Up very early Tuesday morning to head to the airport... goodbye Barcelona!
Airline was "Transavia", a tiny Dutch outfit that I'd never heard of. As with the other smallish short-haul European airlines, it was decent and no-frills. We arrived in Amsterdam at around 12 noon after taking the shuttle van.
At the hotel: horror upon horrors! There was a sign on the beloved hot chocolate machine explaining that it was "out of service". The kids were somewhat mollified after some fast talking on the part of the desk clerk, who assured us that there would be some form of hot chocolate at the breakfast the next day.
We headed into town for a walk, since the weather was really nice and we want to get out and about. Quick lunch from the bakery; pizza rolls for the kids and felafel for the adults, followed by a long wandering walk around the city looking for "interesting stuff".
Amsterdam is an amazingly easy city to get around when it comes to language issues-- people around the city will speak Dutch to you first, but will instantly switch to English when they figure out that you are from abroad. Literally everyone speaks English as far as I can tell-- it's sort of creepy in a way.
Our meandering walk took us eventually to Westerkerk, one of the big churches, but our plan to climb the towers was foiled (they wanted us to come back in 2 hours). Everyone was getting tired, so we headed back to the hotel to relax for a while. Dinner: we trolled for restaurants, since we wanted to try something interesting. Amsterdam is really expensive compared to Barcelona-- the meal prices were way, way higher. We finally settled on a small Indonesian restaurant, where we ordered rijsttafel, something that both Amy and I wanted to try. Lydia went the egg roll route. Very tasty, although not cheap.
Back at the hotel after dinner I was very surprised when I turned on the tube and discovered two English teams playing soccer: Liverpool and Chelsea, in a Champions league game. English soccer seems to be everywhere! We only watched a little of the play, since everyone was tired and wanted to go to sleep.
On Wednesday we breakfasted at the hotel, then took off to the Anne Frank house for the tour. We took our first shot at riding the streetcars, which turn out to be quite easy to use. When we got there, I was very glad that Amy signed us up in advance, since the lines were enormous. The house was interesting and very well put-together; I thought they did a nice job arranging it so that you still get a sense for what the place might have been like during the war. The small video exhibits (mostly clips from a family friend "Miep") were fascinating. Also one very short interview with Otto Frank himself, in which he basically said he had no idea that his daughter had such a side to her (his quote: "I have concluded that it is impossible for parents to ever truly know their children" -- yikes).
Afterwards another long walk back to the center of town, where we decided to rent bikes.
Hurray-- much speedier and easier to get around after that (although maybe a little less relaxing; you really have to stay alert when biking around this town).
The kids (particularly Ethan) were very happy to be on bikes again-- much easier on the feet compared to walking.
We made our first ride to a pancake house and had an early lunch. Dutch pancakes turn out to be vaguely crepe-like, sort of half crepe and half American pancake. After that we biked over to the Rijksmuseum plaza, where they had a large outdoor sculpture thing. The kids (and some adults) had fun clambering around on top of it for a while.
Then we had a very nice ride to Vondelpark, and the kids spent some time playing around while Amy and I turned our brains off and relaxed for a while.
On Thursday we hopped on our bikes and rode off to the central station where we met up with our bus tour group, and then it was off to Keukenhof, the huge flower garden outside of the city.
The bus ride was a little late in getting going, but it didn't take took long to get there. Amazing to see the fields on the way-- outrageous bands of color popping up at odd intervals. The garden itself was a little crowded by still very beautiful.
It's an enormous place, so it can accommodate quite a bit in the way of visitors. We stayed for a couple of hours, had a nice lunch, then hopped on the bus back to town.
In the afternoon we spent time getting caught up on our shopping. Bought some presents for our German friends, and went to the grocery store to buy "Stroopwaffeln" cookies-- these things are incredibly good (Lucy and Scott brought some back for us the last time we were there). Kind of like a sandwich with crisp wafflish layers on the outside and caramel on the inside. Visited the ATM, the bookstore, and so on. For dinner we made an attempt to visit "The Pantry" (billed as a spot where we could get "typical dutch" cuisine), but we chickened out after taking a look (not enough on the menu for Lydia) and wound up instead at Wagamama, a noodle chain (generic, but decent).
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