This entry will be less verbose and have more photos; I know what the people want. Let's start with Brussels. We arrived in the afternoon and checked into the 2GO4 Quality Hostel, just north of the Grote Markt. It was immediately visible that this hostel was better than Glasgow, much to our relief. We walked through the neighborhood and for dinner found pizza for Sally, which she had to eat with a knife and fork. Hilarious to watch. Later in the evening we found the Saint -Gery area with outdoor bars filled with locals, and then had last call of Trappist Ales at L'Archiduc before heading home to bed. The relatively early bedtime was due to the fact that we only had one full day in Brussels, so we were determined to do as much as possible. There was so much to eat! We started with a Belgian waffle on the go (the true Belgian way to eat it) from Vitalgaufre. You are handed a little cardboard triangle with a single thick crunchy vanilla waffle, and you walk down the street eating and trying not to get hit by cars.
At 11am we joined up with a free city tour run by Sandeman's New Europe. Our Irish guide Mick showed us around for three hours and gave good background on all sorts of cultural and political history of the city. We started in the Grote Markt (great market square) where he pointed out that the beautiful Gothic town hall was actually an atrocity to architecture. I have a photo below. Looks fine, right? Except that the left side is wider than the right, so it isn't symmetrical, and the windows and towers on each side are totally different, and the main archway and its frame are crazily off center from the central spine of the building.
That tour came to an end around 1:45pm and we ran immediately off to our next 3 hour tour, by Brussels City Tours, a chocolate tour! Yippeee! Keep in mind we haven't eaten since 10am and Sally is singing me the entire Gilligan's Island theme song and we're about to give her more sugar. Oh boy. Our guide for the tour was Isabel, and she aptly summed up our experience with a comparison to airlines. "First we will taste the RyanAir of chocolates, totally acceptable but very basic. Then we will taste two like coach class on a Lufthansa flight, a business class, a first class, and finally, we go all the way to the ultra luxury first class on Singapore Airlines." Also important to note here is that what we call truffles (referring to any filled chocolate) are called pralines, which are not our pralines. And pralines can be filled with praliné which is the nutty caramel stuff we know.
It was a good trajectory to follow, but makes one less likely to purchase a RyanAir chocolate, thats for sure. Our fourth stop was a small torréfacteur chocolatier, Frederic Blondeel (related to the Connecticut Blondels I'm sure). The term Torréfacteur refers to the idea that this chocolatier actually purchases raw cacao, roasts, grinds, and separates the cocoa butter from the fiber, making his own chocolate. Wait, so who is not making their own chocolate?! Everyone else, apparently. Most chocolatiers buy pre-made chocolate from distributors and melt it down to pour over their unique fillings. I feel like this is much more scandalous than it probably is. We finished up with two of the most exclusive torrefacteurs in the country, Pierre Marcolini and Patrick Roger. Roger's pralines sell for 400€ per kilo, where as the RyanAir equivalent sells for 26€ per kilo!
By now it was 5pm, so we grabbed a grocery store dinner and ate at the hostel. Don't worry, we weren't turning in for the evening. We had one last stop: Delirium Café. Beer aficionados will absolutely know what I'm talking about, but in case you aren't an avid BeerAdvocate follower, Delirium is both a beer brand and a bar that holds the record for carrying the largest selection of commercially available beers in the world. 3,000 brews in fact. We did our best to try as many as possible. We made some friends, tried more beer, met old friends from our morning tour, and drank more beer. We forgot that one Belgian beer at 8% abv is the equivalent to 2 crappy American beers at 4% abv. Welcome to Europe!
The good news is we got to sleep it off in the morning...oh wait that's not what happened. Right, we had a morning bus to Amsterdam! Fun!
We had a lot more time in Amsterdam, and heartily enjoyed ourselves. We were the super cool kids going to bed at 11pm and waking up at 7am...even at our Shelter City Christian Hostel (no drugs, no alcohol) people thought we were lame. That's fine, it enabled us to see the city streets before they were filled with enormous groups of drunk guys on "lads weekend." Our first morning in the city we went to the Anne Frank House. We arrived at 8:45am for a 9am opening, and had to wait three hours to get in. It was definitely worth the wait. Around 1pm we walked to a vegetarian restaurant, Bolhoed, where I had a great meal and Sally ate a few pieces of lettuce and asked me what hummus was. Then up to Noordermarkt, a weekend food, antique, souvenir market, followed by a stroll through the 9 streets shopping district. We also took a canal cruise and a major city hike out near the botanic garden and royal zoo, logging more than 11 miles for the day.
