And the answer is........we have decided to do a day trip (a very long
day trip) to Bruges and 5 days somewhere else. The top candidate for the
next stop is Paris but if the trains are still on strike 3 days from
now then we might just go to London instead. It is so very luxurious to
be able to decide where we want to go on a moment's notice.
It is
way past time to poke my nose into a few shops. There are cheese stores
everywhere and the displays are so pretty that I just want to buy one
of everything to take home but do you know how much cheese weighs? A
ton. I'd never be able to lift my suitcase off the carousel at the
airport when I get home. Sigh. So I am bowing to reality. Of course
there are a zillion stores with wooden shoes but there's no way I'm
gonna fit stuff like that into my suitcase. Reality is sometimes tough
to accept.
A few interesting sightings of people bicycling by: a
slender young woman with a cello strapped on her back (we've seen quite a
few cellos and French horns and the like on cyclists), bicycles with a
kind of wooden wheel barrow arrangement on the front of the bike that is
large enough to fit a wife and 3 small children, and many people
riding while talking on their cell phones.
Our guidebook listed a
good place for high tea and so today we went there to refresh ourselves
after shopping. Named Gartine, it is located in a little alley and I
would never have even noticed it if not for the guidebook. And it turned
out to be a slow food restaurant, which means that everything is made
from fresh, local, and organic ingredients, and we always love slow food
places. Never having had high tea in a Dutch environment, I was very
interested in how it differed from a standard British tea. Well, it was
spectacular. We started with a cream soup made from herbs in their
garden, then a potato onion and herb quiche, then a sandwich made with
homemade chutney and an aged cheese on delicious brown bread, and then
came the sweets. The platter included an almond cupcake hollowed out and
filled with homemade raspberry/beet jam and topped with whipped cream, a
chocolate dipped date, and 4 wedges of things that looked like
cheesecake but were much lighter in texture-- chocolate with a hazelnut
crust, lemon meringue with graham cracker crust, pistachio lime with
pistachio crust, and pear with a nut crust. We couldn't possibly eat it
all so we brought it back to the hotel for a late night snack. Can't
wait for snack time.
Tonight was a very big soccer game for The
Netherlands at the World Cup. The streets are awash in orange--people in
all-orange outfits and goofy orange hats, stores with massive orange
balloon decorations, orange steamers and garlands. We had our hotel room
window open during the game and every now and then the city would erupt
in roars of shouting and horns blowing. I expect the flurry of boats to
start up soon on the canals, full of drunk and singing fans.
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