Sunday, June 8
I was up early, thinking we had a train an hour earlier than we actually did. It was okay though because it gave us extra time to walk around Koblenz. After breakfast, we went for a morning stroll around the city, which I think made us both feel like we hadn't missed much by sleeping in town and spending the day out on the Mosel. There wasn't too much going on, at least in the area we walked, which reminded my mom of a college town.
This was a designated travel day with a regional train up the Rhine to Dusseldorf, where we switched to an international route terminating in Amsterdam. We were there by the beginning of the afternoon and had most of the day to walk around. Our first agenda was to get some food, and walking towards the Jordaan, the old city, we found a cafe where we each got savory pancakes. Mine was folded over like a quesadilla and stuffed with spinach and feta. My mom got an open face pancake with mushrooms and cheese. This is another concept, alongside flammkuchen, that I think has a lot of potential. I can't say this was the most delicious expression of savory pancakes. My mom certainly thought hers was a bit too cheesy, but this is definitely a meal idea I think I'd like to play with when I get home.
Most of the day we walked rather aimlessly, just following whatever caught our eyes, be it lingering canals, railings overflowing with bicycles, ornate old buildings, sleek new buildings with brilliant windows, cheese shops doling out free samples, tourist shops hocking clogs and orange Holland gear–they're in particularly high gear with the World Cup starting this week–tulip booths with more varieties than we knew existed, and so much more. The city was so well-composed, with hardly a dull neighborhood. It had been brilliantly curated over the centuries, with preservation of the largely fine older buildings, while leaving room for interesting newer ones.
It was also extremely crowded, perhaps for the holiday weekend we'd been hearing about in Germany. The streets were bustling with bikers and pedestrians. As we soon found walking out of the train station, bikes had the right of way, then pedestrians, and last of all cars. Scooters, which there were a fair number of, also qualified as bikes for some reason. I think that's the one part of the traffic patterns I would change. Cars were few in number though, and for every fourth or fifth one that passed, there was also a trolley, the primary form of mass-transit in the city. I thought the whole thing functioned very well, and while it was packed, it wasn't congested, just full of life. Almost immediately I felt like this was a city I could live in, one I wouldn't be able to understand in a few days, but rather a destination to be slowly absorbed over a period of time. Maybe there's a theater festival…
We made the most of our time though, eventually ending up in Vondelpark on the south side of the city, where we sat in the grass for a while watching a bunch of roller-skaters do tricks. We speculated that with the tradition of skating on the canals all winter, rollerskating was much more popular in Amsterdam than America. Certainly we see they have great speed-skaters in the winter olympics.
When we continued walking, we passed through what seemed like a mall's worth of name-brand stores. None of them were big, like you might find on Fifth Avenue in New York. Buildings in Amsterdam were traditionally taxed by street frontage, so they tended to be built narrow and vertical. Most of the familiar clothing outlets had a shop–or in the case of H&M, five. It wasn't our focus, but I imagine many people go to Amsterdam just for the shopping. It was certainly a pretty place to do it and a nice pedestrian atmosphere.
As we got tired once more, we started looking for a place to have a late afternoon drink, but we liked the restaurant we stopped at enough to stay for dinner. Alongside a French rose, we shared two appetizers: a beef carpaccio with arugula and a sharp creamy salad dressing over top, and pan-fried prawns with some lemon juice. Seeing as we were finally near the sea, we deferred to seafood as well on the main courses, getting tuna and mackerel alongside other shellfish. Everything was very tasty, and as the dinner went on, we were surrounded by more people. Compared to all the cities I'd been traveling in, Amsterdam was a later-oriented town. We sat down in a fairly empty spot a bit after 7, but the restaurant was packed by the time we left around 8:45. While it's not quite like the city that never sleeps, it was definitely a big night-time metropolis. We didn't stay out too much longer though and got some extra sleep that night.
Canals
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