We woke up refreshed and ready to go… after showers and getting our bearings we called a UberX and waited in the lobby of our hotel. This is a really nice hotel, but it’s about 10 miles away from where we want to go, so prices are around $40 (give or take) to and from the hotel. We had decided that we’ll not go to and fro and to and fro… we’ll just go into town, do all our stuff, and when we are done come home. That will keep costs down a little.

The UberX got cancelled (who does that? The driver or Uber??) so we got another one… that cancelled. Then we decided to go across the street to Jack’s Casino… maybe the Uber drivers knew that landmark instead of our hotel… and we got another UberX. This time Franz (not Hanz) with the black Mercedes came. Ellie does all the ubering and this time I hadn’t asked his name. When we got in the car I said “what’s your name? “You know my name,” he replied. No, no I don’t.

Turns out Franz was really nice, with the best English of all our drivers. He was also the oldest (last night the guy must have been about 20… Franz was probably in his fifties). He had lived in Amsterdam his whole life (the others were immigrants, I think)… which meant he could make a great breakfast recommendation. Not expensive, and not touristy, we requested.

The plan for today was to go into town and see stuff. We saw the Van Gogh Museum, which was expensive enough to make us question our plans to go to the other museums and walk around and look at paintings for about $20 each. Don’t get me (too) wrong… that’s cool and all, but we want to experience Amsterdam… the sights, the smells, the sounds (so many languages!), the culture, etc. So instead of scheduling in another museum, we decided to try to go to the Anne Frank House, which we could only do after three, if we stood in line to get tickets (since we didn’t get tickets weeks ago). We figured we’d have a shot, so why not hang out in that neighborhood until three? (we had no chance to go there, the lines where very, very long, and they weren’t hardly moving).

So we walked around this area, until it was time to go home (probably from around 10am to 7pm):

Franz delivered on his restaurant recommendation… he dropped us off at the corner by “the church” by the Anne Frank House and pointed to an unassuming restaurant, and said to go there. We spent at least an hour there (eating is a leisurely thing, apparently), and ordered various foods to share. I got “krotons,” or on the internet, bitterballens. Not sure how to describe them but they are best eaten with lots of mustard, and fortunately, I didn’t have to share with anyone :p

photo courtesy GPSMYCITY

Ellie got the most amazing (it was so good) chicken soup we’ve ever had, Sam got a pancake (that is a breakfast, lunch, and dinner thing here), and William got an omelette (also seems to be on every menu). All of this was sooooo good, and it wasn’t just because we were hungry. 40 euros later and we were ready to head out for the day.

Sam’s strawberry pancakes. If you say “camera” she will strike a pose. As will Ellie, and William. I’m travelling with models.

This was our first pass at the Anne Frank House, and it was telling. The line wrapped around a corner or two… and it was early in the day. We decided to walk around and ended up at a “cheese museum,” which was just a cheese store with a little museum on the bottom level. It was fun enough, with samples, and we spent almost an hour there.

Here are some colorful cheeses… the blue is pesto. I can’t remember what the pink cheese is made from:

We really had nowhere to go until three, when we could have a chance of getting standby tickets to the Anne Frank House, so we just wandered around… Sam and Ellie found a Yoga store and me and William went inside a tool store (there were antique tools in the window, so I thought it would be interesting, but inside it was just a neighborhood tool store. It was interesting to see the different tools, though they were modern), and I thought it was kind of a weird place for a tool store.

Ellie’s sister had recommended an amazing cheese store, where she had bought a bunch of cheese a week or two earlier… so we walked a while down the road, through allies, across bridges, etc., stopping here and there, and soaking it all in, until we got to that store. It wasn’t as good as the Cheese Museum, but it was a fun walk through the town.

We were close to the Central Station, which was huge and very active, and maybe had a bathroom (aka toilet) we could use… which it did, of course. For .50 euros. Here’s a view from within Central Station, where the platform is for the trains:

I don’t like paying for the bathroom so we left… we went towards the Anne Frank House, but stopped at a plaza where there was a guy in a Yoda mask (the rest of him was painted gold), floating in air. That was stupefying to William… although within 20 minutes we had all figured out how he was sitting with nothing holding him up :p. There were other performers, like an old man sitting in his chair playing a very old xylophone, and apparently Ellie loves the xylophone… so she tipped him, got a picture with him, and even got to play it.

There were a couple of creepy “grim reapers” there waiting to get a selfie with you… a good reminder of the other side of Amsterdam (where apparently everything is legal). We rested for a bit (my foot was ready for a break), and then as we were leaving to take a picture of the super old statues across the street, saw the grand finale of a street performer who was going to do 20+ revolutions of head spinning… the audience was not into it, but he did a good job trying to get them to clap and cheer and stuff. Poor guy… he needed a better audience.

