Amsterdam was our next stopping point, and we spent a good five days there. Amsterdam was busy, tourist filled, and smelled like marajuana. It was also full of interesting museums, cobbled streets and pretty canals however, which balanced out the negatives. Although I much prefer small towns to big cities, it was still a very enjoyable trip.
We had lunch at a small restaurant simply called Pancakes!
Traditional Dutch pancakes were of course the theme here, and man were they good! Slightly thicker than french crepes, interestingly the toppings (bacon, cheese, mushrooms and capsicum in my case) were cooked into the pancakes rather than placed on top. It was extremely nice and very filling.
The taste I tried of Yannick's one (he continued his chocolate theme) was scrumptious.
Our wandering soon took us to this 14th century Begijnhof that I was interested in seeing as it's the oldest inner courtyard in Amsterdam. Once surrounded by a moat with only one way in or out this secure location was the home of young and unmarrried women who were not nuns but took vows of chastity and lead religious lives of prayer and privacy (however they could leave to marry at any time). It is quite cool that even to this day, only women live here.
A flower market proved to be somewhat disappointing as it mainly involved bulbs -it was the wrong season for flowering and had been advertised as a floating flower market which apparently simply meant buildings backing onto the canal.
The array of plants was quite impressive however, from multi coloured cacti to bulbs for black tulips! Tulips in fact have a long and interesting history, introduced to the Netherlands in the late 1500s they gained popularity until the 1600s saw a movement now known as 'tulipmania' where these bulbs became extremely overpriced, resulting in people selling their land and belongings simply for a few of these precious bulbs. The market eventually collapsed of course, and some argue that this economic downfall affected the Nethelrands for many years afterwards, a medieval economic crisis!
And of course, we wandered many, many canals, some large and industrial, some full of houseboats, and others graced with little bridges and rowboats.
On the metro on the way home we were talked to by two polish guys who seemed high as kites and couldn't stop eating. They demanded to know why we hadn't been to Poland yet, and then upon finding out about our own origins, one of them went on a tangent - although we couldn't quite work out whether he was saying he'd visited New Zealand, he knew someone who had visited New Zealand or simply that he had heard of New Zealand. The only thing he seemed certain of was Marlborough wine.
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