August Wrap-up

Here's some of the highlights of the last month of Summer in Amsterdam.

• Not really a highlight, but important nonetheless- Nana was diagnosed with cancer, and Samflew back to Australia to spend 2 weeks with her family.  Sam really enjoyed the chance to be with the family during this tough time, and also had a fun weekend in Sydney with friends before coming back to Amsterdam
• Nick and Erin's visit (as featured on Nick's blog)- it was great to see these guys and share Australian impressions of Europe as they spent a few nights with us during their European holiday .  We went out for dinner a few times including Vapiano's at Rembrantplein (amongst the Gay Pride festival) and Toscana's at Haarlemmerstraat, and a nice afternoon in the Vondelpark
• Sam's cousin Kata and her husband Brenton spent a night here on their roadtrip through Europe.  We had a really great dinner at Bazar turkish restaurant on Albert Cuypstraat
• BBQ at Sybran's house, enjoying the summer weather with some friends
• Sanne's birthday party at Almere, which is only a half hour drive but took us almost 2 hours due to sub-optimal public transport.  Almere is a beautiful suburb North East of Amsterdam, across the IJ.  Sanne and Hans' house was really nice and backed onto a canal.  It was very different to the busy and often cramped city of Amsterdam
• Stepping up to help out on the hosting and welcoming team at church, which is not my usual style but they need people and I'm keen to help, so we'll see how it goes
• Small screen highlights- Olympics, Walking Dead, Falling Skies, How I Met Your Mother
• Paper highlights- Finally finished Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, a long and often difficult but very rewarding read. ALso started Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea

Boy & Bear at the Paradiso

Aussie folk rock favourites Boy & Bear were in Amsterdam this week.  They were playing at the Paradiso, an old church converted into one of Amsterdam's best and most famous musical venues.  The hall is a good size, small enough to feel intimate but big enough to have atmosphere. Even better, it's only 1km away from where we live, so no need for cramming onto public transport or looking for a carpark.

Last time I saw Boy & Bear was about a year ago at the Enmore in Sydney.  Compared to that performance, they were more confident, relaxed and talkative which must come with experience, and also probably because the crowd here was much smaller than at their home town performance.  They possibly took this relaxation a bit too far when they at least twice had to restart songs because they started at the wrong time or sang the wrong words.  Fortunately they were good about it- they apologised, had a bit of a laugh and carried on with the awesome tunes.

My friend Sybran came along and, if his reaction to hearing Boy and Bear for the first time is anything to go by, I think they have just won themselves quite a few new Dutch fans.  I also really enjoyed the music and the venue, and will definitely be making an effort to visit this great music hub more frequently.

Heat Wave

This weekend was uncomfortably hot.  Being Australian I'm ashamed to admit this, but the 35 degree days were so unexpected.  Even at midnight it was high twenties, which makes it very difficult to sleep in our apartment with its small double-glazed windows and lack of ceiling fans.

It was, however, beautiful weather to go to the beach.  I went to Muiden with some friends from church, where we went by boat to an island out in the IJmeer.  Muiden itself was a cute little town on the water's edge, where lots of people were having morning coffee at the cafes.  It was very sleepy though, and you would have to be very patient to live there because the main road had a swing bridge on it which would open up to let boats through, meaning that everyone with their cars and bikes just had to wait for 10 minutes until the bridge closed again.

On the island, it was no beach by any Australian standards, but it was really nice to be near the water, play football, swim and barbecue.  The area was packed with boats, from small dinghies to larger tourist cruise boats, and many sailing boats.  Everyone was relaxing and enjoying the sun, because despite its heat there are not many opportunities to do so in Holland. The sun was scorching, and there was a lot of very sunburnt guys that evening

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Summer Holiday Part 11

On our last night in Paris, and the last night of our holiday, we went to see the Eiffel Tower.  We caught the metro to Trocadero where we had a great view of the tower, despite the pouring rain. 

Our last dinner together was had at a little bistro around the corner.  It served basically pub food, but it was good and cheap, and we entertained ourselves by making paper hats.  Our waiter was a champ and we convinced him to wear a hat, and there was a British lady at the table next to us who also wore one of our hats.  It was a really fun night.

After dinner we went back to see the eiffel tower lit up in the dark, and it was incredible to see. It was the night before Bastille Day, and there was apparently some lights display that happened on the hour, but at 10:30 it was between displays, and we didn't want to stand around in the rain.  We rushed home in the hope that we might be able to see it from the rooftop terrace that our apartment was advertised as having, but when we got back we found that there was no rooftop terrace.

The next morning, our last day, we had to be out of the apartment by 11am, but because we were in a self-serviced apartment and not a hotel we could not leave our bags there, so we caught the metro to the main station (Gare du Nord) and left our bags in storage there, as this is where our train home would leave from later that day. We stopped for a coffee and had a bit of a wander around, but because it was a public holiday most things were closed, and it was not a terribly interesting area of the city, so we caught the metro to Luxembourg and visited the gardens. 

Fortunately the whether was much nicer than when I had been here the previous day, and we had a great time relaxing on the public chairs in the sun.  At the fountain we hired a toy sailing boat and set it out into the water where it floated around the pool at the mercy of the winds along with all the other sailing boats. 

After a bit more sitting around in the park for a while longer, it was time to head back to the train station.  We had one last coffee together, and as our train's details flickered up onto the revolving flap timetable board, we said our final goodbyes which was very sad.  It made it a bit easier that only 3 and a half hours later we were home (almost 30 hours before our friends would be), relaxing on the couch, preparing for life to return to normal.

