Travelogue 2 -- finishing up Amsterdam and moving on to Bruxelles/Brussels

I've been thinking that an infatuation with Europe is something like the grown-up version of wanting a pony. I haven't gone anywhere else with that thought, but it's a thought.

[My set of pictures of amsterdam]

The first part of Amsterdam day 2 was eaten up by a trip via tram to the Albert Cuypmarkt, an open-air market. There were really nice food stalls -- the thing/gimmick in Amsterdam is fresh-squeezed orange juice. At food stalls, in bars/cafe's. Wherever. There were also people selling discounted shoes, luggage, sweaters, coats, scarves, cheese, meats, seafood, cds & hookahs, chocolate (including chocolate naughty-bits).  There was a really nice band/trio as I was walking in,  playing a song I knew, but couldn't place, maybe tango. A sax, an accordion and, I think, a clarinet. The average piece of clothing was about 15 euros, and in the adjoining stores was closer to 50 euro to start.

Here's a good picture, ala wikipedia

I ended up getting a european-style vegetable peeler, and a hard-sided suitcase. Apparently the thing now is to have four wheels, and multi-directional. Quite handy.

About dutch: It's pretty close to english.
Hello   == Hello/Hi
Mag    == May
We     ==  We
ik        == I
huis    == house

So, it's actually pretty effective to just talk English at people, because either they know English, or the words are close enough that you can both get the gist of what the other person is saying. There are a wide range of accents, from the airport's canned announcements that sound somewhat swedish in terms of intonation, to the girls on the tram today that spent 10 minutes chatting where they seemed to be hocking up loogies and somehow turning that into language (for perspective: I actually think german sounds fun. This was different :P )

I ended up stopping into a cd store that spanned 5 store-fronts (quite a lot of property in amsterdam) and then on to the (somewhat underwhelming) foto museum, Foam . Their cafe was recommended to me by my friend Cherie, so I went in and ordered lunch. As I went back to my table, I noticed two guys roughly my age chatting in english over a map, and sounding lost. I ended up helping them figure out where they were and where they were going and we all ate lunch together and chatted. One was a canadian and the other welsh (originially austrian), both worked in a very nice hotel near London. The canadian is a chef; we talked food, which was a lot of fun. After a very leisurely lunch, concluded with dutch apple pie (sadly overrated in my opinion, but I'm not much of an apple pie fan), I walked them to their next destination ('the Heinecken experience') and went back to where I was staying.

There's something really wonderful about speaking your own language in a place entirely foreign.

Later that night I went out with my friends who were hosting me to a live Tango-music concert, in a small venue called the Badcuyp ( 'the Bathtub'). The musicians were very impassioned, and were accompanied by a show of projected images on the screen beside them for each song. 

One song had a sort of strange set of images involving scantily clad women, which was sort of appropriate in two ways -- Amsterdam being known for its red light district, and the origins of tango as a dance danced by men waiting for whores.

I'll leave my trip to Bruxelles/Brussels for next time.

à bientôt!