On Friday afternoon we were lounging below deck on a 75 minute whistle-stop canal tour of the city ,when our tour-guide described Amsterdam as a ‘peeled onion , cut in half lengthways- with the streets and canals being those individual layers’ . I reckon we walked every dam bit of that onion . We didn’t stop – up hill down dale ( except it’s flat ). We saw women who had forgotten to get dressed properly and then forgot to close their curtains . We saw more flamingoes than we saw in lake Nakuru . We ate like kings ( Willem ) and old -queens ( Beatrix ) .As well as dining in an amazing traditional Dutch restaurant ( best steak and gravy we have ever had ) plus an a la Turkish one and also going across the sea to have cheese-fondue, where some of the SOC and jacob and Florence and Ryan celebrated Rosie’s birthday last year, we ate bitterballen, patat and satay sauce and kibbeling and tartare sauce . We sailed back across the sea to ‘The Eye ‘, the new ultra modern museum of film and saw a Peter Forgacs exhibition. We went and gawped in amazement at De Ateliers and Jacob’s studio .It is so big , I reckon you could land a small plane in there .We had dominoes tournaments ( I’m about 6 euros up ) Then on our last night we found the same little Irish bar ,Mulligans, that John and I went to 10 years ago and watched Ireland get slaughtered by Australia , which didn’t seem to dampen anybodies spirits when the band came on .It was more a case of diddly fiddly diddly-dee, and less of the clog-dancing .
I love a city break – especially when Jacob or Florence live there