Don't make us go back!

For the last four days of our epic journey I booked us a fantastic AirBnB room in Holland Park (Notting Hill neighborhood). Our host was the fascinating Jaana and her home was pristine in a gorgeous wedding cake of a townhome. While we had an open invitation to stay with Lizzie and family again, we knew we were much less fresh-faced than when we'd first been there. Basically we were animals, used to eating torn scraps of baguette and somewhat warm beers, speaking almost exclusively to one another in grunts and gestures, bathing infrequently, and hanging our underpants just everywhere to dry after an old fashioned sink wash. (Future employers: We are totally responsible adults in real life, we swear)

Four days sounded like so much time, and we tentatively planned a day trip to Brighton for Victorian beach amusement, and birthday celebrations that would empty the UK of its alcohol inventory. As you can imagine, we woke up on July 8, our first morning back in London and realized there was so much to do we could only cling to this time with our filthy fingernails. We walked through Kensington park to the Victoria and Albert Museum where we focused on the truly important exhibits: Fashion and Jewelry. We probably could have accomplished much more that day if I hadn't known about the Jewelry exhibit. The gallery didn't allow photos, but that didn't stop me from spending a full two hours there, much to Sally's horror, taking notes on jewelry styles and designers of different eras. I'm not even exaggerating (I kind of wish I were). We also visited the Wallace Collection, a townhome/cubic-city-block-mansion of art collected by five generations of Wallace men. I was inexplicably enchanted by the home's varied marble fireplace mantles, again, I am not kidding here when I tell you that I walked through this house taking photographs of the fireplaces and loudly praising them as Sally sat with head in hands waiting for the sweet release of death. Here's the proof:

 

I should also mention at this point we were at about 463 miles walked according to my absolutely imperfect pedometer. So now we were on a mission to reach 500 miles, we just had to. So we walked. One morning we got up and walked from our AirBnB to Camden Market, a six-and-a-half mile walk that we were about halfway into when the strap on one of Sally's hearty travel sandals tore free. She valiantly trudged on, not only to Camden but back into the center of London.

 

 

Another good reason for all the walking was that London's underground staff had decided to strike on July 9. After visiting Camden we had planned to make our way to the East End for a Sandeman tour, but could only get as far Euston Station, where we encounter a queue for the bus that was approximately 200 people deep at 2pm. Not good prospect for getting to Liverpool Station by 2:30pm. Sally wisely pointed out that it was not worth trying to run there, so could we just stop walking for a minute? That's how we ended up at the British Museum, ostensibly to use the toilets but since we were there, we took a gander at the Rosetta Stone.

The good thing about London is that where there's a will, there's a pub. So that's how we killed time before meeting Lizzie for drinks and Indian food. And after a perfect summer evening telling Lizzie about Francis and other adventures, Sally and I spent three hours trying to get home. It was a damn nightmare. 

Our last day in London was also my birthday. We ate breakfast with Jaana on her rooftop patio, walked to Westminster Pier where we caught the Thames River Service boat to Greenwich. The day was beautiful, the town was really cute in a touristy way, and it was an adventure of train rides back to London.

 

We finally made it to the East End for the Sandeman Real East End Tour. The itinerary looked so fun, a great afternoon adventure, but what the website didn't say at the time was that the tour started on July 31. So we trekked over to Liverpool Street Station, walked from clock tower to clock tower looking for a red umbrella, but 2pm came and went and we were just standing there, totally disappointed. It turned out okay though! We walked through the East End on our own and I pointed out to Sally streets that looked familiar from Call the Midwife. Thank goodness I watch so much British TV. 




We went back to the AirBnB for a bit before heading over to Lizzie's, so I took the opportunity to walk down Portobello Road, admiring the colorful homes and varied market stalls. 

 

 

The rest of the night wasn't captured in photographs, so I'll romanticize it a fair bit. Lizzie & Co had prepared for the big night by setting up a saber-ing station of 20oz beers. Three and a half years ago  when we traveled through India, I taught the Brits how to quickly and effectively remove the cap and lip of a beer using only a dinner knife. Sure it's sexier when a sommelier pops the top off a champagne bottle, but let's be serious: when you have to get to the alcohol, you have to get to the alcohol. This is the endgame of my wine career. Get the good stuff into your mouth. 

I lied, here is the sole photo from the night. Credit: Elizabeth W.

I don't know if British butter knives are weaker than Indian cutlery, or British bottles are thicker than their Indian counterparts, but we had a fairly difficult go of it. I think the men were finally successful, but I was woefully unable to make myself an amber glass ring. The good news was that we did have a bottle opener, so we were able to enjoy a few drinks before heading out to a wonderful South Chinese restaurant specializing in roasted meats and hand-pulled noodles. The entire experience was unique (a delightful departure from Americanized Chinese take-out) and provided deeply entertaining conversation. I am so lucky to have such accomplished and witty friends! On our way back to Southwark we stopped in for more drinks and a pile of chips/crisps to enjoy into the wee hours of the morning. We did precisely that, and on July 11 Sally made our way home. 

A few hours later we were up and out, wishing Jaana well, and met Lizzie again for brunch at Kensington Square Kitchen. It was as hard to believe that we were leaving as it was to anticipate actually taking the trip seven weeks ago. Sally and I didn't have much to say on the tube ride to the airport, or making our way through security. When we got into the terminal, I saw a sign and joked to Sally that it read "Breakfast Pizza" to which she responded, "I could eat." 

And so, the perfect end to our trip together was this: Sally eating a plain cheese pizza while I ate a plate of fish and chips with mushy peas. I couldn't have asked for a more amiable travel partner, nor a better counterpoint to my rather heavily sarcastic outlook.  As Sally finished her last European pizza, I turned to her and said, "Our plane is boarding in ten minutes. Now we have to run."

I have walked 100 miles and I will walk 100 more

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.

Birthday bagel in Amsterdam! Look at that face!

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...