There were also some Chinese people doing some kind of very slow yoga/dance/exercise, and so we joined in with them (behind them). It felt very good to do… an Amsterdam local who was with them came up to us to ask us to sign a petition going to the U.N. about organ harvesting in China – apparently anyone who practices this spirituality (not religion) in China is subject to the state to have their organs harvested for the back market. Yuck and bleh… that was a sobering thought. We signed it, and I asked him what the buildings around us were… apparently, the one was the Royal Palace. “Does the King live here?” No, he only comes twice a year to stand on the balcony and wave at people.

We made our way back to the Anne Frank House… the line seemed longer now, and still wasn’t moving. We decided to do a canal ride (18 euros each) for an hour… it was a good idea but my sleepy jet lagged companions had a hard time seeing much… it was starting to hit us. It was still interesting, although I think the tour company could have done a better job with their audio (too many pauses). Notice the no parking sign on the canal wall…

The houseboats have a lot of personality. I think there are about 2,500 houseboats here… here are three totally different designs:

When we were done we were all anxious to find a bathroom… so we set off for a 30 minute walk to the Avacado restaurant. Although, that didn’t work… within a few minutes Ellie and Sam had ducked into the Pancakes house. I guess the call for the avocados wasn’t that good, because they were like “maybe there’s a bathroom here!” So, pancakes for dinner (mine was bacon and apples. Yep.). While they charged for the bathroom, they did let us use it for free since we were customers. Turns out our pancakes were worth 60 euros. I was craving a hamburger or meat or something, and the bacon+apple cooked into the pancake just didn’t do it. And the price was just salt in the wound.

After getting fed and bathroomed we walked to a grocery store, outside of the tourist area, and spent a while shopping for snacks and stuff (this restaurant stuff was good, but too expensive!), then we got an uber back to the hotel by 8pm.

Were we going to dance and hang out and swim? Nope… we got in and all crashed pretty hard… I guess that’s what walking around all day + jetlag does to a bunch of tourists.

All in all, a great day in Amsterdam, soaking it all in. Speaking of soaked, it looked like it was going to rain, but the weather was amazing and awesome all day.

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OTHER PICS

Stopped in a pastry shop and got this beautiful creature. It looked great, but the waffle underneath was hard as a rock, and broke more than one of our plastic forks :p

This guy was about three stories up on scaffolding (all of the scaffolding is decorated with brightly colored material to make even construction attractive. Sam was taking some pictures of him working and he stuck his tongue out and yelled something about him not being pretty enough to take a picture of. It was charming :p

William is getting to know and enjoy his camera… what a great trip for that!

Bikes, tourists, old buildings, trees. That sums up Amsterdam.

Not the only boat with a sad story in the canals of Amsterdam:

This was taken from the canal tour… this is the bike commuter parking lot. It was HUGE:

If I lived here, I would get a red bike. Easy to find…

I’m posting this picture for Ellie’s mom (without Ellie’s permission ;))

William’s canal shot 1 (boat)

William’s canal shot 2 (a model’s dad)

These tiny cars cracked us up:

At the SLC airport, going up the escalator to go through security:

This morning at 8am we got into the Amsterdam airport, after sitting on our plane for 10 hours. It was a good-sized plane, but the seats are so small for anyone over 5’6″ that there is just no good way of sleeping… which is what you are supposed to do on this kind of flight.

Let me back up… we got the the airport around 11:30am, and got on our plane at about 2pm… then we were airborne around 2:30, on Wednesday (in Utah). The flight was ten hours, and we’d land in Amsterdam at 8am local time. Supposedly what you do is sleep on the plane, then DO NOT sleep during the day in Amsterdam, and this helps your brain and body get used to the new timezone.

I got about three hours of sleep on the plane… first a two hour nap, then a one hour nap. Long story short, by 2pm Amsterdam time, we found a library, went upstairs to the kids section, and crashed. Resting our bodies on the tables, napping-not-napping, we finally decided to call an UberX and get to the hotel for a one hour nap. Which turned out to be a four or five hour nap. Oh well… we’ll acclimate over the next few days, right?

So, back to the airport. We went down the plane steps and walked to a bus, then took a few minutes ride to the terminal, where we got our bags (rather quickly), and commented on the garbage bins for “meat, milk, and milk products.” These were for people flying in from other countries to dump, and not bring in to Netherlands. We figured those could get pretty rank! Before we left one lady was quickly going by them and almost knocked one over with her luggage.

