This week

Let's see... what's been going on this week here in Amsterdam...

Monday night, the four of us working over here from Chicago (Meg, Bryan, Dan and me) had a dinner with two of the leadership from our company here in the Netherlands. They wanted to get our feedback about working over here, how it compares to Chicago, how our new systems are working out for them, any suggestions we might have... that kind of stuff. Since everyone besides Meg and I are in Rotterdam, that's where the dinner was... so we took the train over, which takes about an hour. Dinner was at this really nice little restaurant called La Stanza. The food was great and I think the conversations went well, too. Meg and I both passed out on the train ride back to Amsterdam afterwards. After getting home so late the night before from Berlin and then doing this, we were worn out.

Tuesday night, just stayed in. I tried to go to sleep early, but could NOT sleep. It was no good.

Last night... since Meg is only here another week and we are out of town in London this coming weekend, she wanted to go out for dinner and try an Indonesian rice table. I suggested the place that Matt and I had just been at because I knew it was really good and not as crazy expensive as some of the others. So, back to Puri Mas. But, first, we stopped off at Wynand Fockink for a pre-dinner drink. I think she got raspberry (Framboos) and I got blackberry (zwartebessen) brandy-wine. Very tasty... here's us "slurping":



Here's us at Puri Mas with our rice table:



Today for lunch, we are going out of the office (a big treat here!) for a going-away lunch for Meg. Where our office is located, there are not any restaurants nearby so we eat every day in the cafeteria on the top floor of our building.

Trip to Berlin

Saturday morning, Matt and I had flights that were supposed to leave at the same time, around 10:30am... he was flying back to Chicago and I was flying to Berlin (via London - yeah, doesn't make sense, but it was cheaper!) So, we went to the airport and first thing we saw was that Matt's flight was delayed 2 hours. He has absolutely no luck with flights! (His flight was canceled on the way here!) We checked in and Matt got his 18 Euro tax refund for the souvenir purchases he had made the day before.

My flight claimed it was leaving on time, so I had to board before Matt. We said our goodbyes.. : ( and I got on my plane... and sat on my plane for almost an hour before we took off. The winds were really strong, so flights were spaced out more between take-offs and landing, meaning everyone was getting delayed. They made us all sit in the last 15 rows of the plane and left the middle 15 rows after first class empty... saying that since our flight was so undersold and the plane was so big, they needed to balance out the weight. The flight was absolutely terrible... so bumpy! I felt so sick after that and I still had another flight to go, which went right back through the same airspace. UGH!

Once I got to London, I sprinted from the transfer bus to the gate for my Berlin flight. I did NOT want to miss that flight! Luckily, I made it and off we went. If I thought the first flight was bad, this one was WAY worse! When we finally landed, everyone clapped and took a big sigh of relief. I have never been so close to actually getting sick on a flight as I was at that moment. Good times.

Berlin... I really will need to go back, because I did not have enough time to see everything and the weather was so bad that it was difficult to walk around outdoors. It was literally so windy that it was hard to walk in a straight line. And NO, I hadn't been drinking!

I met up with Dan, Meg and Bryan (who had flown in Friday night) at the hotel. My hotel room was the size of a large closet... so tiny. The shower was in the hallway. But, the location was great... right in the Mitte neighborhood (middle of the city and close to many of the tourist sights).

We walked around Alexanderplatz and ended up eating dinner at Escados Parrilla Grill. We all got free glasses of wine while we waited for our table. Nice!

After dinner, we walked to the Hackescher Markt area which has quite a few pubs and clubs and is a popular area. We first stopped off at the Brauerei Lemke for a few drinks. Meg, Bryan and Dan ordered the tasting of four beers and we shared an apple strudel.





I ordered a Berliner Kindl, which is a beer served in a round flat glass with a straw. It tasted like raspberry and seemed pretty light. I think the alcohol content was low.



We went to another bar and Dan and Bryan got Bitburger beer.



Two girls in orange shirts were walking around giving massages for tips while people sat drinking beer... Meg and Bryan both got one.



We continued our bar hopping to Kilkenny Irish Pub. Pretty crowded place, but we managed to find a table near where the live music was going on. The crowd seemed pretty into the band, which was fun.

We had more beer and ordered a cheese plate to share (cheese is big as a dessert here). Most of the cheeses were decent, but there was one that tasted just like eating a hunk of mold... awful!



Meg and I took the train back to the hotel around 1am and left the guys to have some fun. From what we heard, they made it home rather late (or actually early in the morning).

Sunday was so cold and rainy and windy... not good for sightseeing at all. I wanted to see some things that the rest of them had seen on Saturday while I was flying through the air. I took one of those hop-on/hop-off bus tours around the city and saw a lot of the tourist sites. Unfortunately, I really don't have many good pictures because of the rain and the fact that I saw a lot of the stuff from the bus. I hopped on more than I hopped-off! : )

I did stop at the Brandenburg Gate for a pic:



This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There are 2,711 gray stone slabs that have no markings or names and each one is a different height. The differences in size of the slabs are supposed to create a sense of disorientation. There is a museum below that the others went to that has stories of families that were affected by the Nazi regime.



