Gable hook outside our window
The wooden house (one of the oldest houses in Amsterdam restored in the 1950s)
The courtyard at Begijnhof
The orphan’s lockers at the Amsterdam Museum
Proof that I was in Amsterdam
View from the Skinny Bridge
The EYE from the ferry
Given that we were not in bed until about midnight, we still didn’t really sleep in, just until about 8 am. We got packed, took leave of our lovely little hotel room and its gable hook right above our window, and left the luggage with our super friendly reception staff while we went for a few more hours of exploring. I had found a great little page on an Amsterdam tourism site called “50 free things to do in Amsterdam,” and I studied that while we had breakfast on nearby Rembrandt Square. Although we had already done a few just by happenstance and by walking around, we added a few less obvious ones–we found the Begijnenhof, where single women who weren’t quite ready to become nuns have lived since the 15th century, and where the lovely courtyard still features a wooden house that goes back to that time period. We also walked through the entrance area of the Amsterdam museum, which features some interesting art about the past and present of the city, and also the “orphan lockers”–lockers that stem from the time when the site was one of the city’s orphanages, and are now used to house a mini exhibit about daily life at the orphanages. Male orphans who were old enough to learn a trade (at 12) had their tools in these lockers, and later, in the 1950s, they were apparently used as rabbit cages. The Amsterdam orphanages were in use until the 1960s (at the very end, for foster care rather than for actual orphans). We also walked to an area outside of the city center where there is a daily market on Kujp street, but “daily” apparently didn’t include Sunday, so the street was pretty much closed up, although interesting to wander through. We then walked back in the direction of the hotel, had another modest pub lunch, and then retrieved our luggage to get ourselves the mile back to the central station. Since we still had a couple of hours, we took the ferry across to the EYE Film Museum one more time, and explored their basement level film equipment exhibit–another thing we knew was free. We love the architecture of the museum, and the three-minute ferry ride is a lot more fun for us than for the poor captain of the ferry boat, who must get very bored! Then we returned to the train station, found our platform, and got on our train back to Osnabrueck. Amsterdam was certainly fabulous, and we were glad the weather cooperated–it was never above 70, but the rain that kept being forecast was always postponed or disappeared from the forecast altogether, so the few squalls we got were very manageable.
We arrived in Osnabrueck at about 6 pm, 10 minutes after Kai got in from Berlin (he had some excitement with his departure, since his ticket (a sheet of A4 paper, as all our tickets for the German trains have been) fluttered away from him and onto the tracks as his train took off. I did send him the PDF of the ticket, but was not sure the Deutsche Bahn, the German train service, would accept it–luckily, they did and all he had to deal with is that somehow his reserved seat was taken by the time he had it all sorted out–and that he didn’t have anything to drink since he forgot to bring it. Wow, he needs to learn a bit more about traveling by train! We plied him with Fanta and all three of us took the bus home to Imke’s, where a lovely German Abendbrot was waiting for us. I’ve missed German rolls! Even though I preferred Dutch to Czech food, it was a bit on the bland side and I do have to admit that the toast they mostly serve for bread, and especially the very bitter coffee were a bit boring. And if I didn’t ask for mature cheese, I’d get the very very mild Gouda that I have always thought of as pretty boring. So I thoroughly enjoyed my mom’s smorgasbord of six or seven different flavorful cheeses, which is a given at her dinner spreads. 🙂 Kai retired right after he’d finished his food (I don’t think he had a lot of privacy in Berlin, although he truly had a good time, since it included a couple of days with his dad and step mom, a free philharmonic concert on Tuesday, and even an opportunity to “perform” parts of Hamilton to Laurie and a friend of hers, who were apparently an appreciative audience). We showed my mom some photos from Amsterdam and I watched the news with her, but I have a feeling we won’t last much longer tonight.