And, of course, all the people who board at the subsequent stops are speaking in Dutch. I overheard someone use the word 'bizarre' and wondered if it's borrowed from Dutch.
To learn German-based English vocabulary, it's probably better to learn Dutch than German, since English split from German before Hochdeutsch was the standard. That is, it's closer to one of the forms of Plattdeutsch, which are closer to Dutch. (e.g. Drübbel (clearly, => dribble)). And the words that are 'clearly' German are all Plattdeutsch:
I'd suggested trying out something from airbnb, a website where people who only use their apartments infrequently can offer them (or a spare room, even) up as a 'self-serve' sort of bed and breakfast. I got in first, of the three of us, by about an hour, and went straight to the apartment.
I met the guy who owns/rents it, he showed me around, and pointed out the fridge and cabinets full of breakfast foods that we could eat (yogurt-flavored and unflavored, fromage blanc, eggs (large &small), super thin bacon, bio müsli, müsli with lots of fruits and nuts, 'crunchy müsli' (i.e. granola -- I've seen it called 'knusper müsli' and 'crüsli' as well (crunchy müsli)), and lots of fruits -- bananas, apples, oranges with the leaves attached, a ripe avocado, mangos, kiwis and a persimmon. I'd never tried persimmons before, apparently they're delicious.
To help with the jet-lagged friends, I got up way too early and started making coffee/espresso. And more. And more. When people were mostly done with their showers, switched to food.
We had a make-espresso-on-the-stove pot, which I hadn't used prior to this. Works quite well, I think, although it probably helped that we were using a gas range. The 'stove'/range was a gas stove, no oven attached (underneath is a dishwasher), and it also had a very strong exhaust fan above, which made me quite happy to fry up the super-awesome bacon without feeling like a piece of bacon myself all day, and some scrambled eggs.
Our itinerary for the day:
- Canal tour
- walk around
- eat lunch at Latei
- Red light district
- pop-up Christmas market
- (Genever distillery -- this was added during the day)
- dinner @ Moeders
- Amsterdam festival of lights
After breakfast, we took the tram (which I bought a day pass for) up to Centraal station and bought a 1hr
canal tour ticket
via this company, which we had to wait half an hour for, due to our timing.
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| Amsterdam loves bicycles(fiets). And that's just a small portion of the bicycle parking by the central station. |
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| From Amsterdam Dec 2012 |
And then the rain really got worse, so the first bit and piece of the canal tour, it was really hard to see anything. It had four (recorded) languages (Dutch, English, Italian, Korean) narrating, and before the trip you can request some (max of 4) out of their collection of 13.
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| Sign on the boat (French and German both call tipping 'drink money') |
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| From Amsterdam Dec 2012 |
Some views down canals once the weather cleared:
Two boats (row boat on the right), a dutch flag and birds:
Here's a view of a big courthouse (Palais de Justice)
After the tour, we walked around a bit.
Here's part of the water near the central train station. It seems a bit trusting for the windows to be so close to the water:
A lot of the buildings lean left right, and/or forwards. Here's a good example:
A quintessential canal view (canal in dutch is '
gracht'):
I don't know the point of these, but they look cool:
We learned on the canal tour that the old buildings of Amsterdam were known for their gables, with these hook/winch things above, that were used historically to haul stuff into the warehouses. That is, it seemed like most of old Amsterdam was warehouses. Maybe people lived or worked in the ground floor?
Also went into a cool liquor store, where the owner approached me and asked "English? French? German?" (clearly he's Dutch; I'm impressed that he speaks 4 languages). Nearby was this sign:
Wandering towards where we intended to eat lunch, we ran into what seemed to be a mini chinatown area.
This sign was on the temple:
Stopped at
Latei for lunch, kooky place where everything in the store (not the people or their cat) is for sale. Smelled amazing, food delicious.
Here are a few views:
When we left, this sign said goodbye:
We walked past what was some kind of tour. The 'xxx' is the prominent feature of the flag of Amsterdam.
Next stop, the
Red Light district. You are warned to not take pictures of the ladies, if you would like to retain your camera. So, I have no pictures of that. If you look in the following picture, however, to the left is a building that appears to be normally used for this but under renovation. The most exciting thing in the window now is the guy who's a painter or workman, up on a ladder. I liked the shutters on the house to the right of the erotic museum:
Here's a closeup of the plaque on the building:
We saw a window of underwear and a confused penguin:
Here's a house at the edge of the redlight district. I like the stripes:
Walking along, looked down an alley to see this:
Homomonument. Once we got there, we figured out the three pink triangles were all on the ground, and quite large. Here's the main one:
it has a nice view:
We stopped at a cheese store nearby, nestled into a church, where the church bookstore had probably been. I got some pesto-gouda, and my friends got chocolate (and cookies?).
