Amsterdam Day 2
Today was a full day of seeing the sights! I got up at 8:30 (late!) and hustled out of here by 9:15 so as to make it to the Van Gogh museum by 10:00 which was the time I had a ticket reserved for. I walked over to Centraal Station, got the tram (bought a 48 hour pass for the transit system) and got the museum area in plenty of time. I toured the Van Gogh museum for about 2 hours. Its really very well done and enables you to see the progression of his work over the 10 active years that he was painting as well as see works from those with whom he studied or who he liked and who's techniques he imitated. When I left there, I went an had a cappucino and then stopped and got some delicious Dutch cookies - verse stroopwafels. They are thin waffle cookies with caramel inside. Munched on a couple of them while heading to the Rijksmuseum, which is the Met of Amsterdam. That place is absolutely enormous - you could spend a week in there and not see everything. I toured that museum for 3 hours, really enjoying the Dutch masters - some of those paintings were breathtaking. They also have some really interesting special collections - ship models (amazingly intricate and pretty big as models go!), porcelain, 19th century wedding gowns, jewelry, doll houses. Clearly, this is a place you need to go back to over and over. After I left there, I walked across the street to the Bols distillery and went through their tour explaining the Bols genever liquor distilling process. Bols genever is a liquor that has been made in Amsterdam since 1525. Its sort of like gin, except it has malt wine in it, so it actually tastes like a cross between gin and scotch whiskey, although it is clear like gin. Apparently the British used the basic recipe for genever from Amsterdam to make gin, back in the 16th century. Gin is like genever, minus the malt wine. Bols also makes a whole array of liqueurs using the genever as a base. The tour is fun, teaching you to smell the various ingredients that make up the genever itself and the various liqueurs. At the end of the tour you get one cocktail of your choice - you go to a compute screen and respond to some questions about your taste preferences and they suggest some recipes for you to try. I wound up getting an Elderflower Collins - sort of like a Tom Collins only it is made with genever (rather than gin) and elderflower liqueur. It was pretty tasty, actually! The tour then also includes tasting two shots of any of their liquors, so I tried one shot of the genever itself (the "old" recipe) and the elderflower liqueur, which was quite nice. At that point it was nearing 4:30 and I was tired so I took the tram back towards Centraal Station, getting off at the Flower Market. That's a fun place to walk through. They have flowers for sale as well as bulbs galore, some of them marked as OK to bring into the US and Canada. I'd want to check on that before I bought any as I know our customs folks are sticklers for plant products! I stopped into a couple of cheese shops where free samples were on offer so got to taste some varieties of Gouda, which helped soak up the booze from the Bols tour! Then I got back on the tram and went to Centraal Station where I decided to take a canal boat tour. That was a lot of fun and we went all through the little canals all over the city. It was really lovely. When I got back from that it was 7 PM so I walked around to find someplace to get supper and stopped at a Tapas place. Then I wandered back home through a different neighborhood, one that I had seen as we were on the canal boat and which I figured out connects to the street that I use to get back to my apartment. On the way home I made a stop at the grocery store for some supplies and finally rolled back into the apartment at 9:00 PM! I can't believe how long it stays light here. Its after 10 now and its still not really dark. My camera chose the mid-point of the canal boat tour to start acting up - the LCD screen has given up the ghost so I can't see the pictures I'm taking anymore. I can look through the viewfinder and take shots but I have no idea what they look like. Very annoying. And then after the boat tour I managed to lose my sunglasses! But other than those two incidents, it was a full and very interesting day!
Pics today - The Bols distillery, the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam sign in front!), me on the boat, and shots of the old canal houses that are inconic of Amsterdam seen from the water during the boat tour. And a shot from a bridge in the Jordaan neighborhood overlooking the canal.
No comments:
Post a Comment