traveling 15

Koningsdag or King's Day did indeed begin slowly and was pretty much a slow day from beginning to end.

After breakfast we donned our 'orange stuff' and wandered down the road to the huge Vondelpark, 47 hectares, which was only about 15 minutes slow walk from our apartment. There was orange everywhere although we were a bit surprised that not everyone was wearing orange. We  had expected that most people would have been wearing orange from what we'd read and heard. There was certainly heaps of orange things in the shops everywhere.

The park was full, very crowded. People selling second hand junk, lined each side of all the paths, along with people selling all sorts of food, playing music, doing tricks, and games. People also set up stalls along the footpaths between the building frontages and the bicycle lane which made walking along the footpaths a risky business.

It was a lot of fun and the crowd got more and more dense as the day went on which eventually caused us to leave the park and go and find somewhere to have a very late lunch.

Some photos of our Koningsdag

posers

 orange cakes and tulips

 in the park

I had a go at knocking down the monsters

 Here's the monsters and the kids who ran the 'knock down the monster' game

making music

all sorts of things were for sale, even someones grandmother's corsets

 and Barry spotted this

By this time the two carousers of the previous night were feeling very jaded so back to the apartment we went. Barry and Sam had a sleep, Sam because he was a bit under the weather and Barry because he had a nasty cold and was feeling rotten. Emma and I held the fort and kept the robbers out. 

Eventually, the sleepers woke up and it was time to mooch off to the pub 5 minutes down the road for dinner. There was a big crowd of people, most of them dressed in orange, all outside drinking and hardly anyone inside eating which suited us fine. It was an ok pub dinner, much like we could have in NZ - we were having a lot of difficulty finding places which served traditional dutch food. Amsterdam is like Auckland in that respect - there are plenty of restaurants here doing all sorts of different food -  a lot of pizza places, hamburgers, Chinese, Thai, Indian, steak houses, Irish pubs are everywhere, pasta places one after the other.  In desperation I had a look on line and found out about a restaurant called Moeders, means Mothers in English, which does traditional Dutch food so Sam booked us in there for our last night in Amsterdam. 

The next day, our final full day together in Amsterdam was spent going to the Van Gogh museum and then to the Rijksmuseum. We had booked tickets online for 9 am at the Van Gogh because they let people into the museum in batches, the Rijksmuseum tickets, bought when we got tickets to the tulip farm, had no specified time. The two museums are next door to each other and only a short tram ride from the apartment, which was extremely helpful in us getting to the Van Gogh by 9am. None of us had got  much sleep the night before because people celebrated Konnigsdag all night and the sound come up from the street, in the door and through the walls from the next door apartment and through the ceiling from the apartment above us grrrrrrrrrr

Not conducive to happy museum visiting but, I'm happy to say, we did very well at bothof them. They are both amazing and well worth visiting  and altogether we spent about 6 hours museuming and finally left because the lack of sleep was taking its toll and we were hungry, as we hadn't had much breakfast and were yet to have lunch.

 Going to the Van Gogh at 9 am was a good decision because we were in the 1st batch to enter so there weren't many people which meant that we could stand back and look at the paintings from a distance as well as up close without people getting in the way. There were crowds of people by the time we left. We all had a laugh at his early paintings because they were so bad, eg,  in one painting 

 one side of a woman's face was completely different than the other side.  I looked at it for ages wondering if I was seeing it correctly. There is also a lot of information and displays of things such as using a 'perspective frame' -  I'd never heard of such a thing let alone know how it works, and Van Gogh's use of colour theory and the colour wheel. I know about these things and found it hugely interesting. Also, they had microscopes set up so people could see how colours were put together using different brush techniques. I think I'm explaining this quite badly so I'm going to stop. 

In the Rijksmuseum I was stunned by  the gigantic painting 'The Battle of Waterloo', and by the huge number of people in front The Night Watchman' and also taken aback by the hordes of people taking photos. Sometimes it looked like some people were simply photographing everything as in - snap and move on, snap and move on, snap and move on. By contrast, the Van Gogh Museum has banned taking photos and good on them, we said. I've heard many times that the flash from cameras has a detrimental effect and have also seen many times people simply ignoring signs asking for flashes not to be used. 

There is such a lot to see in the Rijksmuseum and there was quite a lot that I didn't see but I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and would happily go back again. The four of us enjoyed both museums and agreed that it had been time well spent.

on the way to the museums

the Rijksmuseum

this is part of the museum library. The green stripes along the top of the shelves act like dust-covers to keep the dust of the top of the books as they sit on the shelves. This was the only photo I took inside the museum.

 some lovely real estate that we saw on our walk home

That night we went to Moeders for our traditional Dutch food dinner. Happily for us it was a 10 minute walk down the road from the apartment and lucky for us that Sam had booked because it was packed and we had to wait for about 15 minutes for a table to be vacated. The host was very apologetic and have us each a complimentary glass of wine to drink while we waited. Without the booking we would not have eaten there.

The idea behind Moeders is that it is a tribute to Dutch mothers and their cooking. The walls are covered with framed photos of patrons' mothers and the blurb on the menu says that they're still putting up photos if people want to give them a framed photo of their mother and it also says that when the restaurant opened the owners asked their friends to donate plates to the restaurant which is why there isn't matching crockery. 

We had a very fine dinner but I can't remember what we ate and I didn't write it down except I do remember that there was sour cabbage and  pickled red cabbage which was delicious, boiled potatoes and I had some kind of stew but don't remember the names of any of the dishes. We were very happy with our dinner and very happy to have eaten traditional Dutch food at last.

inside Moeders 

traveling 14

First off, I just have to tell that we are now in Paris, arrived at 9.40pm last night and I feel so, so excited. to be here. It's 7.30 am now so am going to tell you some more about Amsterdam before I go out and begin to explore.

