abandon ship

Amsterdam.

We concluded our multi-week plan, entitled Disney, Donkeys, and Dutch this past weekend with our second trip to Amsterdam. Our first trip to Amsterdam was The Trip the Blog Forgot, and with as late in the game as this post is, one could wonder if we simply don’t have much to say about the place. (Alternate theory: we have something against blogging about our forays into Dutch-speaking territories; our December trip to Bruges never amounted to anything beyond a set of photos in Lightroom and two text files containing unfinished blog posts)

Here we are, though: Amsterdam.

For our first trip to the ‘dam, we didn’t actually stay in Amsterdam; rather, we stayed in Zaandam, a northwestern suburb which was about 15 minutes by intercity train away from Amsterdam Centraal. This (admittedly slight) distance, combined with the fact that I was, at the time, rather desperately ill, meant that we didn’t spend much time in the city center. The hope, on this trip, was to rectify this by staying in a rentable boat (a boatel?) that the Purrito found via Waytostay.

Upon arrival in Amsterdam, after making our way to the quay where our boat was tied up, we found that, much like hotels, there’s some difference between pictures and what the actual room looks like. I won’t say that it was the worst boat that I’ve ever been on (that award goes to the Intrepid, may it be laid up and rotting in an abandoned quay somewhere), but I will say that we were fortunate that at least the WiFi worked, as that allowed us to find a hotel that I wasn’t vaguely worried would catch on fire, owing to the primitive gas stove that was rigged up for “cooking.”

Captain whatever-your-name-was, you were a nice dude, and I’m sorry that we ended up running into you the next day as we wandered the streets of Amsterdam, though you almost managed to hide your confusion at the fact that you didn’t know that we’d abandoned your boat. (His main houseboat was tied up, and this little expeditionary boat was tied to the houseboat).

Anyway: Amsterdam. Yeah…

A cheese shop. We somehow managed to spend €60 here.

Answer to the question “How do they get furniture in there?”

A (weird) cat museum.

Weird.

A friendly inhabitant of the cat museum.

Not our boat.

I don’t think he has this biking thing down quite yet.

This bird isn’t dead, but in the 15 minutes we spent observing him, he didn’t progress very far in regards to getting the fish down his throat, either.