Here is a pic of the Reichstag (German Parliament building). You can climb up into the glass dome on the top.



The Berliner Dom (Cathedral) at night:



We walked back over to the Alexanderplatz and took a speedy elevator ride to the top of the Fernsehturm Berlin (a tv tower)... we went over 200m in less than 40 seconds.



Meg and I at the top:



Afterwards, we wanted to grab a quick dinner before heading to the airport to catch our flight back to Amsterdam. We went to the Nikolaiviertel (St. Nicholas Quarter), which has quite a few little German restuarants. We ate at Kartoffellaube, a restaurant with mainly potato dishes (that's what kartoffel translates to)... gotta love a place like that! I got the potato pancakes with applesauce... a big favorite of mine. We were disappointed to find out they only had 1 piece of apple strudel left... Meg and Bryan shared it.



Our flight home was perfect! I was so worried considering how bad the weather was all day and how bumpy the flight was on the way to Berlin, but it was smooth and went by super fast. Thank goodness! Meg and I made it back to Amsterdam and to our apartments by about midnight Sunday night.

For more pics from Berlin, CLICK HERE.

Happy 1st Anniversay Andy & Michelle!

January 27, 2007

Zaanse Schans and Matt's last day in town

Since Friday was Matt's last day in Amsterdam, I took a vacation day and we did a little sight-seeing. Neither of us had been to Zaanse Schans before, so we decided to go there for a few hours in the afternoon.

We started off with lunch at Durty Nelly's, an Irish pub that Matt had gone to for New Year's Eve when he lived in the Netherlands two years ago. Good food. We got a plate full of condiments and there was "brown sauce" in there... just a plain white packet that said brown sauce and had a big tear drop looking brown thing on it... what the heck is this stuff? Neither of us felt up to tasting it or had anything that required some sort of gravy looking stuff, so it just sat there. I did a quick search on the internet and brown sauce is like malt vinegar and some spices and eaten by the British. There's a guy with a whole blog dedicated to the stuff! Funny!



Zaanse Schans is a neighborhood of Zaandam, a city not too far from Amsterdam, with well preserved historic wind-mills and little houses. There is a clog/wooden shoe factory, a cheese making shop, 5 windwills and a bunch of other little shops all spread out over a few acres of land. It's a big tourist attraction in the summer... not so much in the winter, which is (unfortunately) why many things were closed when we went.

We took a train from Amsterdam, walked a few blocks and then took a ferry across the water over to the Zaanse Schans village area. The ferry was really popular with the kids on the bikes. There must have been a school on one side because each time we took it there and back, it was packed with high school age kids on bikes.



The area had many little canals running throughout and cute bridges, etc.



At the cheese making shop, we saw the goats checking out the roosters:



Of the 5 windmills, there was only one open to the public right now and it was the newest one:



We went to the wooden-shoe factory and saw how they actually make these things... there was an interesting little video showing how they carve the shoes and then carve out the inside.



And of course, they had some for sale:



They had some xmas wreaths on sale that were made of little wooden shoes... very cute, but wouldn't this be a little heavy to hang on the front door???



It was pretty cold and windy most of the day and rained some as well. We came back and did a little souvenir shopping, had a quick drink and then came back home to rest a little before going out for the night.

Matt had been wanting to go for Indonesian food while he was in Amsterdam, so we went to dinner at Puri Mas. It's an Indonesian restaurant close by the Leidseplein area that was highly recommended on many websites I researched. When we got there, Matt recognized the place... he ate there a few years ago when he lived in the Netherlands. Of all the places, I found one he had been to! Luckily, he said the food was good and he didn't mind eating there again.

We got the rijsttafel (rice table), which came with 3 kinds of rice (fried, white and yellow) and then about 15 other small dishes... they ranged from not-so-spicy to really spicy. The meats were set out on burners to keep warm while we ate. We ordered two different rice table options so that we would get a variety of different dishes. We got dishes of lamb, beef, pork, chicken, an egg, potatos, cucumbers... lots of stuff. And for dessert, we got tropical fruits and ice-cream. Everything was so tasty and we were SO full afterwards!





After dinner, we walked to the Xtracold Amsterdam Bar. We had heard about this place on our canal cruise on Wednesday night and Matt thought it would be cool to check it out (no pun intended!) It's a bar with a room you can go in called the ice bar that is -8 degrees Celsius.

We got there and had a drink first in the warm part of the bar. They make you sign a waiver of liability form basically stating that they aren't responsbile if you have some sort of bad reaction to the cold or your cell phone, camera, etc. stops working because of the cold. I was a little worried at this point... thinking, man it must be really cold in there!



They give you big parkas (which are super heavy-weight) and gloves to wear inside the ice bar. You are only allowed to stay in there 30 minutes and it costs 15 Euros, but that includes one drink while you are in there.

The ice bar was not nearly as cold as we expected... it's like walking into a big freezer. I'm sure that the temperature would feel much worse if there was wind blowing. My cell phone has endured much worse walking around Chicago... if it works after that, this is not a problem!



The drink you get is served in a "glass" made of ice and is vodka with your choice of mixer.