Before I do that I'll tell you that Emma and Sam have made it back to London without a hitch and  we look forward to seeing them in June.

And now - Amsterdam and our Tulip Farm visit. I felt very excited when I realised that we'd be in Amsterdam at tulip flowering time and we were all looking forward to going there.

One of the neat things about taking a tour which goes outside the city is getting to see outside the city, perhaps I've said that before. The tulip farm we went to is the the Keukenhof  Gardens which are about 45 minutes outside of Amsterdam. this particular garden is open for 3 months of the year - March, April and May and has 800,000 visitors in those 3 months. It is a huge operation with a huge garden area for visitors to walk around in and the commercial tulip growing area. We chose to go on the tour because it was the easiest option otherwise it's a train to the airport and then a bis from there. However, this meant that we were on their timetable which meant that we were on a set leaving time which meant no time to hire a bike a ride through the tulip fields which would have been AMAZING. No, I'm not complaining - the gardens were pretty amazing. As well as the tulips on all their spectacular colourful glory there were daffodils, hyacinths and other spring flowers. The scent from the flowers was lovely and we certainly enjoyed roaming about with Emma and Sam.

taken from the bus on the way to the tulip farm

 I was surprised at the level of pollution. It was a fine day and it seemed the landscape was fading into the murk not very far from the bus.the photo above and this one were taken not long before midday.

 also taken from the bus. It was fantastic to see the miles and miles of brilliant colour stretching out into the distance, just like the pictures and postcards. 

not sure what this little round house is about but I really like it.

 and then we were there

This was one ofthe first things we heard

And now - the gardens

interesting looking lilies

it was a fabulous day and now I've got lots of ideas for my garden.

including this outside light made from an old hose. I got Sam to stand beside it so I would  have the height of it without having to remember it. 

All too soon it was time to be on the bus and heading back to the city which was getting itself ready for the next day - The King's Day which means a lot of orange in the city and on the people. King's Day is a national day and this was first King's Day or Koningsdag in Dutch, in 120 years because now they have a king whereas they'd had a queen. We also bought some orange things to wear - tiny orange hats, Sam and Barry bought t-shirts, and Emma and I had orange leis and we were set for   

Koningsdag. 

After we got back from the tulip farm we sat at a table outside a  restaurant and had a few beers watching  the city life go by, went to a restaurant just down the street from our apartment for dinner  and then we walked over a nearby little bridge to see what was on the other side and we found a street party happening. What could we do but join in and  so we had a few more beers after being enthusiastically welcomed, because we are kiwis and he was originally from South Africa. We couldn't figure out why he was so  enthusiastic except that he was probably drunk.

We left after a while and wandered into a tiny little pub just before the bridge and had some more grog and by the time we came out the street party had really livened up so Emma and Sam decided they'd like to carry on but Barry and I decided to call it a night.

Suffice to say that  they arrived back at the apartment some time later very merry indeed which made for a slow start to Koningsdad the next morning

traveling 13

I forgot to say, in the previous blog, that we also telephoned House trip re the the problems with the apartment and they were very helpful, first of all they withheld our payment to the agency and once the cleaning had been done and was satisfactory they payed the agency but gave us €80 compensation and will monitor the agency to see what they're about. 

So, now to our next day in Amsterdam - canal tour, tourist bus tour and the sex museum all before dinner.

The canal boat tour and the tourist bus tour were ok, not great, but fun to do and it was interesting to see the city from the water. The Amsterdam canals are a lot bigger than the canals in Venice. In Venice we easily got a sense of what the purpose of the  canals are and how they work but we didn't glean much of an understanding of the canals system in Amsterdam. The tour guide was rather short on information and mostly just pointed out interesting sites. 

the railway station

this is across the road from the railway station. It is a very busy part of the city and was kind of like a mad-house

The bus tour was much the same and after both the canal and the bus tour we still didn't have a sense of the city. After the beautiful architecture of Prague Amsterdam seemed pretty ordinary by comparison. Both were worth doing, from our point of view, anyway.

this style seemed of building seemed to be typical, there were lots of buildings like it

One of the more interesting sights on the canal boat tour was the almost disaster happening to  a little 4 person pedal boat. It almost collided with our boat - well, in fact they did bang into us - gently.  They'd just got away from us when another canal boat came around the corner and was immediately almost on top of them. Everyone in our boat  was holding their breath, it seemed that a disaster was about happen right under our noses. Fortunately, the little pedal boat got some speedy pedaling happening and managed to get out of the way and all was well. Up to this point Emma had been quite keen on doing a pedal boat excursion but she wasn't so sure after what we'd just seen.

The Sex Museum was kind of interesting with lots of boring stuff and some not so boring stuff. It wasn't  really a museum because there wasn't much historical information but there were hundreds and hundreds of pictures and  photos, I'm sure there's no need to go into detail here. 

I learnt the difference between a coffee shop and a cafe - a cafe is where to go for a coffee and a coffee shop is for smoking.

 another coffee shop

There were lots of buildings with wisteria growing up them, very beautiful to see and to smell.

 part of the bike park outside the railway station. It holds 2500 bikes. Amsterdam is full of mad bikers hurtling along the bike lanes totally focused on getting to where they want to go and woe betide any silly tourist who steps on their way

It took each one of us a little while to become aware of the bike lanes and to get used to looking before crossing them just as we look before crossing roads and each one of us had a few near misses.

a bicycle lane 

 

at the door of our apartment

it was great to see Emma and Sam again  and we had a lot of fun over the next 4 days.

and of course there is a windmill

more tomorrow