Basement beers and sneaky wines

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.

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

High stakes Frogger

12052019

Day 5

Finally got to sleep in. All of us slept in until at least 0900 Laura got up first to do some stretching and yoga, I finally got up amd started looking at what it takes to get in the Rijksmuseum.

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

It's the Dutch national Museum, seeing that we went to only the one museum in Iceland I was feeling the itch to sauntering around and lookin at old stuff.

We purchase some tickets online and head out for breakfast. On the way to the tram that took us to the museum we stopped at a cafe for breakfast. I had a ham and cheese sandwich, Laura had a ham, cheese and pineapple sandwich, my dad had an omelette, and my mom had a savory tomato-spinach pancake. The savory pancake was basically a pizza, but on a crepe instead of crust, it wasn't bad. Also we obviously had beers, as it was basically lunch, so that's fair.

We made our way to the tram, which involved crossing a bike path, a street, a tramway, another street, and another bike path. Crossing the street here is crazy. You gotta keep an eye out for bikes, because you won't hear them coming. But you have to time it so that you can get across the bike lanes *and* then get across the street as the cars come.

We safely made it to the tram, used our multiday pass for the tram and got to the museum square.

The pre-purchased tickets got us in quick, and we wandered around the museum.

That's a bust of St. Fredrick, that they actually kept some bits of the very same after he was canonized.

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

Some unicorn horns.

The library, which is an active library, you can do research here through a sign up and wait-time process.

There was much more to see, the museum traces Duth art from about 1100 to modern day. You should check it out.

From the meseum we went to a bar.

https://cafegollem.nl/

They had about a half dozen of their own beers and another half dozen guest beers, in addition to over a hundred different beers in bottles/cans.

They also had a cat.

Every beer we tried was great, and all of them were from the Netherlands.

We also got a sausage, and cheese board for snacking.

The sausage in particular was great. It was organic pork, course ground, and spiced with cubeb that really made it pop.

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

From here we went to dinner. We went to a Surinamese restaurant. Overall it was pretty good. The flavors we're unique and interesting, but there was very little difference across the dishes we selected. There were noodle dishes with beef and lamb, a fried rice and chicken dish, and a chicken and lamb dish with roti. The roti was dry and not inpressive honestly. The chicken and beef was great, the lamb was a little dry, and the fried rice was good, but not my style, it tasted almost smokey. My favorite part were the noodles, they were like chow mein but with Indonesian flavors.

I suppose it was difficult for this meal to be really impressive after our last few dinners.

Laura and I then went to the grocery store to try and get snacks, and we saw we could buy 6 packs of beer for €3.75 we came home with beer in addition to the snacks.

Took it easy the rest if the night.

Tried to wake up before sunrise, but the sun never set...

11052019

Day 4

Got 2.5 hours of sleep, because we were off to Amsterdam. 0750 flight, which means getting to the airport by 0550, which means a taxi pickup at 0500. Fortunately Laura and i did most of our packing after getting back from the beer bar, but that only shifted the sleep back 45 minutes, it didn't help us sleep any more.

Also given that it was Saturday morning there were still many youths out n about after partying Friday night. In fact at some point in the early morning b(though the sun would imply it wat mid day) a pair of young women made their way into the courtyard of the building we were staying at for a few minutes of some activity that was too private to undertake on the street. What they were doing I am not sure, but they selected a spot seemingly right under our window.

Anyways getting to Amsterdam was uneventful. Between the flight time, and he time change it was 1330. Decided to take the bus into the city center, Anto eat up time so we could make it right into the Airbnb, and B. to same a little money. But the ticket machine didn't like our Uber Visa card, nor that of my parents, uh oh, the kiosk wanted a PIN. We're from the United States, we aren't concerned about identity fraud, or people stealing our credit cards... fortunately our reliable Capital One Quick silver card worked.

We purchased a set of 3 day passes and hopped the bus. Easily enough we were getting off at the end of the line, the bus station.

Few hundred meters into the neighborhood, on a side street we found our Airbnb host, who took us around the corner into a side street of a side street and showed us the place. Is great, she even showed us stuff to do, and gave us food recommendations, including an Indonesian restaurant anfew blocks away. Which is great because I was looking forward to exploring the food of Dutch colonies.

So we went out to a cafe to waste enough time for the Indonesian restaurant to open. Laura curated the experience, I just had a very fresh cup of ginger-lemon tea, and my dad had an espresso. After enough time passed we headed to Long Pura.

http://www.restaurant-longpura.com/

Everything we had was amazing, and a welcome change up from the Icelandic food we had been having. Lots of "exotic" flavors. After we ordered but before our food arrived our waiter tried upselling us on Kuruk/Emping chips. To be honest I didn't hear or understand what he said but I remember the last time someone tried upselling us on and appetizer and it went great (see Singapore posts

The chips arrived with a thick peanut sauce that was a great way to start our gastronomic experience.

The satay sampler platter, goat, chicken, beef and ground fish. All were great, there was a spicy sauce that the beef got draped in which pished it to my favorite of the list.

We got the rice platter too, it was effectively a sampler of the whole menu. There was a spicy beef, a coconut beef, a coconut chicken, coconut goat, a spicy hard boiled egg, adish of steamed veggies, there were more of the chicken satay as well. We also ordered an eggplant dish was was very good.

We ended the meal with an Indonesian style creme brulee, which was as good as creme brulee, but honestly nothing special, and my parents split a coconut crepe that was certainly interesting.

The dinner experience took several hours, and was far less expensive than Iceland was. Ultimately we just toddled home and went to sleep shortly thereafter.