb burger that he said was solid, and given that he didn't share any, I dont doubt it. My mom had a poke bowl on quinoa, and a plate of zucchini fries. The fries were breaded, and tender, but not too greasy. From here we went back to the Central station to hop on a canal tour. This was free with our ticket for the tulip fields. We sat on the outside back of the canal boat so we got 0 tour-guiding and just looked and took badly lit pictures.

It was nice to see Amsterdam and not also be keeping an eye out for a zooming scooter or whizzing cyclists or silently prowling electric cars.

The homes were beautiful, both architecturally and interior-decoration wise. We spotted buildings currently lived in that were built in the 1660s, meaning older than my home country.

It was relatively late night, we headed back to the Airbnb to drop my parents off and shortly thereafter Laura and I went to wander through the Red Light District.

We walked there as it is close, and it has always been around the older part of town, as it serviced the sailors that were coming in from the main canal. It was a little after midnight when we got there. And it was admittedly a Monday night, but the place was pretty dead. There were drunk people wandering about, but the place wasn't packed. More than half of the girls in the windows were not occupied, so there weren't many people *in* getting serviced. We went into one bar that Laura had researched that was supposed to be pretty hopping, but when we got there we doubled the patronage, so we left without paying €7 for a Heineken. We went to the next bar that was allegedly 24hrs, but when we went to order the beer they said they were closing in <30 mins. So we left there too.
We did find a coffeeshop that was open later, so we sat in there till they closed at 1am. And then took a long circuitous route home