Around the ice bar, there are bottles of vodka frozen in ice blocks



And ice sculptures of Dutch sports stars



And a big wall of ice with "Some like it cold" written on it (an ad for the the extra cold Heineken that's sold here.)



There is a tv showing what's going on in the ice bar for everyone else in the rest of the warm area of the bar to watch. When we had been in the ice bar, the bartender only came in a few times and wasn't in there with us for most of the time. The bottle of vodka he made our drinks with was just sitting out in the open. We had thought at the time "wow, it's probably easy for people to steal more vodka". When we got out of the ice bar, we sat and watched the next group go in (it's done in half hour shifts). Well, that's exactly what these guys thought, too... and tried. They were all congregating to the left of the screen because that's where the bottle of open vodka was sitting. The bartender in the warm area of the bar looked up and saw that these guys were stealing the vodka and realized that no one was in there watching them. He got all mad and went in and dumped their drinks out. It was funny... we were waiting to see how long it would take the staff to figure out was going on!

Feyenoord wins!

Thursday night, Matt and I went to a professional soccer match (along with Dan, Meg and Bryan from Chicago and Paul from the Rotterdam TP office). Paul is the one that has season tickets to the Feyenoord games and was able to get us all tickets to the game. The tickets cost 35 Euros each... around $50 USD.

Feyenoord is the Rotterdam team in the Dutch soccer league (here's a link to the Feyenoord Wikipedia site for history about the team, etc.). There are about 18 teams in the league and Feyenoord is in 3rd place (right after PSV and Amsterdam Ajax). The team that Feyenoord played Thursday was FC Twente, who was in 4th place in the league at the time. Big match-up!

Meg, Matt and I took the train over to Rotterdam (usually about an hour or so depending on the number of stops) and met up with the rest of the guys. They have special trains that run to Feyenoord Stadium on game nights... that train was packed! Once we got to the game, we had to wait outside before they started letting people in our section in the gates.



Don't expect to enjoy a cold beer and a hot dog here, though... the stadium only served Amstel Lite, which Paul told us is a non-alcoholic beer. But people were downing it like it was real beer... kind of funny.



Matt and I tried the rookworst (aka the Dutch ballpark hot dog, I guess). It was pretty good.



Meg and I's favorite player was #18 - Serginho Greene (or as we called him, the guy with the hair). He was all over the place! (I didn't take this picture, obviously... but none of the ones I took of him close-up turned out)



Here's a few random shots of the field... our seats were really good.





Matt and me at the half:



During the game, there were lots of chanting and songs being sung... the only words we could understand were "Feyenoord", but Meg and I pretended to sing along. : )

After a goal, the crowd goes crazy and sings a song...



Lucky for us, we got to see this 3 times! : ) (Here's a link to goal #2)

The Feyenoord team was down 0-1 at the half and didn't look so good. The only goal that FC Twente scored was on a penalty kick and the crowd went nuts... booing and yelling and tossing stuff onto the field. They were not happy! The second half was much better... Feyenoord scored three times and made more attempts at goal. Much more exciting and the crowd was a lot happier! They ended up winning 3-1!

Due to the possibility of fights, etc. between the fans of the two teams, the visitor fans (FC Twente) got a super little section of the stadium to sit in and were surrounded by sections of empty seats and lined with security guards. They were escorted in later after we had been seated a while and right before the game started. They sang and beat on their drums for the first half of the match almost nonstop... towards the end of the second half, they had quieted down quite a bit (I'm sure it had something to do with the score!)



After the game, we took a crowded train back to Amsterdam... almost didn't make it on, but Matt opened the closing doors of the train Hulk-style and the three of us jumped on. : )

We stopped off at the shoarma place on the walk back to the apartment... so good!

Canal cruise at night

I saw that they have canal cruises you can take at night through Amsterdam to see the buildings and bridges all lit up and also drink wine and eat cheese along the way... sounds good to me! So, Wednesday night, Matt and I went on a 2-hour cruise through Amsterdam. When we got on the boat, we were the only people on there besides the driver and the tour guide... Matt was a little worried no one else would show up. But, a few other couples got on board.



We cruised around various canals, drank a bottle or two of wine and I ate some cheese. Since everyone on the boat requested English as the language, the whole tour was in English (much better than tours where they repeat everything four times in four different languages). The tour guide was pretty funny... or maybe it was the wine that made him seem funnier! Anyway, it was a very nice time. I think Matt thought it was kind of cheesy, but he lived through it. : )

My camera doesn't take very good pictures at night, so none of them really turned out.





The boat went down the canal right by my apartment!



Here's me in front of our boat, the Toon Hermans. Behind me is that huge bike parking garage and the flash from the camera reflected off the wheels a little... so that's what all those circles are.

Tuesday night dinner

Tuesday night, Matt and I ventured out to find somewhere to eat that would be good for his recovering tummy and also be tasty and worth our money (unlike the Oriental City). We stumbled upon this little restaurant on the Singel canal called Meneer Pannekoek.



Awesome place... I had a ham and cheese pancake and Matt had kipsateh (chicken satay) which actually came with about 1,000 fries. Even better was that there is a non-smoking section to the restaurant. You don't see that a lot here.