We got our bags, and went through the passport check very, very fast, and went up to get our first UberX ride.

bike parking at the Airport…

This was a great experience, except that we were at the arrivals level, and the UberX guy was one level above us, at the departures… once we figured that out, we hustled up and found him. X means eXtra large… but this was a Toyota Prius. Fortunately we all packed really tight, and were able to get four people (plus the driver) plus all our luggage (one bag + one carry on) in the little Prius. The driver was cool, but didn’t speak much English. We had a nice 15 minute ride to our hotel (which was about $25).

We got to our hotel around 9am… maybe 9:30… and hoped we could either check in (in the U.S. they rarely let you check in that early), or leave our luggage behind the desk so we could go downtown… another UberX ($30).

NOTE: We are at a hotel+casino, in the middle of flower fields (no flowers in bloom), and nothing else around. Great for the casino because there is no other place to go, wander to, spend money, etc. Bad for us because we either eat the $15-$20/person meals, or we get a $30 uberX into town.

Fortunately, they had a room ready for us so we could check in and then get our UberX to go to the Museum District. Here is the travelling trio pretending that we aren’t tired (this was within five minutes of getting to the hotel):

The four places we had planned to go were: The Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Anne Frank House, and the “flower market.” And a few other places, but those were the highlights.

We got dropped off by “Sherif,” our second UberX driver, who was really nice and had a sweet Mercedes, and found our way to a place to buy tickets. That only set us back 60 euros… after a few minutes of looking around, I had to go back and ask “um, where is this museum?” We felt quite disoriented.

Finally, made our way in, which was in a big glass building, down a huge escalator (now we are underground), then over to the museum, which was four floors. Lots of painting from Van Gogh, who apparently didn’t cut his ear off (but makes for a good story), and his mentors/colleagues. Van Gogh apparently got started in Amsterdam but eventually moved to southern France (we’ll be around there in a few weeks).

It was cool, as far as painting museums go. There were a ton of people there… Amsterdam is clearly a tourist destination.

From there, we decided to get some food. It must have been close to noon… so we got a recommendation to a hotel a block away, but when we got there the outside menu showed that anything we would want was at least fifteen euros… just a bit more than we wanted to spend. So, let’s walk down the road a bit 🙂 We went a number of blocks, which started to feel like forever, since our bodies were sluggish, and “I feel like my body is melting” (direct quote from Ellie), and our minds were loopy.

“Mine is the bike with the seat cover starting to come off…”

We pass restaurant after restaurant… they all seemed overpriced for what they were offering… and finally found a cute little pastry shop that looked fun to go in. Fun led to holy cow amazing, and oh-by-the-way they have things like sandwiches for four euros, quiche and pizza for $2.50, and immediately we’re like “this is our lunch place.” It was awesome, affordable, and a super cool environment.

After a delightful lunch we walked another block to the end of the road (well, intersection for four other roads) and went into a Openbare Bibliotheek, which seems like it might be a library (yes, it was). In Spanish, biblioteca is library… so I figured “open” + bibliot____ might be library. Turns out, it was. We went up one level, which was the kids section, and promptly found some seats and rested our heads on the tables (which kind of looked like resting our heads on the food tray on the plane).

This is the front of the library… I took this because the stoplight is actually just for bikes (a bike stoplight… whuh?????). Can’t see it very well, but it’s there.

It was obvious we were mentally and physically weird, and even though we hoped to stay up for at least six hours more, we decided to get our last uberX of the day and go take a “one hour nap.” This is where we waited for the Uber, across the street and down the road from the library… a quiet street.

I love being here with my shutterbugs!

Five delicious, rich hours later, we were awake 🙂

William and I went to explore the hotel and look for food (across the parking lot at the casino), and decided to probably eat all our meals at small cafes (which means UberX into town)… see a theme here? Too many Ubers. Next time our hotels need to be within walking distance to stuff (public transportation + neighborhoods). We found the hotel pool, exercise room, a map that showed how to get to the canals (about a kilometer away… we should explore that soon), and then the casino building (two restaurants, one cafeteria style, one deli, a KFC and a Home of the Whopper Burger King). Darn.

We got back to our room and Ellie had showered (although she couldn’t figure out how to turn the water off of our very sophisticated shower system: to the right is the top showerhead, to the left is the side showerhead), so there was a bit of a panic there…

And now I’m writing this, grabbing pics, and Sam, William and Ellie have spent an hour learning a dance routine. Fun 🙂

Hopefully we’ll be in bed in a couple of hours and start to get our schedules straightened out.