Day 11 & 12: Amsterdam

  I'm combining the last two days into one post, to save some time.  Right now, we're stranded at a hotel in Toronto.  Our flight out of Amsterdam yesterday was delayed by 2 hours, causing us to miss our connecting flight home to Cleveland.  The airline put us up in a hotel and bought us dinner last night and breakfast this morning... and hopefully, we'll be home this afternoon.

  Anway, on Thursday we visited the Ann Frank house.  One of the benefits of being on the Rick Steves tour is bypassing all of the lines.  This was the line of people standing in the rain to get in.  It stretches all the way down the block:

    ...but we got right in.  Here are some pictures I took before I found out you're not allowed to take pictures:

    Here's the bookcase that hid the stairs leading to the area where eight people hid:

    Touring the house is a strange experience.  It's a crowded, slow, single-file walk through about a dozen rooms, each with quotes from her diary and objects that were saved.  Some of the pages of her diary are also on display.  Unfortunately, we reached her bedroom right after someone had just gotten sick and thrown up in the corner.   Ugh.

    Our next stop was at one of the many "coffee shops" in Amsterdam.  Coffee shops are NOT for coffee.  They're for buying pot.  Marijuana is legal in Amsterdam, but you have to buy it at one of the stores.  The one we went to was called "Paradox", and the owner is a friend of Rick Steves.

    There are 200 coffee shops in Amsterdam.  You have to be at least 18 to enter.  Each one has a license hanging in the window, and they're not allowed to do any advertising.  Walk in, and you'll find a menu on the table:

    The whole system is extremely tightly-conrolled.  There are limits to how much you can buy, and how much the owner can sell every day.  But the owner's impassioned plea for leagalization was undercut a bit by the ghost-like older man in the corner-- who looked like he spent all day there-- who stood up and told us how important it was to "stay hydrated."

    Our next stop was The Rijksmuseum, a massive national museum full of masterpieces from Rembrandt, Vermeer, and others.  Rembrandt's "The Night Watch", which is massive, was especially impressive:

    In Vermeyen's "The Holy Family", it looks like baby Jesus has been hitting the gym:

    Next door is the Van Gogh museum, the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world.  Again, here are the two pictures I took, before finding out that taking pictures was not allowed.  They really need to do a better job of making that clear when you enter.

    Here's an actual palette he used.  Very cool.

    We also checked out a surprising home known as "Ons' Lieve op Solder", or "Our Lord in the Attic."  In the 1660's, Catholics were not allowed to practice out in the open.  So the top three floors of this unassuming house were turned into an ornate church... where they could worship on the down-low.

    It was strange to walk through an ordinary-looking home, go upstairs, and see this:

    The houses in Amsterdam are very distinct.  Most of them are very narrow, and there's a good reason for this.

    Taxes used to be based on the width of your home. But it didn't matter how tall it was.  On most of the homes, you can see a type of pulley sticking out, at the top of it. This is still how they get everything from groceries to furniture up to the top floors.

    On Friday night, we had our last group dinner together.  We had an entire upstairs room at a restaurant reserved.  We'll miss this great group of people.  Hopefully our paths will cross again!

    Some final thoughts on Amsterdam:

  --  Yes, we did walk through the infamous "red light district."  Women wearing bikinis or lingerie (I thought they'd be naked.. they were not) stand in windows and doors (all lit in red lights) and advertise sex.  Prostitution, like marijuana, is legal but very tightly regulated.

  Our guide, Hilbren, told us that the area has been chaging recently, after crackdowns on human trafficking.  He said it would like very different in the next few years.

  I did not take any pictures, because they are they are strongly frowned upon by the women, the customers, and... more importantly... Nat.

    -- We love walking through grocery stores in other countries.  Check out what Cool Ranch Doritos are called in Europe:

    --  And finally, take a look at the vending machine in our hotel.  Candy, electrical adadpters... and Heinekens.

      That's all!  Thanks for reading!

Day 10: Aalsmeer Flower Auction & Amsterdam

    We left Delft this morning and headed to Amsterdam, the last city on our tour.  Along the way, we stopped at the Aalsmeer Flower Auction.  Neither one of us had any idea how massive this thing is.

    There's no way to capture this on camera.  It's the largest flower auction in the world, taking place in the LARGEST BUILDING in the world (10.6 million square feet!)  And everywhere you look, flowers are quickly being sent on their way, by people on scooters flying around, pulling what are essentially trains of flowers.  It's amazing that they don't crash into each other.

    Flowers from all over the world are sent here to be auctioned, then shipped all over the planet.  About 20 MILLION flowers are sold every DAY.

    The auctions are done in rooms like this, with the buyers at computer terminals:

    It's a "Dutch" auction, which is the opposite of the way we do it:  The price starts really high, and they keep dropping it until someone pushes their button to buy.  It's a much faster system, and makes we wonder why everyone doesn't do it like that.

    The freshly-cut flowers are for sale the next morning, often on the other side of the world.  Amazing.

   Next, we stopped at The Muiderslot, a castle that was built in 1370.

    We took a tour, and had a group lunch in the basement.

    Then the tour bus pulled into Amsterdam.  The weather has not been cooperating with us for the past few days.  But even though it was raining, we took a walking tour of some of the neighborhoods.

    Then we had a group dinner, at an Indonesian restaurant called "Kantijil & De Tijger."  It was the best meal we've had so far!  An army of waiters brought out DOZENS of plates to each table, containing all sorts of beef, pork, chicken, fish, noodles, etc.  There were several variations of each of them, and everyone dug in, family style.  There was not enough room on the tables for everything.  But as soon as we finished one dish, they brought three more.