The June 7th pre-birthday day trip was to a sort of fabricated village north of the city, Zaanse Schanes. The entire region of Zaan was a major industrial power in the early 1700s, and in cycles through its history. Historically famous for ship-building, saw mills, and steam/electric/gas machinery, now the top business along the river is Verdanke, a chocolate (praline) and cookie (biscuit) factory. I didn't know that when we arrived in Zaandam, but both Sally and I noticed the air smelled of chocolate and baked goods. Awesome!
Zaanse Schanes is the sort of tourist attraction that teaches visitors about Dutch history, much like in the US you can go to Williamsburg, or visit historical working farms in New England. We saw clogs being made, ate a lot of Gouda samples, thought we were going to get murdered in a creepy coopery, went inside and on the roof of a peanut oil-producing windmill, ate a Dutch pancake, and watched a Dutch dance recital (modern dancing, not traditional). The sun was shining, a breeze was cooling us, our stomachs were full of sugar, and we surpassed the 100 mile walking mark (per my Garmin vivofit).
Back in Amsterdam, we learned of the cat museum and proceeded there forthwith. Katten Kabinet was established by a Dutchman named Bob Meijer who loved his cat John Pierpoint Morgan so much he built a collection of artwork that featured cats, and even commissioned artwork of his beloved pet. He houses this museum in the first floor of a beautiful old canal house on a quiet, leafy street. It was fun to see inside a traditional Dutch home, and the fact that it was covered in cat art only made us happier. By the time we left it was nearly five, thus the perfect time to have some wine. We found the ideal cafe in a non-touristy area with tables on the sidewalk overlooking one of the canals, so we ordered some prosecco and enjoyed life. Of course our dinner was pizza, at a great place near Nieuwmarkt called Da Portare Via. When I mentioned it was Sally's birthday, they gave us free tiramisu! After two bottles of bubbly and a pizza each, we fell straight into bed.
On Sally's actual birthday we spent the morning at the Van Gogh Museum, which was just wonderful, the best one I've been to in ages. What an immensely talented human in such a tragic psychological state. I made a list of some of my favorite pieces for different reasons, but the list is too long to recount here. I will say that I had a security guard following me around because I was crouching and squinting and generally ogling the detail of his brushwork, which is much harder to appreciate behind glass! Suspicious behavior.
In the afternoon we took another day trip, this time to the historic
fishing villages to the north east of Amsterdam, then to a fortress
south east of the city. In the Waterland area there are many small towns
to see, some more touristy than others. We wandered through the less
populated towns of Broek in Waterland and Marken. They were sunny and
idyllic, really quite different from one another. And because the sun
doesn't set until 10pm or later, we had plenty of time to see the
military outpost of Muiden, its Batterij and Muiderslot. Between 1892
and 1955, Muiderslot castle formed an integral part of the areas
military defense of Amsterdam. Seeing the landscapes of these regions
also helped us understand the Van Gogh collection even more. Though much
of his prodigious work was painted in France, the countryside in
Amsterdam is highlighted in his early work and we could see why; vistas
stretched on for miles, big dark pines curled and strained against the
wind, distant steeples and city skylines sprung up across waterways, and
wheat waved in sun-drenched fields.
And that's it for week two! Did I say this post would be shorter than the first? Hmmmm...
At 11am we joined up with a free city tour run by Sandeman's New Europe. Our Irish guide Mick showed us around for three hours and gave good background on all sorts of cultural and political history of the city. We started in the Grote Markt (great market square) where he pointed out that the beautiful Gothic town hall was actually an atrocity to architecture. I have a photo below. Looks fine, right? Except that the left side is wider than the right, so it isn't symmetrical, and the windows and towers on each side are totally different, and the main archway and its frame are crazily off center from the central spine of the building.
That tour came to an end around 1:45pm and we ran immediately off to our next 3 hour tour, by Brussels City Tours, a chocolate tour! Yippeee! Keep in mind we haven't eaten since 10am and Sally is singing me the entire Gilligan's Island theme song and we're about to give her more sugar. Oh boy. Our guide for the tour was Isabel, and she aptly summed up our experience with a comparison to airlines. "First we will taste the RyanAir of chocolates, totally acceptable but very basic. Then we will taste two like coach class on a Lufthansa flight, a business class, a first class, and finally, we go all the way to the ultra luxury first class on Singapore Airlines." Also important to note here is that what we call truffles (referring to any filled chocolate) are called pralines, which are not our pralines. And pralines can be filled with praliné which is the nutty caramel stuff we know.
