That’s the view from our apartment window today – Awesome! Today was decent. We saw some sights, ate some food, and started to explore Amsterdam.
I’ll be honest though, the day started off pretty rough. I feel like most blogs paint everything in some perfect rosy light – I’m not planning on doing that. After yesterday’s excitement with the flight and the walking and the eating, we were tired! So we ended up sleeping until the afternoon and feeling awkwardly guilty about it the whole time.
When we finally did crawl out of bed, we got ourselves back to Centraal Station to do Rick Steves’ “Amsterdam City Walk” up Damrak street, through Dam Square, Spui Square and Leiden Square. We have been curiously fascinated with Rick Steves for years; watching his videos and reading his travel books over and over again, wondering if we would ever get out there and do that. Well, here we are in the middle of Amsterdam wandering around just like Rick has taught us, and it feels pretty “dam” good!
We walked down the busy Damrak street, saw the Dam Square monument, the Royal Palace, and did some souvenir shopping.
We stopped to eat some friets (French fries in a cone, covered in a thick mayonnaise sauce) from a little place off Spui Square. It was nice to sit and take in the all of the activity around us.
I looked at some leaning buildings.
The walk ended in Leidseplein where we decided to find some dinner. After being beckoned by numerous mater de’s from the touristy alleyways, we found a nice little eatery tucked back in a corner. It had a little chalkboard menu and perfect outdoor seating… but we didn’t eat there… I decided it was probably too expensive and wouldn’t be right – so we kept looking. Except that now we were getting hungrier and the wind was picking up and it was getting later. I started to panic a little, torn between spending too much on a meal and falling for the tourist restaurant trap. I didn’t know what to do – the h’anger (hunger anger) was setting in and we needed to eat… fast!
We settled on some place called “Players”. It was expensive, the service was weird and slow (even by Dutch standards), the food was gross and to top it off, the burger we ordered had a feather in it. So this experience has led me to develop a general rule on eating out – research first. With the power of Yelp reviews and a quick internet search, I’ve got no excuse in not knowing where to find some good eats at the right price with the right atmosphere! Lesson learned.
We finished off the night with a nice stroll through Leidseplein on our way back to the apartment. A sluggish start to a decent day, with a disappointing dinner and a really nice walk through Amsterdam – I guess that’s how we are doing this travel thing!