We stopped in various knick-knack stores, including Dam souvenirs (at Dam square):
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| a shoe outside the same store. You could probably stash an infant in there. |
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| From Amsterdam Dec 2012 |
And a shopping center (located behind Dam square), which I found very pretty:
Random whale (near 'By Popular Demand', cool odds-and-ends store that'd fit right in in Austin):
Walking, crazy weather changes. Windy, huge gusts, rain, pouring rain, drizzle, bit of sun and blue sky, rain, dry but windy. Etc.
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| Dutch for coffee seems to be 'koffie', but used to be Coffy, from this sign? |
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| From Amsterdam Dec 2012 |
En route to the 'pop-up-christmas market', came across this super duper lopsided building:
A view back along Bloemenstraat (the street the market was on):
I didn't take any pictures of the market. It was tucked into a narrow, not-too deep room opening out to a street. The smokers were standing right at the door, probably because it
had been raining. We had to fight a bit to get in and out. There really wasn't that much for sale. Most of the room was taken up by people sitting and eating/drinking (we bought some cider. There were also pastries for sale) and an empty stage area with a schedule of people/bands to play.
Nearby:
We saw several of these tiny cars (maybe half the size of a smart car) around:
Ended up at Vondelpark briefly, which is named after
Joost van den Vondel, a 17th century Dutch author. I'd thought 'Vondel' was like 'Wandel' and it was a walking/wandering park.
We don't go far inside, though.
We then headed over to
Museumsplein. Here's the back of the Rijksmuseum, which is clearly still under construction now (3 years later):
Nice murals on the side:
Took some cheesy tourist photos.
Went to find a restroom,
On the wall as you walk into the building, we saw an advert for a (nearby) Genever (Dutch forerunner of Gin) distillery that offered tours all the time, including a cocktail and tasting in the ticket price,
'House of Bols' ('Bols' sounds funny. Here's
google saying it). Headed on over it to it, as we had some spare time (since the christmas market didn't take that long). It was nice. Strange. The theme of the 'exhibit/museum-y part was 'You taste what you see/smell/touch'.
Some Bols family history:
Turns out
Genever was introduced to the states in like 1820 or so (way before Gin/Gin was around). Apparently we invented the cocktail, and a lot of original cocktail recipes used Genever 'for its fine mixing properties'.
Bit of advertising where they claim their bottle is scientifically awesome:
A schematic:
And a video explaining that they'd designed their super efficient-for-pouring bottle with input from real bartenders!
The evolution of their Genever bottles:
Their 'original' (maybe longest surviving?) Genever recipe:
KLM gave (gives?) out little delft houses full of Genever to 1st class passengers. At some point it became illegal to give away (hard?) alcohol, but they still sell (sold?) them:
Sign to the post-tour cocktail room:
Had an 'Original Collins' (saved the recipe, which is also
here). That and a 'tasting' were included in the tour price of about 12 euro. Delicious.
It's also a bartending school, so there's a 'flair' booth where you can pretend to be a bartender and throw some bottles around, and there's two bartenders-in-training serving us drinks.
The post-cocktail tasting was two shots of whatever you wanted that they had. I chose 'the genever that was in the drink' and an oak-aged one (on the right; Bols Corenwyn --
pic of the bottleGin):
The internet tells me that "
Only Bols is permitted to use Corenwyn as a brand name because it was Lucas Bols himself who first created the drink back in 1575. "
Here's a blog post on the
history of Genever.
After that, we just missed a tram, and instead walked back to
Moeders (Mothers) for delicious Dutch food. Yum Yum.
Menu says if your mother comes in on her birthday, we have a special surprise, which seems to have happened while we were there.
All of the walls are covered (and the window sills as well) with pictures of mothers:
Our delicious Dutch spread:
This was what the menu recommended as 'traditional dutch food', the Hollandse Rijsttafel,
``een combinatie van ons suddervlees, hachée & stamppotje.
compleet met gekookt aardappeltje, rode kool, appelcompote, stoofpeertjes, spekjes, rookworst & jus. ''
Dishes, clockwise, starting above the beer on the left:
- (stamppotje) mashed potatoes&carrots, with superthin bacon and a sausage
- (appelcompote) mashed apples
- (gekookt aardappeltje) boiled potatoes
- two pots (middle) of stewed beef
- stewed pears (you can only see a bit in the picture)
- (rode kool) red cabbage with apple
- baked/oven-fried potatoes
After dinner, we took our leftovers (enough for another meal!) back to the (very near) apartment/bnb, then went out for the scavenger-hunt-esque walk along the amsterdam 'festival of lights'. it was more fun finding the things than seeing them. More crazy rain and wind gusts interspersed.
Festival of lights. First one was hard to find:
Figured out how to math frothy milk and added that to the espresso. Yum.
I was tempted by some really cheesy clog-slippers (hey, I don't have any warm/soft houseshoes) as well as some nice scarves; I did buy a small flexible tripod (6 euros) to play around with with my camera.
