Happy Monday Night From Amsterdam -
A few more idle thoughts before we wrap up our quick trip to Amsterdam. We hit some of the tourist stops (ha!) in Paris and couldn’t help but notice the high number of Japanese tourists. Geez, they’re a tough group. I’ve never been bumped and pushed so much. They aren’t the least bit phased by anything you might do back. I guess those crowds in Japan harden folks and pushing and shoving is just routine in daily life. Switching gears, I noted that the big cities between Paris and Amsterdam weren’t that impressive, at least from the limited view you get from the rails. I followed my own advice and “looked it up”. Antwerp, which looked modern, was totally destroyed in World War II, so it has to be fairly modern. Same thing with Cologne, Germany, which I had on our itinerary until I saw a photo of Cologne at the end of the war and there wasn’t anything there but debris.
Day #8 December 29 and Day #9 December 30 -
We’re at the very end of the day (#9 on the trip). We added dinner, which made us even more fond of Amsterdam. We were lucky to select a reasonably priced hotel (that we like) and discover the location is great, which is especially tough to do when you’re looking at hundreds of hotels on line. Our difficulty is having four people and European hotels basically do not have rooms with two double or two queen beds. Getting one room for four people is tough and having to buy two rooms really gets cost prohibitive.
Turning to the photos, we grabbed some Amsterdam scenes while we were out today. We also caught some evening scenes, trying to show the huge number of pedestrians out on a rainy Monday evening and the tight quarters within the center city. The Christmas food shacks were located in a square, which was surrounded by retail, including a number of restaurants, plus a small ice rink. It was all about atmosphere (and quickly moving trams doing everything but running people over).
Marz had seen “a cute little restaurant on the corner” when we were walking around last night. The kids wanted to stay in again tonight, so we went to this 12 table bar and restaurant – De Staalmeesters at 127 Kloveniersburgwal. It was loaded with atmosphere and had the feel of the nicest tiny little restaurants in New York City or Boston. We couldn’t help but comment on the vast number of restaurants that we were excited about going to. Fortunately, we were very pleased with our (Marlene’s) selection. We sat down and were greeted with two Barry White songs, a Tina Tunrer song, and then a Four Tops song. Later we heard Mary Wells and “My Guy”, to say nothing of a Smokey Robinson song. The atmosphere made it such that even average food would be good enough. Marlene opened the menu and saw nachos for the first time in Europe. So, that was a no brainer – and they were good. She had “farm chicken”, which was a small chicken (the taste I had was very good). I went with cheese fondue and could not have been more pleased.
On the way back to the hotel we went through Rembrandt Square for the second evening running. There’s some life in the old square and eateries everywhere. We were there because we were picking up some dinner for the kids. In a couple of block stretch we saw two small casinos, an automat (see photo --- can you say NYC in the early 1950s?), an old movie theatre (see photo) and a hamburger joint with “Irish meat” burgers, “Angus meat” burgers and “Japanese Wagyu meat” burgers. I’m sticking with my NO BEEF policy, but I’m getting my interest up, especially looking into the windows of the many Argentinian steak houses here in Amsterdam. By the way, the other day in Paris I spoke with the woman in the small American grocery store where I had the can of A&W root beer. I asked her about getting American beef into France and she said it was very difficult. To her knowledge the only way was to have beef shipped from the U.S. to Belgium (in the form of the entire animal) and then get it into France, but she kept saying it was very tricky. Not that I’ve seen Japanese beef and I assume top Argentinian beef, I can’t help but wonder what’s up with the French. One thing about the French is clear – they like the way things are there. We sat at dinner and wondered how the French could see Americans and Dutch (and we assume many other people) keep stores open all day, have restaurants with menus featuring a large variety of dishes, have residences that aren’t surrounded by high barriers, and have windows that don’t have shutters that are closed more often than not? They like it the way it is, even though some French talk about the fact their country is behind the developing curve.
Another point of clarification. The French government took action today on a tax matter. I need explain what they did, as it will correct a previous statement I made. Today the French government approved a 75% tax on employers that pay an employee more than one million euros ($1.35 million US) per year. The employee gets the one million and pays his tax. The employer than pays to the government 75% of the total gross salary paid to the employee. This has French soccer teams in an uproar as they have all sorts of players making over one million euros per season, and having to pay the salary plus an additional amount of 75% of the salary to the government isn’t working for them.
Taking the German “ICE” train to Dusseldorf tomorrow. We’ll see what New Years Eve looks like in Germany.
The Wilsons
