Bonding over Beer

Day 8

15052019

First full day on the cruise, stopping in Harlingen, Netherlands.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlingen,_Netherlands

The town is pretty small, we are glad we didn't do any of the ships excursions because I feel like it would have been pricy for what it would have gotten us. We just walked around the town. I think it would be most aptly described as being quaint, most of the town was still asleep, it was a weekday after all.

The canals on the town are so small that they have a crew of guys that bike around to open and close the canals and raise/lower bridges.

We happened to be stopping to use a public toilet as the canal tour boat hired by our cruise ship was passing through, so we got to see how manual the process was.

Given that the whole time in Port was relatively short we headed back to the cruise ship. Laura and I stopped off at a grocery store to bring in some extra wine on board. We also snagged a discount bottle of beer to drink on the sock before getting on board.

While enjoying that beer in the pleasant weather security approached us: “what're you drinking there?” and struck up a conversation, we basically got a portion of the info we would have gotten had we taken the tour. He himself was port security out of Amsterdam and travelled around to support these smaller ports. He lived in Friesland.

He told us about how Friesland used to be a separate landmass, but was connected to the rest of Holland by landfilling. And that they actually have their own language. He talked about the beer we were drinking, that it was from a monastary in the dunes of Holland. The monks have been brewing this beer for centuries.

He pointed out that Harlingen has a long history of fishing, whaling and exploring the northern seas, he claims a Frieslander discovered both Iceland and Greenland before the Norwegian Vikings did. Which is exactly what Tord the Norwegian in Iceland told us would happen. All the various flavors of sailors around here claim they discovered America, they only seem to agree that Columbus was 400 years late to the party.

After getting back on the ship easily with the wine, Laura decided she needed more wine and we went back to the grocery store to grab another €8 bottle of wine and spotted a bottle of Aperol for €11, which is a great price honestly. And given that it's not actually liquor we thought we could get it on. Aperol and the tonic they have on the ship? Aperol spritzes on a cruise? Sounds great.

No dice, security caught it, didn't have a problem with the wine, but took our bottle of Aperol to give us when we get off the ship. So now we have 3 days in Sweden to drink up a bunch of Aperol.

The next exciting part of the day was dinner. Laura and I ordered the peppered tofu entree as an appetizer to split, and it was, whelming. Not great, not bad, would have been a disappointing main course, but as an app it was acceptable. I ordered a mushroom sauced roast duck, and Laura got a chorizo and shrimp dish on couscous.

My duck was pretty good, not great. And Laura's dish came sans chorizo, my father got the same thing, and his was also chorizo-less. It was so conspicuously absent we had to check the menu again to make sure. I don't even recall what we got for desserts.

After dinner we went to my parents cabin, which is slightly larger, they have a couch one can stretch out on, ours feet hang off of. There we drank some of the wine we snuck onto the ship.