Amsterdam Part 2

 

T-shirt in hand, I continued my wandering.  Following a crowd, I ended up at Vondel Park, one of the city’s highlights.  And with good reason.  This place is amazing.  It’s huge with multiple ponds scattered about, wide trails to accommodate bikes and pedestrians, and lots of benches and swathes of grass for meeting up.  I love when a city provides nice green spaces for the citizens to get away from the cars and crowds of downtown.  This is by far the nicest such park I’ve seen.

Using my phone to navigate again, I figured I’d visit the Rijksmuseum since it was nearby.  There’s an extensive tram system that will take you from the train station to all the tourist sites, but I was happy to walk.  Being on the ground in Amsterdam really shows you how open the city is.  The souvenir shop will be next to a cheese shop, next to a head shop selling mushrooms, cannabis, edibles, and paraphernalia, next to a café, next to a sex shop.  You can get all your vices fed on one street with zero shame.  I walked into one sex shop, compared the dildos for color, shape, length, then passed by the ball gags and the stand of pornographic postcards, then just left for the next shop.  Easy.

And just a note -- what is up with these duck shops?  I've seen them in mutitple European cities.  Why?  What's the deal with the ducks!?!

Getting into the museum was not so easy.  There is no ticket booth.  Instead, there is a barcode on one of the doors.  You have to scan it with your phone (it is truly scary how pervasive those things have become – to the point where you can’t enter a facility without one) and buy the tickets online.  Except it wouldn’t let me.  I found the site just fine, but I guess the museum was sold out for the next few days.  Oh well.  I can really take museums or leave them.  Same with churches.  They are pretty to look at and I can appreciate the history, but I’ve always been weirded out going into them as a tourist.  Even for a heathen like myself, it seems sacrilegious.

Thursday arrived as another pretty day.  The Moxy offers a decent breakfast, not as good as the free breakfast in Woodstock, but still worth the $15.  And just to top Mykonos, this place not only had two of those coffee machines, it also had another machine that dispensed water and juice.  Very nice.

After a hearty breakfast, I got my token for the shuttle, rode to Schiphol, and headed for the train into the city.  I then went straight to the Lovers Canal Tours.  12 euros gets you a one-hour tour through the city with a recorded voice (dubbed in 16 languages) pointing out the sites.  The boat was enclosed (the main reason I picked it because the freaking wind was so strong) and a pleasant way to the see parts of the city one might miss because of all the walking involved.

Wandering off afterwards, I found yet another park.  Not as nice as Vondel, but it’s still another gathering space that I highly enjoyed.  Yes, I can admit it.  Even having no kids, I am still an old grandma at heart.  I prefer a park to a nightclub.  And, continuing that theme, I’m usually asleep by 10 or 10:30.  So if you want to know what the night life is like in Amsterdam, I am not the one to ask.  I’m sure it’s full of drunken, high tourists looking to get laid and peeing in the canals.  A little too much excitement for me.  Just hand me some breadcrumbs so I can feed the birds.

Just beyond the park was a strip mall of sorts.  A few restaurants were next to a museum.  The eateries weren’t to my taste, so I headed to the Fabrique Des Lumieres to join the other culture aficionados.  Honestly, I was just looking for a bathroom.  But, hey, I can spend 16 euros for some culture after my call of nature break.  I entered the space in near darkness.  Turns out the display is a roughly 10-minute loop of Dali’s paintings projected in vibrant color in a 360-degree rotation.

After the Dali display there was a similar 5-minute one of Gaudi’s works.  Classical music played during Gaudi, but Pink Floyd was the soundtrack for Dali.  And it was very fitting considering his trippy work.  I can just imagine someone picking up one of the multitudes of pot products in the city then going to this exhibit and tripping out.  Dude.  The colors.

Directly across from the museum was a street fair full of food trucks.   An overwhelming amount of food trucks.  

Any variety of food you wanted could be found here.  I wanted to sample some of the BBQ, or tacos or desserts, but was concerned that I didn’t have any cash on me.  In fact, I hadn’t hit an ATM the entire time I was in Amsterdam because I didn’t need to.  The Dutch are very big on tap to pay – as long as you have a credit/debit card with a chip, you are good to go anywhere in the city.  Including, as it turns out, this street fair.  Seems they know that no one carries cash here so everyone has either the hand-held readers I’ve seen all over Europe, or they have a set up on their phones.  No worries as everyone is prepared to take your business.

There was a stand in the back full of Jamaican people just burning some chicken.  The smell of it wafted over the entire fair, drawing enough people that they had their own cordoned-off line.  This is the choice of cart that I made and it sure was tasty. 

I followed it up with a warm apple tart from a British stand.  That was strange – less apple and more of a mixed berry tart with marshmallow (the Devil’s Pillows), ice cream and topped with dried flowers, but still a nice end to the meal.

Please note that this was on a Thursday in the middle of the day.  The museum exhibit was packed as was the street food fair and the park.  And you can’t tell me that all these people were tourists – too many of them spoke Dutch.  It’s a testament to the culture that so many people have enough leisure time to just spend in the park in the middle of a workday or have enough personal leave to take the family to a street fair.