The next day was a bit of a food day for us, we had decided to get stroopwafel for breakfast however the bakery we had scoped out the day before wasn't open yet. Improvising we found this bakery down the street, with very nice pain au chocolat and a rather delicious sticky caramel bun. That wasn't even the best part though!
This delightful bakery was also selling pots of different types of spread, from apricot to chocolate to white chocolate. We spontaneously bought a jar of white chocolate paste, which we soon discovered tasted slightly like raw chocolate chippie dough - we forwent bread in favour of spoons. My favourite moment however was sitting on the metro on the way back to the campsite that night (all our adventures seemed to happen on the metro!) with our shopping at our feet, when the jar of white chocoalte must have rolled out, and the girl opposite us suddenly piped up in a thick Aussie accent to say 'excuse me, you've dropped your...paste' with obvious confusion as to what to call this strange white pottle.
Focaccia bread from the breakfast bakery in hand, we stopped by this amazingly named 'Winkel' cafe to pick up apple cake and then headed to the park for lunch.
The bar Eijlders called to us from the pages of Lonely Planet, so we obliged. Used in the 1940s as a meeting place for local artists who disagreed with the nazi regime and refused to adhere to their propaganda, this bar has long been politized. Now, it is a dark and cosy place, lit by dim lights and candles, and serving delicous beer and the best bitterballen I tried in the Netherlands. I had as usual taken a random stab at the beer menu and picked one I didn't recoginze. The barkeep quickly came back to tell me he didn't have that exact one, but he had the same type but better! I happily agreed, and it was just as delicous as promised. As we were taking to the kindly barman and lamenting the number of tourists in Amsterdam (hypocritical I know) he told us during the five minute walk between the bar and his home, sometimes he hears no Dutch at all on the street! To me, that shows perfectly how touristy Amsterdam has become. Quite sad really.
Old buildings on our wanderings. During our travels to see the old houses and streets of the city, we were approached by a Canadian asking directions to a McDonald's for wifi. After regretfully telling him that for some stupid reason McDonald's in Amsterdam had no wifi, we struck up conversation generally about where we were going and so on. Eventually he wandered off on the hunt for 'space cakes'.
The Archives of Amsterdam was another building I was looking forward to; for one thing it was free, for another it contains the records of the city through written history. The downside was the descriptions were all in Dutch, the upside was the English-subtitled short film that was playing! Concentrating on Amsterdam and it's colourful political past, it traced the movement 'Provo' that occurred in Amsterdam in the mid 1960s which focused on provoking authorities with non violent protests. It centred on anti smoking protests as well as the ban-the-bomb movement. It was disbanded at the end of the 1960s but soon followed by the hippie movement. The stir that it caused in Amsterdam was something I had never known about and found very interesting.
The entrance to the archive itself was through a bank vault which I thought was pretty damn cool.
The records of the city. Apparently there is a police report somewhere here documenting that an eight year old Anne Frank's bike was stolen, but we unfortunately couldn't find it.
The building itself was in a cool Art Deco style which made the displays all the more interesting! The outside was rather geometric also, and had the great name of 'De Bazil' (after the architect).
De Pieper was the name of this interesting pub, built in the 1600s, it suprisngly didn't show it's age too much and I would never have guessed the date if I hadn't already known (although the rather vertical winding staircase to the bathroom did give it away a little). Here I was able to have my favourite beer - La Chouffe - on tap!
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