(no subject)
the supposedly famous apple pie from winkel cafe which was amazing!
profitjes (mini pancakes) with ice cream & chocolate sauce.
we arrived in amsterdam with no problems and got directions to our BOATEL (because yes, we stayed on a boat!) easily which was good. the actual boatel was great in theory for the novelty factor, but the reality was considerably less than luxurious (not that you expect that from a hostel anyway, but still). we have learned our lesson because the room had just enough space for a bunk bed and for us to put our suitcases down... and although we thought that we would have wifi we actually had to go to the library nearby to use it. but anyway, on the first day we decided to check out the nine streets which is a pretty cool area of amsterdam with lots of nice little boutiques and vintage shops (that we couldn't afford anything in, sadly); and we also went into a cute little pancake restaurant and had profitjes which were great!
the following day we hired bikes and rode around the city and didn't die! the traffic in amserstam is insane and coupled with riding on the wrong side of the road we were fully expecting something bad to happen, haha. the first thing we did was go to nordermarkt to have a look around and then we stopped at the winkel cafe for lunch and apple pie. we attempted to visit anne frank's house but it turns out we were there on yom kippur so it was closed! what are the odds? but we did see a narrow house which is basically a little house that someone actually lives in that's about 1m wide and we visited 'de poezenboot' which is a floating cattery on a boat just for the fun of it. we also went to this little 'secret garden' at spui which was pretty. that night we went out for an italian meal and found a febo which is basically a fast food vending machine where you take your hot food out of the wall! sadly we didn't actually get to try it while we were there (though we really wanted to) but we did also go to the sex museum that night which was hilarious.
my mean machine
chocolate boobs?
elly and i bought fresh berries from nordermarkt.
yep, it's JUST that middle door. :/
on our last day i'd arranged to have lunch with carla - we've been friends for years but have never met in real life (obviously since she lives in the netherlands) but elly and i thought we'd be able to squeeze in the anne frank house before lunch, but unfortunately the line was huge and we had to end up meeting up there after we'd been through the house, but we lunch was realy good! it was so great to finally meet her. :) afterwards elly and i walked to vondelpark and the i amsterdam sign and then bought funny/different food from the supermarket including our favourite - naturel cats.
we're currently spending our first night in paris but i'm pretty sad because we've already lost a day and a half of our time here. :( we were supposed to get a train here from amsterdam this morning but when we got to the station we were told that we'd have to wait until 5pm to get the direct train (and pay for it) or get four local trains and get there at around the same time, so we figured we'\d save the money and just take the local trains because we really didn't want to carry our suitcases around with us all day. and when we got to paris we went to reserve our train tickets to barcelona for sunday and the overnight train we were planning on taking was booked out (fuuuuu) so we had to book a day train for sunday which was supposed to be our last day in paris and then we'll also have to pay for another nights accomodation that night in barcelona. LAME. i'm pretty sad about it because paris is one of the places i was looking forward to the most but there's nothing i can do about it now and i guess i'll just have to make the most of it while i'm here because at least i'm here at all