It was a good trajectory to follow, but makes one less likely to purchase a RyanAir chocolate, thats for sure. Our fourth stop was a small torréfacteur chocolatier, Frederic Blondeel (related to the Connecticut Blondels I'm sure). The term Torréfacteur refers to the idea that this chocolatier actually purchases raw cacao, roasts, grinds, and separates the cocoa butter from the fiber, making his own chocolate. Wait, so who is not making their own chocolate?! Everyone else, apparently. Most chocolatiers buy pre-made chocolate from distributors and melt it down to pour over their unique fillings. I feel like this is much more scandalous than it probably is. We finished up with two of the most exclusive torrefacteurs in the country, Pierre Marcolini and Patrick Roger. Roger's pralines sell for 400€ per kilo, where as the RyanAir equivalent sells for 26€ per kilo!
By now it was 5pm, so we grabbed a grocery store dinner and ate at the hostel. Don't worry, we weren't turning in for the evening. We had one last stop: Delirium Café. Beer aficionados will absolutely know what I'm talking about, but in case you aren't an avid BeerAdvocate follower, Delirium is both a beer brand and a bar that holds the record for carrying the largest selection of commercially available beers in the world. 3,000 brews in fact. We did our best to try as many as possible. We made some friends, tried more beer, met old friends from our morning tour, and drank more beer. We forgot that one Belgian beer at 8% abv is the equivalent to 2 crappy American beers at 4% abv. Welcome to Europe!
The good news is we got to sleep it off in the morning...oh wait that's not what happened. Right, we had a morning bus to Amsterdam! Fun!
We had a lot more time in Amsterdam, and heartily enjoyed ourselves. We were the super cool kids going to bed at 11pm and waking up at 7am...even at our Shelter City Christian Hostel (no drugs, no alcohol) people thought we were lame. That's fine, it enabled us to see the city streets before they were filled with enormous groups of drunk guys on "lads weekend." Our first morning in the city we went to the Anne Frank House. We arrived at 8:45am for a 9am opening, and had to wait three hours to get in. It was definitely worth the wait. Around 1pm we walked to a vegetarian restaurant, Bolhoed, where I had a great meal and Sally ate a few pieces of lettuce and asked me what hummus was. Then up to Noordermarkt, a weekend food, antique, souvenir market, followed by a stroll through the 9 streets shopping district. We also took a canal cruise and a major city hike out near the botanic garden and royal zoo, logging more than 11 miles for the day.
The June 7th pre-birthday day trip was to a sort of fabricated village north of the city, Zaanse Schanes. The entire region of Zaan was a major industrial power in the early 1700s, and in cycles through its history. Historically famous for ship-building, saw mills, and steam/electric/gas machinery, now the top business along the river is Verdanke, a chocolate (praline) and cookie (biscuit) factory. I didn't know that when we arrived in Zaandam, but both Sally and I noticed the air smelled of chocolate and baked goods. Awesome!
Zaanse Schanes is the sort of tourist attraction that teaches visitors about Dutch history, much like in the US you can go to Williamsburg, or visit historical working farms in New England. We saw clogs being made, ate a lot of Gouda samples, thought we were going to get murdered in a creepy coopery, went inside and on the roof of a peanut oil-producing windmill, ate a Dutch pancake, and watched a Dutch dance recital (modern dancing, not traditional). The sun was shining, a breeze was cooling us, our stomachs were full of sugar, and we surpassed the 100 mile walking mark (per my Garmin vivofit).
Back in Amsterdam, we learned of the cat museum and proceeded there forthwith. Katten Kabinet was established by a Dutchman named Bob Meijer who loved his cat John Pierpoint Morgan so much he built a collection of artwork that featured cats, and even commissioned artwork of his beloved pet. He houses this museum in the first floor of a beautiful old canal house on a quiet, leafy street. It was fun to see inside a traditional Dutch home, and the fact that it was covered in cat art only made us happier. By the time we left it was nearly five, thus the perfect time to have some wine. We found the ideal cafe in a non-touristy area with tables on the sidewalk overlooking one of the canals, so we ordered some prosecco and enjoyed life. Of course our dinner was pizza, at a great place near Nieuwmarkt called Da Portare Via. When I mentioned it was Sally's birthday, they gave us free tiramisu! After two bottles of bubbly and a pizza each, we fell straight into bed.
On Sally's actual birthday we spent the morning at the Van Gogh Museum, which was just wonderful, the best one I've been to in ages. What an immensely talented human in such a tragic psychological state. I made a list of some of my favorite pieces for different reasons, but the list is too long to recount here. I will say that I had a security guard following me around because I was crouching and squinting and generally ogling the detail of his brushwork, which is much harder to appreciate behind glass! Suspicious behavior.
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| Birthday bagel in Amsterdam! Look at that face! |
And that's it for week two! Did I say this post would be shorter than the first? Hmmmm...
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