The square around the Old Church, complete with "Old Church Coffeeshop".

February 23, 2002
The Dutch know how to relax.

Not just by smoking, that seems to mostly be the tourists.

Meals are long, service is slow and the check will NEVER arrive unless you ask for it.

They all seem to speak English, and although the touristy places have the reputation for being surly because they know they'll never see you again, we must have been avoiding those places. Everyone seemed nice, and really laid-back.

Amsterdam is a beautiful, sordid city. The buildings are tall and narrow, because the owners used to be taxed on the width of their property. As the Dutch are known for being thrifty, they just built tall, deep houses, with large windows because the furniture has to be hoisted in as the stairways are impossibly steep and narrow. The soil is sandy and constantly shifting, so some of the older houses are precariously slanted sideways or forwards.

Dutch food is supposedly pretty bland, but there is every kind of cuisine available, and we've eaten quite well. Their former colonies in Suriname and Indonesia are well-represented in restaurants, and I don't think I've ever tried either, so I'm curious.

View down a canal, taken from a bridge in the Red Light District.

Today I walked and walked and bought tacky souvenirs and tulip bulbs from the flower market. We had traditional Dutch pannenkoeken for breakfast, with Coffee Verkeerd (the only way to get real milk in your coffee, otherwise you get a small jug of condensed milk on the side). Darin had a bacon pancake (like a thick crepe) with molasses syrup, and I had the miniature pancakes with enough Grand Marnier on them to make my tongue numb.

In the evening, we took the train to Hilversum, outside the city, to have dinner with Darin's lovely friend Dick Kickstra. He cooked for us and we just hung out in his flat and talked for hours. He's a great photographer, who'll probably be really famous someday and I can say that I met him way back when...

Afterwards, he walked us to the train station and we stood on the platform, while the sky poured hail. We got on the last train about 12:30, only to be stopped and removed at Naarden-Bussum two stops down the line because drunk teenagers kept pulling the emergency brake. The driver was very annoyed and said that they do the same thing every weekend.

After 30 minutes of standing on a cold platform, they let us back into the carriages with a stern warning over the loudspeaker. I have no idea what she said, but it sounded very intimidating. Then, we waited for another hour, while the transit police came to escort the train back into Amsterdam. Finally, they showed up and posted a guard in each compartment, so the rest of the ride went smoothly.

We'd missed the last streetcar, so we took a taxi back to the hotel, arriving at about 2:45 am. We rang the night bell. Then, rang it again... and again. Then, we got out the cell phone and tried calling.

After 20 minutes of ringing and freezing our butts off, we realized we were stuck. The hotel was dark and no one was around. We'd had to stand in line at the tourist office for an hour to even get a hotel room for a Saturday night, and we were fairly far out because everything closer to the center of town was booked.

We got in another taxi and headed for Leidseplein, the nightlife area, hoping to find something that would be open until 6am, when the sign on the hotel door said it was supposedly going to re-open. There were a few hotels with lights on, so we decided to try. All booked. The very nice man at the Golden Tulip called around and found us a room at one of their hotels way outside town. We were too tired to think, so we got in another taxi and headed for suburbia. It was a corporate cinder-block, but clean and we just wanted to sleep.

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