Just like other summer trips, we’ve been doing a lot of walking. Towards the end of the trip we can start to feel it in our legs, and today we decided to sleep in and enjoy the big comfortable hotel bed a little bit longer. Our goal today was to try out some Dutch sweets so we anticipated a high calorie morning.
We started with a cup of coffee at a café called “Brasil”. Our original plan was to go to another place but it turned out they were filming a TV commercial inside so we had to go to our backup coffee shop. We were killing time until a stroopwaffel store opened up at 10 am. To use up more time we went to the local Albert Heijn supermarket to do some shopping for souvenirs and there we found one of the traditional sweets we wanted to try, the formidable boschball, which was basically a giant chocolate-covered creampuff. With a couple of boschballs in our grocery bag we went back to the stroopwaffel place and ate a freshly baked one prepared by the friendly lady working there. She didn’t mind letting us in a little early, and we had some more coffee with the intensely sweet but very delicious warm stroopwaffel. For added decadence we asked her to paint some Nutella on one side – wow! We brought our boschballs back to the hotel and ate them there while planning the rest of our day. I thought the boschball was a little too sweet for my taste – but I don’t think they are the kind of desserts that you eat every day. At this point I think we had already hit our daily recommended calories.
To burn some of those calories we decided to walk around town some more. We started at the somewhat disappointing Amsterdam Cheese Museum. Again, I was hoping for some education but instead we found a cheese shop with a small basement lined with some old cheesemaking equipment and some broken video screens that apparently were supposed to provide the educational info. We left a little disappointed, and then started a long circuitous route to the southeast and then northwest. We stopped for brunch at a little café. They had draft beer taps prominently displayed at the bar, but unfortunately they only served bottled beer. Kuniko got stuck with a bottle of Heineken, which even in Amsterdam tasted pretty much like Heineken anywhere else. We ordered some light food (Kuniko: lentil salad with parmesan cheese, avocado and poached egg, Bryan: panini sandwich with fontina cheese and prosciutto). While we waited for our food a mini-van pulled up outside, and a small group of Korean people got out. There were two cameramen, two make-up artists, and two or three VIPs. Don’t know who they were, but they did some shopping and the other staff had to wait around a bit. They ended up eating at our café, and I watched the makeup artists working on the VIPs while they waited for their lunch. Weird!
I was feeling pretty blissed out – sipping beer in the morning and riding a sugar high in a beautiful city far from the broiling Japanese summer. After brunch we walked a little more through the parts of Amsterdam we hadn’t visited yet. We saw a couple of historic drawbridges while hearing the bells of nearby churches, visited a local bakery and had a sausage roll served by a polite young man who looked excited to be able to use English with us. Our walking course ended near the northeastern part of Amsterdam at the only windmill inside the city. We were there to see the windmill, but also conveniently (and probably not coincidentally) there is a local microbrewery right next to it, so you can sit outside drinking local beers while contemplating the giant old windmill.
Crossing the street to the brewery we had to be careful of bicycles. One bicycle passed in front of us as we were about to cross and we held up just in time. The very attractive rider with blue hair looked at us and smiled as we stayed out of her way. An old lady crossed the street behind us carrying a poop-shaped pillow. We were in an interesting neighborhood.
The brewery we visited, Brouweri ‘T IJ, opened at 2 pm, and we arrived a few minutes early. There was quite a few other people waiting for it to open, sitting at picnic tables outside under an arbor of vines for shade. I noticed that next door was a brewpub (not a brewery) that was open earlier, to scavenge customers of the microbrewery who arrived too early. Once the brewery opened at 2 pm, there was a bit of a scramble as people lined up to get drinks and the bartenders poured as fast as they could to meet demand. There was even some pushing and cutting among the customers – they were serious about their beer. We ordered a tasting flight of five beers, and also a pint of IPA made with mosaic hops. All the beers were OK, although a little thin. The standout beer was a brown ale called “Colorado” that was really tasty.
After enjoying our beer we walked back towards the train station, walking on the waterfront and enjoying the views of the city. Again, beautiful architecture in both modern buildings and the classical-style buildings. Especially interesting was the Maritime Museum that was built on the water shaped like the prow of a sinking ship. I also was interested in a Chinese restaurant built on its own island in the harbor – to get there you needed to find a water taxi. It was a three story building in the Chinese style, and for some reason reminded me of the James Bond movies.
When we reached the train station we looked into buying train tickets for our trip to Gouda and The Hague the next day. The tickets seemed really expensive, so we checked on buying them online. Downloading e-tickets turned out to be much cheaper, so we decided to follow that course instead. For dinner we made it an eat-in at the hotel night. At the supermarket we bought all the stuff we’d been drooling over – goat cheese with coriander, roasted ham, herb crackers, a salad of grilled vegetables and sun-dried tomatoes, and another salad with kebab meat, couscous and cucumbers. Along with two local beers and some prosecco we partied in our room and enjoyed an evening in.
