europe trip day 7 - amsterdam day 3
July 19th, 2008 by shinzu
This morning, we woke up really late, so we headed down to eat some Chinese food. This was the place where the girl from the night before from the pool hall worked at.
Found the restaurant!
The restaurant was quite nicely decorated. In fact, I can’t really think of many poorly decorated restaurants in Amsterdam.
A wall of business cards. I put my www.thecheatingcook.com business card up there :)
We ordered family style food. Here we have dumplings in soup.
Some dim sum
The menu
Group picture. I have to say, the food was pretty good, but nothing like ‘mind blowing.’ I think this speaks to the testament of how good the food in California is.
It’s not diet coke.. its ‘coke light’
We had some ice cream desert. It was really really good. I think you can buy this in the korean market.
In the restroom, there were these interesting targets, where when you peed in them, it would spin.
Cops on horses.
Go Holland!
Outside of China town was a little bazaar thing going on.
They mainly had crap in it.
Afterwards we went into some bar to watch the French Open finals. Evidently, tennis wasn’t too popular here because there was only 1 other person watching.
Beer overview
While watching, a cat crawled in the bar.
Video of the kitty
An interesting sign in dutch and chinese
A cover of a newspaper. As you see here, the US presidential elections trumps all local politics apparently.
Amsterdam is strongly a biking city, evidenced by the zillions of bikes you see in this bike parking lot.
Bikes, bikes, and more bikes.
Picture of the tram that runs around the city. It wasn’t quite useful to us since we walked around most of the city.
Beware of pickpocketers sign.
Fastfood in a vending machine. I remember seeing a lot of this in Tokyo.
A beer listing menu. As you can see here, they list the percentages of each beer. 12% is quite a big percentage.
We generally were walking around looking for a flea market area afterwards. But we would first pass through a rich area.
Rich part of Amsterdam
The flea market actually closed by the time we got there, but the sun was in a really nice position for us to take some pictures.
Rob
Peter
Dan
Laws of gravity temporarily suspended giving Ben a hard time.
Curiosity killed the cat…
Afterwords we went to de zotte bar which was a recommendation from the bartender from the night before.
It was a very nice and quaint bar. With 206 beers!
We would spend some time here just drinking and relaxing. At 5pm haha. Nice to live up the European lifestyle.
Group pic.
A really good beer. With a 10 week fermentation process.
Duivel.. another heavy beer.
Afterwords, we went walking around.
In europe, many of the canals are quite dirty (like the Seine river), but beautiful towards sunset and at night. I think the exception to this would be Venice.
Hrm.. who is red here..
While walking around, Peter was hungry for some french fries so we got some at this eatery. Also, there was some British guys outside trying to persuade us to go in a club. We were talking with them quite a bit, and I think we got one in trouble for talking too much to us (not doing his job).
The official flag of Amsterdam.
Beware of.. red carpets?
All three of us were suddenly struck with fobiseizures.
Advertising for soccer.
After a relaxing afternoon, we got some Lebanese food near our hotel.
It was quite an interesting shop. They had the old school California and a Wisconsin license plate hanging in side. It’s like.. wtf.. Wisconsin?
A possessed rob.
A bad Carls Jr. ad ripoff.
Mr. sleepy head. Next stop.. prague!
Overall… I think Amsterdam was a pretty cool city, but probably would be a city I wouldn’t come back to. In retrospect I might have planned for 2 days instead of 3, but it was nice having the third day being a very relaxing day.
The sites in Amsterdam are a bit different where they don’t allow photos in many of the exhibits. Whether this is because of the Internet or otherwise is unknown.
Photos are nice, but sometimes experiences are etched into our heads through memory. The opportunity to be there writes a memory in my head that sometimes only surfaces through a relevant conversation.