    I'm not sure if it's because of the several drinks we had, or the contact high from all of the pot smoke walking back...  but at the hotel, Nat and I flipped through the channels and couldn't stop watching one show-- featuring some sort of puppet, speaking Dutch.  We had no idea what he was saying.  And we kept trying to figure out what he was:

    A brick?  A waffle?  Every few seconds, he would appear in a new scene, often from a TV show or movie:

    Eventually, I found him on Wikipedia:

"Bernd das Brot is a depressed, grumpy, curmudgeonly, constantly bad tempered, surly, fatalistic, melancholic loaf of pullman bread, speaking in a deep, gloomy baritone.  His favorite activities include staring at his south wall at home.  His favorite expression is "Mist!", used in much the same way as the English "crap."  His other favorite senteces are "I would like to be left alone", "I would like to leave this show", and "My life is hell."

    My new favorite show.

Day 9: Delft

  Last night, our tour arrived in Delft, a charming city in South Holland.  This morning, we went on a walking tour.

  There's something strange about the "Oude Kerk", or "Old Church", which was built in the 1300s.

    It leans.  A LOT.

      When they were building it, the foundation wasn't strong enough to support it, and it started to lean.  The builders tried to compensate for it as they finished each layer.  Today, the four turrets at the top are the only things that point straight up. The clock face at the top of it uses some optical illusions (one side is bigger than the other) to try to trick your brain into thinking everything's OK.  They don't work.

  The clock has a massive bell in the tower that is only rung on very special occasions... like when a member of the royal family dies.  That's because engineers are worried it could cause the church to collapse.  When it IS going to be rung, people living nearby are sent letters, telling them they have to evacuate, just to be safe.

    Inside the church is the burial place of Johannes Vermeer, legendary artist who died in 1675.

    Side note: if you haven't seen the 2013 movie "Tim's Vermeer", stop what you're doing and watch it now.  It's a fascinating, funny documentary (by Penn and Teller) about the mystery surrounding how Vermeer painted.  He was able to do things with light that no one else did-- light behaved like it does in photographs-- and there is one widely-held theory about how he did it.  In the movie, one guy with no artistic ability goes to unbeliavble lengths to try to prove it.

    Vermeer was from Delft, and there's a museum dedicated entirely to him.  We learned a lot about his life.

    Delft is also home to Delftware, the white and (primarily) blue pottery that's been made in this area since the 16th century.  It started as an attempt to copy something similar (made from porcelain) that was becoming popular in China.  Artists in Delft became so good at it, that Delftware became a craze.  Now imitation Delftware is made in China.

    We went to one of the few "real" Delftware shops left.  The fourth-generation pottery maker, who creates everything himself, led us on a tour.  The woman who runs the cash register does all of the painting herself.

    This is totally unrelated, but one thing you notice here is that people bring their dogs EVERYWHERE with them.  We saw this in a restaurant:

    Speaking of restaurants, we had Italian tonight.  This pizza had prosciutto, fresh arugula, and thin slices of parmesean cheese.

    Dessert: Tiramisu!

    We know we are back at the hotel when we see the giant lamp.

Day 8: Fighting the water

  Today we moved from Belgium to The Netherlands.  Along the way, we made several stops to learn how The Netherlands battles the sea.   1/8 of the country is below sea level.  Half of the country is just three feet above it.
 
  The pumps are working constantly, and need a foolproof source of power.  One of our local tour guides told us she could not believe the blackout that left much of the Northeastern U.S. in the dark for days in 2003.  If the power goes out in The Netherlands for 72 hours, they DISAPPEAR.  And the water isn't just coming from the sea, it's seeping up from below them.

  Storm surges from the North Sea have caused many devestating floods over the years.

  After one especially deadly and destructive flood in 1953, engineers floated large concrete structures called caissons to the area to plug a breached dike.  The structures were originally supposed to be used for an Allied landing in Belgium that never happened.  Instead, they were moved to the flooded area, filled with sand, and sunk into the water.  This stopped the storm surge.  Today, the caissons have been emptied and turned into a museum.  You can walk through them and see what happened.

  We also saw a marvel of modern engineering - the Maeslantkering storm surge barrier.  It's "the largest set of doors in the world."  Each one is the size of the Eiffel tower.

      The idea is to be able to swing the doors closed the doors in an emergency, preventing another disasterous flood.  But the structure also has to stay out of the way of  ships in the second-busiest port in the world.  After six years of construction, it was finished in 1997.   In the nearly 10 years since then, it's been used ONCE.  That's because, by the time it takes to open it again, millions of dollars of business has been lost.  So they will only close it when the storm surge reaches three meters.. about 10 feet.  That means the water basically has to be up to the second floor before they swing shut.

  We got an up-close look.  This was my favorite part of the trip so far.

    Next, we stopped in Zierikzee, a cute town with shops and restaurants.

  Here's the whole gang - a great group of people.

    Hilbren, our guide, recommended the apple pancakes at one restaurant.  Nat got one:

    Finally, we arrived in Delft.  Hilbren warned us that our new hotel was extremely "creative, though often at the expense of being practical."  He was right.  This was the hallway leading to our room:

    I banged my head on it several tmes.  Other people did too.  I noticed small amounts of plaster that were vacuumed up every day.

    Each room is decorated with a different, extravagant theme.  This was ours:

    Other rooms had themes of an African safari, the garden of eden, underwater, etc.  Crazy.  Our shower had a built-in "sun shower" - basically an upright tanning bed.

    The weather was wet and very windy today,  But on the walk to our group dinner, there was a sign of hope.