Postcards from Emily and Gloria
Heart of Belgium and Holland in 11 Days
From this spot on the canal, our boat's captain told us that you can see five bridges all aligned. It feels like a portal to somewhere mysterious, to me.
This is Mom's buddy, Margie! She and I had been talking about journaling for a lot of the trip, and she suggested taking a photo of each other out of the sides of our boat to add into mine. If anything shows you the energy of our tour, this is it!
You could almost believe that Amsterdam still relies on the canals for most of their transportation with the number of boats going back and forth.
“In Amsterdam, the water is the mistress and the land the vassal.”
FÉLIX MARTÍ IBÁÑEZ
Amsterdam
Oh, Amsterdam... What a scandalous reputation you have! I think we all know the stories about Amsterdam's less G-rated activities, and I'll be honest, I wasn't all that enthusiastic about Amsterdam before we arrived there. I expected it to be a busy city, with a lot of things I wasn't interested in. And turns out, I was only partially right. While it IS a big city and feels like a big city in some parts, it is very possible to go to Amsterdam and largely avoid anything related to the "red light district" or substances that are largely illegal in the USA. The exception to this is most gift shops, because they ARE packed full of the cheesy souvenirs that allude to those things subtly or not so subtly. But if you can look past that, then you're good to go!
So I was incredibly glad to be wrong about Amsterdam; I really liked it there! And there's so much to see and do that you can't possibly take it all in in just a few days - I would almost recommend making time for a few days after your tour is over (if I've convinced you that this is the one for you!) to stay here, and see all of the wonderful things on offer. Unfortunately, only one half of our traveling duo is retired (and it's not me!), so I had to get back to my job, and we couldn't stay much longer.
And at this point in our tour, with the last few days upon us, and postage to the USA taking a little while, I had mailed out all of the postcards that I was going to send home.
I try to get them done before the end of the tour so they get posted and maybe to their recipients before or shortly after we get home. But I do have one more up my sleeve!
After we navigated some particularly annoyingly-placed roadwork, our bus dropped us off at the Hotel Die Port van Cleve, and we gathered to repeat what we'd done on our first night in Ghent: take a canal cruise, then head to dinner!
The Dutch LOVE their bicycles. And you can tell, because they might outnumber the people here! There are so many bikes, and not all of the canals have railings, so the government is constantly fishing bikes out of the canals that have taken an unexpected dip.
What's that weird green thing in the Amsterdam harbor? It's NEMO! NEMO is a science museum, designed to look like the bow of a large shipping vessel.
The houseboats of Amsterdam began their history as a temporary solution to the overcrowding and lack of available housing in the city center. However with time, the houseboats became less of a cheap way to house people, and turned into highly sought after, expensive homes.
The "Dancing Houses" of Amsterdam are named as such because of the off-kilter way that they all lean in different directions. They do that because they're very old, and they were all built on the unstable foundations of silt and sand that most of the city is based on. At the very beginning of this journey, I mentioned that I made postcards for loved ones... and that sometimes, they make their way to other tour members and our guide. Well, Nico had been admiring my postcards every time I painted one, so I couldn't resist scrambling at the last minute to finish one for him to keep. I chose the "Dancing Houses" because they were a symbol of the city, and gave it to him at our farewell dinner. I heard from Mom after the tour that he had taken it home and framed it! I do these because I love doing it, but also because it brings people joy. I was so glad that I could bring Nico even a fraction of the happiness that he had brought us over the course of our trip. Sometimes even the guides need a personal souvenir!
TRAVEL TIP
Canal tours might be cliche... but they're still so worth it. Amsterdam is much like Venice in Italy, it's a city built around the water, and the water is where you see it the best!
Just some of the dishes that were served to
us as a part of the rijstaffel. There
were marinated beef skewers that were not spicy, chicken skewers that were spicy, vegetables in a sort of sweet vinegar sauce, prawn chips, curry hard-boiled
eggs, and many more things I can't even remember. But 10/10 meal, definitely try this if you get to Amsterdam!
For now, let's go to dinner! This meal was my favorite of the tour, bar none. When we're home in Maryland, I enjoy getting different kinds of food like Thai, or Indian. But we don't have anything even close to Indonesian food here in our rural area. We'd never had it before, either, but I might have a new favorite food now. "Rijsttafel", meaning "rice table", is a family-style meal of countless small dishes of different meats and vegetables. With rice, naturally. The cuisine was brought back to the Netherlands by Dutch merchants and colonists living in Indonesia.
Indrapura (the restaurant we went to) served their rice with toasted coconut and peanuts in it, and if you've never tried that combination before, I can wholeheartedly suggest you do. Mom can't tolerate spicy food, so she was a little nervous at the beginning. But I tested things for spice before she tried them, and she found that she loved it too! We enjoyed ourselves so much that we didn't even get a lot of pictures!
I got caught trying to take a sneaky picture of everyone enjoying their food, and it turned into this! The photo-bombing thumbs-up belongs to Mom's buddy Margie's husband Brian. The food had everyone feeling good (and silly).
My habit of hoarding away little bits and pieces of paper like a journaling squirrel continued with this foil lid from a snack we bought at the grocery store in Amsterdam. With Gouda cheese being from the Netherlands (and my favorite cheese) it felt appropriate to add it in!
And all of those little photos you've seen on my pages so far? I bring along a miniature photo printer that connects to our phones via Bluetooth and prints the photos on little 2x3 inch stickers. So nice for capturing memories on the go!
Our first night in Amsterdam ended on such a high note with the Indonesian food. Mom and I headed back to the hotel after dinner instead of staying out, because we wanted to get a little repacking of our clothes and souvenirs done rather than saving it for later when we would be rushing to get things completed. First thing in the morning, we would be heading out for our tour of the city!