Amsterdam

Directly after the festivities detailed in the previous post, I headed home, woke my housemate Kieran and packed my bags for Amsterdam. Having not left the United Kingdom for almost 7 weeks, it was definitely time for a mini-break. We were meeting MJ at Harwich Ferry Terminal, where we embarked for the ride of our lives over the North Sea.

I have never been so sea-sick in my life. Sure not having actually been to bed after imbibing a few post-dinner ports probably didn't help. Nonetheless, thanks to particularly high seas, the ship was rocking back and forth like nobody's business, so much so that one could barely walk 3 metres without being slammed into the wall or the nearby person carrying a tray of red wines and coffees.

Thankfully, having definitely not found my sea legs on the marine journey, I still had my land legs so the train from Hook van Holland to Amsterdam Centraal was pretty painless. Apart from the English yobs in our carriage drinking wine from the bottle and singing lewd songs about once working in Chicago, in a department store, woman came in asking for a nail, I didn't have a nail so I gave her a screw, you get the gist...

My photodocumentation of the evening's events was very poor, so to summarise: Arrived, Crokets (more about them later) and Chips, Heineken, Hotel, Edam and Grolsch for Dinner, Bar, Heineken, Sambuca, Bar 2, Kieran and MJ shack up, Grolsch, Long Walk around Amsterdam... alone boohoo. The latter did yield good photos:

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Raring to go the next morning, we crossed over numerous canals,

and saw a giant clogboat

on our way into the town centre

We had a look at the markets

pretended to be Sinter Klaas,

Tried on some big clogs

and some regular(ish)-sized ones,

and had a bit of lunch.

Dutch Christmas traditions appear to involve retro comical racial stereotypes which I imagine wouldn't be allowed in Australia, or the UK, or most places. But, it is a tradition and, in this age of globalisation, commercialism and marketing-driven cultural homogenisation, they should be cherished.

All this excitement was wearing the children out, so I dropped them off at the hotel and went past the Rijksmuseum,

to the Van Gogh museum.

That was of course amazing: so good to see such a large amount of his work and his contemporaries at once. Plus they have a really good collection of other art. The mushrooms i'd had with my lunch were quite helpful also, in the pretty colours deparment. So it was a very fruitful visit.

When I'd moseyed back to the hotel,

the children hadn't been misbehaving too much so after a quick re-enactment of the Sinter Klaas episode,

we headed out for dinner. I foolishly, yet predictably, took the challenge of surfing the giant clog boat, which wasn't as firmly tethered as I'd previously thought. After a bit of image processing, one may be able to get some appreciation of my self-inflicted predicament:

I emerged dry, and on we went for dinner at an Argentinian steakhouse,

then, in search of further foolish hijinx, to the giant clog (the landlocked one)

and the lions

and off to recount our adventures in a nice little bar, where they were kind enough to play Living on a Prayer for me. Twice.

A very amusing night.

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The next day we had time for one more croket

before embarking back to Britain. But the foolishness didn't stop there.

What a mini-break!