Summer Holiday Part 10

The plan for our next day in Paris was to start with a visit to the catacombs. We got there at 10 minutes before it opened, only to find that the queue was already 3 hours long- so we didn't see the catacombs.  We decided to split up, as the girls wanted to go shopping on the Champ-Elysess and I, as well as not being to keen on spending the day in shoe and handbag shops, wanted to see some other areas of Paris. 

I had just been reading Ernest Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast', an autobiographic style novella about his experiences in Paris and the Parisian lifetyle during the few years he lived here.  I thought it would be great to see some of the places he describes in his book, so I found a self-guided tour and wandered through the streets.  It was great to see some of the less touristy areas of Paris, starting with the markets along Rue Mouffetard which was chock full of bakeries, fresh fruit and seafood stalls, and the smells of the French, Italian and Greek restaurants preparing for lunch service was incredible.

Markets on Rue Mouffetard

Building decorated with country scenes on Rue Mouffetard

Delicious croissants

Just around the corner from this market street was the house where Hemingway lived in Paris, number 74 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, and there was a plaque to commemorate his presence.

Plaque at Hemingway's house

After some more walking I ended up in a little cafe on Boulevard Saint-Michel, sheltered from the pouring rain outside.  Relaxing as I watched the crowd of umbrellas on the footpath of the bustling street, I made my coffee and croissant last as long as I could, but eventually it was time to get going.  Conveniently there was a shop selling umbrellas just next door.  As I was preparing to leave the shop with my new umbrella, one of the awnings gave way under the weight of the water which had pooled on it, and a guy who was walking past got absolutely drenched.  He looked at me, and we both cracked up laughing, and he kept going, a bit wetter but somehow with a smile on his face.

Coffee on Boulevard Saint-Michel

Despite the rain, I decided to visit the Jardins du Luxembourg, which was also a favourite of Hemingway's.  Fortunately the rain let up, and I was able to walk around the beautiful gardens without getting too wet.

Jardins du Luxembourg

On the way back to meet everyone at Chatelet, I walked along the Seine and was able to some great views of the river and the Notre Dam.  We all met up at the big fountain at Chatelet, where we were meeting one of Margot's friends who lives in Paris.  We had coffee, walked around some shops and visited a large department store where Sam bought some nice tea.  When we got home, we built a medieval castle wall out of sugar cubes- it was structurally sound, until Margot knocked it down with a baguette.

View from a bridge on the Seine

Bridge covered in locks

Notre Dam

French flags in preparation for Bastille day

Sugar cube castle

Summer Holiday Part 9

Our first full day in Paris was full of famous Parisian landmarks; we had a Paris card for the day which gave us entry into many of the museums and galleries and were determined to make full use of it.  We started at the home of many of the world's most famous paintings, the Musee d'Orsay, where we saw paintings from artsits such as Monet and Van Gogh.

Next we went to Notre Dam cathedral, and waited in line for half an hour to see the inside, which was just as incredible as it is from the outside.

After a coffee in a cafe right next to the Notre Dam (not something I would normally be prepared to pay for the the comfort and convenience were definitely worth it) we visited the crypts underneath the Notre Dam which has remnants of the original Roman foundations of Paris.  We then went to Saint Chapelle, where again we had quite a long wait, this time in the rain.  From the outside we wondered whether it was worth waiting, but once we went inside we were blown away by the incredible wall-filling stained glass windows and the beautiful blue and gold fixtures, much of which remains original from when the cathedral was built in the 13th century.

Just next door to the cathedral was the Conciergerie, a large building famous for its roll as a prison during the French Revolution.  It's most well known prisoners included Marie Antoinette, whose prison cell was reconstructed to its condition while she was held there.

In the afternoon we also managed to squeeze in a visit to the Pantheon before it closed.  This massive building had some displays of famous French philosophers and writers, as well as the underground catacombs where many famous French writers, poets, inventors, philosophers and politicians.

Day Trip to Utrecht

This weekend we decided to see something of Holland other than Amsterdam, so we visited the nearby city of Utrecht. It's about 40km south-east of Amsterdam and only takes 25 minutes on the intercity tram, which is quite a comfortable, clean public transport service.

Utrecht looks similar to Amsterdam in many ways with the canals running between lines of 4 level brick buildings with similar facades and gables. The city centre was of course much smaller and felt less polished when compared to Amsterdam, which could be seen as a good or a bad thing. As we walked along the Oudergracht, we noticed a unique feature of Utrecht's canals which was the lower level along the edge of the water below street level.

We visited most of the major tourist attractions in the city centre, including the Domkerk and Domtoren (Dom church and tower), which have a rich history as the centre point of this ancient town. Records show that the current location of the church was the original founding of the Roman settlement in around 70AD, and the church has gone through many changes over 2000 years including being burnt down, being converted to Protestantism during the reformation, being converted back to Catholicism during French occupation and being torn in half by a tornado in the 1600s which is responsible for the current church being in 2 separate parts (the church and the spire).

We also visited the Utrecht Centraal Museum which had a lot of art from the Dutch old master painters. There was also a fairly large contemporary section that was very abstract and to someone like me, not even recognisable as art (such as a broken drumkit, or some pants hanging from the ceiling).

Attached to the Centraal Museum was the Dick Bruna House, where there were lots of Miffy memorabilia and information about Bruna's other projects. On the way back to the train we spotted this set of traffic lights which had the pedestrian symbols replaced with little Miffy signs.