Our Very Own Canal Cruise

One of the more relaxing ways to see the city is by boat.  The water's filthy, but the views are beautiful and floating below the city traffic and tourist crowds is wonderfully peaceful.  While the canal tours are informative and a good way to get introduced to Amsterdam, there's nothing like having your own boat.  Well, until now. 

We went in with some friends on a boat rental program.  It works a lot like those shared-car programs that many cities have.  We pay a yearly fee and put in a request for the days and hours we want the boat.  The motor's electric and therefore dummy-proof... well, allegedly dummy-proof.  Erika was a pro, but Rob hasn't sat in the captain's seat yet, so we'll have to see just how dummy-proof it is the next time out.  Anyway, the weather was gorgeous on Saturday and so we loaded up with snacks and drinks and met our friends for a few hours on the water. Enjoy:

Friesland

After a couple of days touring Amsterdam and a dubious, rainy day-trip to Bruges, which teetered between the unfortunate beer-spilled-on-camera and longer-than-necessary train ride incidents and the always wonderful Belgian chocolate, fries, and beer consumption, we piled into the car and drove north to Friesland.  

Friesland is one of the northernmost provinces of the Netherlands and has a reputation of being home to sturdy, independent, country-folk.  To get there from Amsterdam, we drove across the Afsluitdijk, the 20-mile long, 100-yard wide dyke that closes off the bay from the North Sea.  We first stopped in the old shipping town of Harlingen, which is a beautiful seaside town that reminded Jan of her trips to Maine.  We had a little lunch and walked around a bit before heading inland to the tiny village of Aldeboarn.  

Jan's ancestors on her father's side were Dutch and some of them sailed to America after leaving Aldeboarn.  It was an incredibly small village, with maybe 200 homes, 1 church, and a small elementary school.  The church was built in 1753 and was no doubt the same church her family attended.  The church's graveyard was full of headstones with the name Dijkstra, from which Jan's family became Dykstra.  We were able to enter the church (the preacher was preparing for the next day's service and the organ player was practicing, which was pretty amazing).  Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English, so we weren't able to share with them or explain our trip.  Still, it was very cool to get an idea of how and where Jan's people were from.  Here are some pictures of the interior and exterior of the church:

Return to the Keukenhof

This week we've been enjoying the company of Erika's dad, Jack, and his girlfriend, Jan.  On their second day in town, we headed back to the Keukenhof to take in the tulips and take advantage of the amazing weather. What a difference a couple of weeks makes. While the tulips were in full bloom when Rob's parents were in town, they were almost completely gone from the fields when Erika's parents arrived. The garden was still almost completely full, but a small army of gardeners were pulling the heads off the tulips and trimming the stems, leaving little plots of petal-less stems mixed in with the other flowers. 

Despite the pruning, the garden was still quite beautiful and we enjoyed a long walk through the flowers and statues and Erika and Jan even walked on water. 

We ended the visit with a trip to the Belgian waffle cart, which was alone worth the price of admission. So if you want to catch the tulips next year, plan your visit before the middle of May and you can get your fill of tulips (or Belgian waffles) before they're all gone.

Summertime?

Unbelievably, we've had a week without rain.  Not only that, but it's been absolutely gorgeous out with the weather in the mid-20's.  Oh, for those of you in the midwest like Rob's parents, who just got over 2 feet of snow, we should clarify.  That's the mid-20's Celsius, or 75-80 degrees Fahrenheit.  

To help us celebrate the beautiful spring weather (though we're a little worried this will be our two weeks of summer- reportedly it rained for almost all of May, June, and July last year) our friend, Colleen, stopped by from Portland.  

We spent the weekend biking around town and sitting in the park, reading and sharing some wine and cheese.  It was a very Jane weekend, Jane.  Colleen even earned major cool points by riding sidesaddle on the back of Rob's bike until we borrowed one for her.  Very brave, that Colleen.  

Anyway, here's a little video of the girls biking through town.  Enjoy!

New Photos on Flickr

We've put more pics of our trips to the Keukenhof Flower Garden and the cheese market up on our Flickr page.  Just click the link to the right.  Not everything is labeled yet, but we hope to get to it soon.  Erika took some beautiful pics of the flowers, so enjoy!

The Running of the Cheeses

Every Friday the city of Alkmaar hosts a traditional cheese market.  It's a largely a display for tourists, but they do sell several thousand kilos of cheese (to real purchasers.  You can't buy cheese here unless you get it from one of the side vendors).  In its heyday, the market moved over 300 tons of cheese a day.  After the buyer determines the quality and negotiates his price, the warehousemen load the cheese up on their little runner carts and take it to get weighed.  Once the cheese is weighed and paid for, the warehousemen run the cheese across the market to get loaded onto carts.  The running of the cheeses is the best part:

The cheese is then transferred onto the old-timey cart:

which is then pushed around the corner from the crowd of tourists and the cheese is loaded into giant trucks.  

If you like cheese, it's a perfect little half-day trip from the city.  Lovely Dutch lasses hand out samples and you can pose with a warehouseman with a big wheel of cheese, like Rob's mom did:  

So cheesy.

Tulip Time

We woke up today to gorgeous sunny weather and decided to head off to the Keukenhof, the famous Dutch tulip garden.  We thought it was the perfect day to go see the flowers.  Unfortunately, so did everyone else in Holland.  And France.  And Belgium.  If you, like us, didn't know, May 1st is a big holiday in Europe.  

So, our 30 minute car ride turned into an almost 2 hour car ride, but we still made it and were still excited to see the gardens.  We made our way in and found the first restroom (an unexpected 2 hour drive can do that to you).  No sooner had we entered the building when it started to rain.  It always rains, so we figured it would be no big deal, we could wait it out.  And then it started hailing.  Yeah.  So we hung out with a few of our closest two hundred friends:

But, eventually, the rain would stop for a time and the sun even came out once or twice and we were able to explore the beautiful Keukenhof:

It was incredible.  Of course, though it had rained most of the time we were there, when we got back to the car, the sun returned and the afternoon was as spectacular as our morning had been.  So it goes... Erika took many more amazing photos that we'll try to post into our Flickr account this weekend.

Rat!

Queen's Day

The 30th of April is Queen's Day in the Netherlands.  It's a national holiday in the vein of our 4th of July, only bigger, as the Dutch are less likely to display national pride than we are, unless it's a World Cup year.  For Queen's Day the city hangs flags and everyone dresses in orange in honor of the royal family, which is descended from the House of Orange.  Amsterdam hosts a music festival and opens the large city park to children, who put on little concerts and other shows.  Everyone with a boat parades through the Prinsengracht, one of the main canals that rings the city.  Basically, everybody gets a bunch of booze and hits the boats.  

Rob's parents are in town and a couple of our friends parked their boats on the canal so we could watch the parade float by.  

We had brunch in the morning at a friend's house, fought our way through the throng of people to the boats and then took it all in.  We had a great time, but probably not as good as this guy: