We had a nice day today. The pace seems to be a little bit slower on a Sunday.
We walked to a place where we could take a canal boat tour. It is a really tourist-y thing to do, but we thought it would help give Patricia (and I, a little bit) a sense of layout of the city. It was a good tour and we saw quite a few canals and buildings. I hadn’t thought of it before, but taking pictures from a small tour boat on a canal presents some interesting “opportunities.” For one thing, everything is above you.
For another thing, the boat my rock or you may get funny angles for your pictures. That is all by way of making excuses for the quality—and scarcity—of pictures from the tour.
The tour not only took us on many canals, but also took us into the Amsterdam harbor, which I had never seen before. We came back down the Amstel and as we passed the Intercontinental the tour guide pointed it out and said what a nice place it was. We agree.
After the tour, we walked from near the museums to the central square called the Dam. Lots of small shops and stores on the way but Patricia only stopped in a couple of them. I am sure she was humoring me. We found the Flower Market, which was not as large as I thought it would be but it did indeed have lots of flowers, plants, and seeds. It was really crowded with a mix of 50%-50% tourists and locals if I could go by language. Between the crowds and the bicycles, we had to keep our heads on a swivel.
From Dam Square, we walked back to the hotel and I made only one minor navigational error from which we recovered quickly. But Patricia did ask “How much further” a few times because it was a long walk After all the walking we rewarded ourselves with another hour of sitting by the Amstel with some wine and cheese We figured it would be quite a while before we would be able to do that again.
We ate in tonight since we had to get packed. We have to leave fairly early—about 6:00 am—for the airport to catch our flight to Casablanca. We hope our travel goes as well as it did on Thursday
We enjoyed our short stay in Amsterdam and I think that Patricia can now understand why I like the city.