Day 8 ~ AmsterDAMN

Belgium couldn’t have been lovelier, and Stef was finding it very hard to leave. There’s a poignancy to travel in that when you leave a place, it’s a good bet we’re seeing it for the last time. We don’t get many times in life when we can savor and appreciate that this is it, but when we’re halfway around the world, it’s unlikely we’ll get another lavish vacation in Belgium.

But in the current of sadness in looking around Bruges for the last time, there was excitement – we’re going to Amsterdam! This was the destination where we’d done the most research and preparation, and it loomed large in our imagination. Sad to close the door on Belgium, but the door was opening on the Netherlands.

Our only unfortunate weather so far was a walk in the rain to the little free shuttle. As we’d hoped, train travel has gotten easier every time – we got onto both our trains without incident. I do think we had some bad fortune on our first train from Brussels to Bruges, because they’ve all made a lot more sense since then. We rode on the high-speed Thalys train – you can tell where your money is going, because they’ve got velvet seats.

It was actually pretty clear when we crossed the threshold from Belgium to the Netherlands – instead of sleepy corn fields, the countryside was covered with businesslike, scientific plots of land, with orderly greenhouses and hardly a cow in sight. There was a certain Dutch precision to the very land. And we saw plenty of windmills – not a single wooden one, but rows and rows of turbines.

This first day was dedicated to cruising by some of the biggest and oldest sights in the city center, getting a general feel of things, and meeting with our AirBNB host on time.

Boy, you step off the train in Amsterdam, and you are in the thick of it. We marveled at the lavish Centraal train station, and even found the Queen’s Cage, where the Queen would wait for her train protected from the filthy masses.

We were immediately overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. Stef thought things would thin out as we got farther from the train station, but no such thing. The groups were overwhelmingly young couples and groups of university-age students – I wonder if this is a big last-hurrah weekend before university starts back up. Maybe it’s like this all the time.

The canals and gabled houses we’d been looking for were absolutely everywhere – and so are the bikes.

We’d been looking for European cats this whole trip and had hardly seen a one. We went out of our way to find the Pozenboot, an houseboat turned cat sanctuary where we hoped to see a cat or two sunning themselves on the canal, but no luck. But if you look in the center of this lovely corner garden, you will see a confident little friend owning the street:

Our first stop was the Magna Plaza – Stef was expecting a town square area ringed with big buildings like we’d seen so much of in Belgium, but it turned out to be this: The world’s most incredible Post Office, now a high-end shopping mall:

We stopped off for an espresso and an out-of-this-world cookie from the delightfully named Mellie’s Cookies, then we were off to the Nine Little Streets shopping district.

Stef was pretty keen to go to the game store there, which did not disappoint. In addition to many of the stateside tabletop games we’ve been loving, they had great toys, magic kits, and all things kinda nerdy. Our favorite was a collection of these little music box things – they had one that played the Star Wars theme, and Daniel is hoping the Brewers will remember this:

The Nine Little Streets were filled with vintage stores and record stores, in addition to the fancy boutiques, and we hope to come back. Ready for lunch, we made our way to Amsterdam’s most legendary frites shop, the impossibly named Vleminckx. Stef had a sambal sauce, and is now abandoning proposal writing to eat sambal all day every day.

We saw the Bloomenmarkt from a distance:

We made our way to the Beginhof, a former nunnery that now houses a variety of women, and it was the most impossibly tranquil oasis in an incredibly (and frankly overwhelmingly) bustling part of the city. It’s a ring of tall Amsterdam-style houses around a courtyard, with a chapel. No photos allowed, so you’ll have to take our word for it – it was lovely.

We headed to the university district to a legendary bookselling spot called Oudemanhuispoort – Stef’s inner 10-year-old just gawked:

We headed down to find the headquarters of the former Dutch East Indies Trading Company, a surprisingly unassuming building that is now owned by the university.

This area of town was full of appealing little alleyways we’d love to come back to.

We wound our way to the Neiwmarkt, a really fun farmer’s market-y kind of place with sidewalk cafes, and we bought our first Dutch cheese, a young gouda.

We went by the Oude Kerk, a church that claims to be Amsterdam’s oldest building. Unlike most of the churches so far, it was a museum you couldn’t just wander into, so we’ll have to make a point of going back if we want to check it out further.

Then it was back to the train station to collect our luggage. This was our first experience using train station luggage lockers, and it was a very good one.

Then we took our first tram of the trip, which was also a very good experience – you just tap your credit card to hop on, and tap it again on your way out, which is miles better than the card-purchasing and loading you’re required to do on Portland’s transit system. Very visitor-friendly.

And we were excited to see our AirBNB! The listing left no doubts that this place would be great for us, but pictures don’t really capture how massive this place is. It is jut enormous, with 15-foot ceilings and nearly floor to ceiling windows. It’s stunning.

The view out the front is a little disappointingly municipal, with the 80’s city hall and a shockingly moribund opera and ballet theater across the street, but it does brighten up at night with its lights.

But the view out the back windows is unique to Amsterdam, with our neighbors’ back yards and their lovely balconies and outdoor spaces:

Overall our accommodations are exceedingly lavish, and we will be more than comfortable here. The stairs were comical – incredibly narrow, and curved so the stairs are absurdly tiny. For the first couple of floors down, we literally climbed down backward like you would coming down a ladder because it seemed so treacherous.

We headed out to find food for tomorrow and dinner for tonight, and hit up an organic grocery store (more European zero-alcohol beer, which we have been loving), and, we were very pleased, our first foray into a new cuisine – Surinamese food! The ordering process was baffling but we managed to get a wonderful dish. We just sort of pointed and said “vegetarisch,” and got a bowlful of the most incredible noodles with chickpeas, tempeh, and an assortment of veggies. It was very satisfying.

Overall, we were in some very touristy areas today, and it was quite a bit much. We look forward to getting a little off the beaten track in the next few days, and seeing more of what the city has to offer. It is certainly absurdly beautiful. Our first day in Bruges was also in the tourist thick of things, and we were very happy to see it efficiently, and move on to less stagey places, and we’re pretty sure that’s what we have in store. Still, a great start to our 8 days in the Netherlands!