Cram then scram sterdam

This is Der Wag, or the weighstation. Ships would bring their cargo here to be weighed before it could be sold off. No comment on whether I weigh more going out than I did going in.



Woke up early to retake the Free Amsterdam tour. Still a great tour, but I kinda got to see behind the curtain a little and, they memorize a speech. I know, what did I expect? But I wanna believe that this earnest young lad really did fall in love with [insert European capital name here] so much so that he devoted his life to study of the intricacies of its lore. I mean, anybody can memorize a speech!

But it was still lovely, I learned a lot, and I would recommend it to anyone.



Sean? Something tells me they sell waffles. By the way, our new hostel's name is Euphemia. Gold star to the first one who can tell me what that means!



Woke Ian up, before we Van Go-Gogh'd, (You think it's insufferable here, you should hear what Ian has to put up with; Prague was nothing but "Waiter, Czech please!" and "Czech this out!") and let me tell you something: That guy could paint.

I mean, he just got it. There's a painting here I couldn't even bring myself to buy the postcard because it was nothing like NOTHING LIKE the experience of looking at the painting. You can see bits of the canvas in parts and in others there's a daub of paint so thick you can see the outline of his penknife. The wheat blows in the wind, and the reaper reaps and all of this is happening just with color. Wow, I must be getting old. I like art now.



Ian was a sport, and we were off on The Heineken Experience. Pretty goofy, but fairly imaginative entertainments for a brewery tour. (Some of you may have received the unhilarious new webvid circulating the youtubes that Ian and I shot at the HeinEx (patent pending). We're hopin' it will get us a gig in primetime. It's not included here for legal reasons, mainly stemming from a lawsuit involving The Heineken Experience's fraudulent claim of "All the Heinken you can Handle!") I mean, can you say that you've been on a virtual reality tour of the life of a beer bottle? I can!



Ian, transfixed by buttons and whistles. They're so cute at that age.

After fully exploiting all of our drink tokens, we happened (?) upon this shop.



With the sun setting over the canals,



we wandered off to the Vondelpark, where our recollections begin to diverge. There are bits we are certain about. A pond. Or two. A tall bird. Hilarity. Cold Drinks. Rain. A woman yelling at us in Dutch to leave her establishment. More rain. A bar with a woman so scary, we don't even try entering. Rain and wind. A coffee shop! Rain. A bar entirely staffed with (and frequented by) elves. Or Dutch people. More rain.

But that's just the parts we remember. Not the parts we laughed the hardest at. Eventually we wound up back at Euphemia (anyone?) had another hearty laugh, and Ian let me loose on the blogmaker.

Although the rain has dogged us the entire trip (dear god! Al Gore was right!) I wouldn't change a minute of it. It was exactly the kind of trip I should have taken 10 years ago, but am glad I finally did. My plane back to reality leaves in (whoa) four and a half hours, and my pupils don't seem like they want to sleep, but I think I can say with some sincerity that this has been one of the best trips of my life, and hopefully I'll be back in Europe again soon.

My next post will be stateside, so warm up the TiVo, Micah, and get out my watching-hat, Daddy's comin' home!

P.S. Ian needed some various ointments (the scrapes he gets into!) so we were about to go into this apothecary.



Turns out it was a Hypothecary, which means they could only help us with theoretical problems, like, If I was mauled by a bear, which unguent would I require?

P.P.S. Euphemia? Yeah doesn't exist. I did find aphemia, which is a mental aphasia where you can't express ideas verbally, but you can still write. Hey kinda like me right now! So maybe Euphemia is a mental aphasia where you can only express your ideas through the substitution of some other words in place of words that are harsh or vulgar.