Finally, after however many nights of poor sleep, I get a good night of rest. You can even say I almost got a great night of sleep. This is much-needed, and I wake up mostly rested. I can say that I’m going to need a few days of downtime and good sleep to get back to some normalcy in this regard, being realistic. But I wake up feeling reasonably good.
I leave the room in search of coffee and this is easier said than done. Nothing is open other than Starbucks, and I refuse to go there. I find a place called Coffee Company which opens at 7:30 so I wait outside until it opens. As I sit there I really understand how prevalent bikes are here. You really don’t understand it until you see it for yourself. At one point while walking, at one intersection I count 30 bikes waiting at the intersection, 20 cars, and 5 people walking.
Once the doors open I get a cappuccino and a croissant. While waiting outside they smelled so good I had to have one. The breakfast is tasty and expensive. Based on the experience with the waiter yesterday, and today’s staff, nobody is overly friendly here. This is in agreement with what D had read in the guide book, that people here are generally brusque which is not a good way to get people to come back. But when you are the only coffee shop open in a 10 block radius…
After I’m done writing, I go back to the room and take a shower in a stall which has no door. So by default, the entire bathroom floor gets soaking wet. I then head back out for coffee, tea, and breakfast for everyone else while the kids sleep a bit more. While I wait, Snoop Dog’s Beautiful plays in the coffee shop so I’ll give them points for music on this one.
When I get back, Julia and Zac are awake while Simon is stirring but not up yet.
We get out the door by 10:30 with plans to meet D’s cousin Suzy and her boyfriend Duncan at 11:45. We want to walk around seeing the city in the hour-plus that we have, just to take in some of the sights of this new location. It’s a new place for us, and a unique place at that. The houses are different, and the whole canal thing is far more of a part of the city than I knew. I didn’t really have any idea how prevalent the canals were, but no matter which way you walk, they’re everywhere.
Bikes too. Bikes are everywhere. They just need to come up with a canal bike and this city would be insane.
We get lunch at a place called Zuivere Koffie, which Suzy picked and works out well for the 7 of us. Prices are reasonable, which is nice. On top of that the food is good, which is more important, of course. We sit there for a bit and talk with them about various things, and it’s nice to have conversation with people who aren’t either 9 or 13 years old. One thing you start to miss is conversation with people who don’t continuously ask you what you’re going to do for them.
They’re considering moving to Norway, so maybe when they do we’ll go there and visit them on a Scandinavian tour. Currently they live in The Hague, which I’m going to admit I thought was just a building, not an entire city. With the word “the” in the title, you assume it’s a building, no? The took a train an hour to meet us for lunch today, which was really nice. She was off today and Duncan has gone back to school so it worked out.
After lunch we walk around the city just talking. They’re both either very friendly, or very good at acting friendly. In the end, either way it’s a nice way to start the day. They hang out with us until our timed ticket for the Anne Frank House comes at 14:15. I’m now on the 24-hour clock.
The Anne Frank House is sobering, to say the least. The reality here is that it makes you angry to walk through something like this, at least in some respects. Before you go into the building, you know what it is. You know the story and you know what the Nazis were. But being in here is something else. When you see the house, and hear some words (there was an audio guide included), and see the pictures, it becomes more real. When your daughter walks in front of the lines on the wall that the Franks put there to measure the height of their kids, it changes things. Then you see the pictures of little Anne smiling.
It then becomes more than sobering, it becomes heart-wrenching to think that there was a time in our world’s history when you and your family could have suddenly found yourself on the wrong side of this monstrous entity, and just like that you were living life on the run from this awful thing. I thought about this when we were in the museum, and it’s still just impossible to believe to this day that this happened.
This is something that truly cannot be forgotten. This is a history that should be required for every human being in the world.
It’s hard to come out of that museum and have a sunny disposition about much of anything. But you know, we’re on vacation, so we went across the block to the Cheese Museum and ate a bunch of free samples. It’s really more of a shop than a museum. But you know, free cheese. What can go wrong?
We also found a magnet.
I also took a detour to Drupa Coffee Roasters and got an espresso while D got a tea. I was hoping they would have some baked goods (like the apple pie) but as you can see from the image below, the shop was pretty sparse. Having said that, the espresso was very good. On top of this, both Portishead and Radiohead were on at different points. The music selection in this city is good.
We then went to one of the boat companies and bought a 1-hour canal boat tour which started at 5:00. Some of the highlights went as such: There use to be an eel grabbing competition on the canals but that was outlawed. There is authentic housing on the canal but if you live there the local government needs to approve every change you make to the house, both inside and out. There are “street” signs on the waterways as well as No Parking signs. The canal belt (3 canals) is a UNESCO site. We went by the Mayor’s house. Venice & Amsterdam have the same number of miles of canals (about) but Venice has 400 bridges while Amsterdam has 250. One of the world’s oldest botanical gardens is along one of the canals. Orange is the national color of the Netherlands because of a family name. Tulips came from Turkey. Amsterdam has the world’s widest canal. Rembrandt is buried in the Westerkerk church next to the Anne Frank House.
This was a good use of an hour, and it was nice to be on the boat for a bit.
We then walk in search of dinner, and we try to find some Indonesian food as this has an influence here (due to historical colonization) but the first place is gone and the second place was expensive and a little rude. So we end up a few doors down at De Eberling. This was out of the way of the tourist areas to the point that they didn’t even have an English menu. The waitresses helped us with it, so we were able to cobble together a meal. By the way, both waitresses here were very friendly. It’s only fair to point out the people who were especially nice.
We started the meal with the Bitterballen, which should be added to every cuisine in the world. I then got a huge vat of mussels that hit the spot. Such yummy!
After dinner we walked home, watched the Netherlands-Sweden game Women’s World Cup game in which Team Orange won in OT, then called it a night. The final will be on Sunday, US/Netherlands, but we’ll be home and the kids will be in Canada by then so we likely will not watch. The TdF will also potentially take up some of our attention that day.
Traveling Normandy 