Our second day in Amsterdam was pretty rainy. But not the heavy Texas rain. Just an annoying drizzle that’s strong enough for you to want to use your umbrella. We walked around the town a little bit. I was hoping to get into the Van Gogh museum but the line was really long and waiting in a really long line in the rain and then paying quite a bit of money didn’t sound like much fun. Though in retrospect, being out of the rain and doing something that we were really interested in doing would probably have been worth it in the end. Oh well. We thought we’d try to get there on the way back but that didn’t happen.
As we were walking around we got to see some really cool things:
Shawn saw this cool car as we were walking toward the downtown.
Our walk wasn’t too long but it was long enough for Shawn to work up an appetite for some more herring!
it's the flag that makes it.
We walked around downtown some more in the rain. Took a stop in a hidden shopping mall to pay to use the restroom. Then walked over to the famous flower market.
one of the many impressive stands at the flower market.
Our hosts had recommended that we try these Danish pancakes so we found a little restaurant where we could sit at a bar that faced the windows over looking the flower market and we got these amazingly delicious pancakes.
the little danish pancakes are on the left and a massive pancake is on the right.
to give you some perspective on the massive panake, that's Shawn's hand in the background. I think it (the pancake) had full strips of bacon in it.
After a tasty lunch of pancakes we continued walking and saw some interesting sights:
those are some big wheels o' cheese!
a brightly colored building is even brighter when it's grey and rainy
Of course we had to try some other Dutch culinary specialties since all of our vacations revolve around food. The problem is that it’s been about 5 months since our trip and I can’t remember what any of this stuff is called!
what are these? I don't remember. Fried Dutch Tastiness. there you go
Then we got severely lost in the canal area as we tried to find our way home. We did eventually make it though we were pretty soaked to the bone by the time we got there as the wind was so powerful that it nearly ripped our umbrella in two! We had yet another excellent dinner with our hosts.
these are little shrimp crispy things that you put into hot oil and they puff up to twice the size!
Indonesian dinner. delicious!
After some fun chatting it was off to bed again because we had to leave early the next day in order to catch our 6 am train. In fact, none of the public transport was going to be running at that time so we would have to walk 45 minutes to the station. So we had to wake up around 4:30am. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining and it was a great time to see the city because the streets were practically empty and it was like seeing it at night without all of the scary drunk/high people. We had no issue getting to the train station or finding our train. Slept most of the way to Brussels where we once again changed trains and then slept most of the way to Paris. By the time our train arrived in Laval we had spent 12 hours traveling. Maybe next time we’ll just swallow the extra cost for a significantly shorter travel time and take the plane instead of the train.
Following this trip, it seemed like our lives in France really picked up speed. We were busy practically every night and weekend.
