Tag: good eats

If you had told me a few months ago that I would enjoy climbing up a narrow brick tower with rickety wooden stairs and ladders, I would have said something like “I know I’m the one with rusty old VW bus… but you’re crazy!”  But sure enough, today we climbed up the Westerkerk bell tower – and it was awesome!

We have been saying that we are going to climb this thing since we got here, but between working and wandering the streets of this crazy city, we just hadn’t gotten around to experiencing Westerkerk.  So today we paid our €7.50 and started our ascent. 

Westerkerk is the tallest church tower in Amsterdam, and was built by the Protestants in the mid 1600’s.  The church itself has a very stark interior, especially compared to some of the other grand Catholic cathedrals I’ve seen.  The tower contains the famous bells that can be heard ringing various melodies and chimes throughout the day.

Going into the church is free, but they make you pay a little cash and go in a tour group of 6 to climb the tower.  Noelle thought the guide was cute… so that was a good start.  The tour was pretty short and simple – he explained a little history of the tower as we stopped on each floor to rest.  The view from the top was amazing!

Heading back down those ladders and stairs was a bit of a challenge, but honestly, after 3 weeks of running up and down the 4 flights of stairs at our apartment, we took these in stride – Success!

We also wandered around the inside of the church.  They say Rembrandt is buried somewhere – I didn’t notice at first, but the entire floor of this place is actually just a bunch of stone graves.  I’m sure they don’t mind the hundreds of people tramping over their face all day long!

[photonav url=http://www.day-tripping.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Westerkerk-Panorama.jpg mode=drag popup=none animate=none position=left container_width=900 container_height=295]

So the tower was awesome, the church was cool, and even the area around Westerkerk is nice.  They’ve got a herring stand, a stand selling yummy frites, usually someone out playing some music.  There’s also the ever present line to get into the Anne Frank house stretching around the block (if you can’t tell already, lines are not my thing (except at D-world, the happiest place on Earth.))  A great church in a great neighborhood!

On a side note, Noelle and I celebrated our six year anniversary this weekend – so of course we found the highest rated Mexican restaurant in town and went straight there.  Los Pilones is actually a Mexican restaurant run by Mexican ex-pats, as opposed to a “Mexican” restaurant run by crazy Europeans who think they can cook but they can’t.  It was cool, the cerveza was cold, the margarita’s were tasty, and the fish tacos were awesome!

It rained a lot today. We stayed in the apartment most of the day, but headed out as the weather cleared in the evening. Check out Noelle’s new instagram account – she’s got some pretty sweet pics of our trip!

We took a nice walk back to the Leidseplein and museum area.  Our goal was to get some dinner and drinks, and visit the Van Gogh museum.Determined not to make the same dinner mistake as a couple nights ago, Noelle found a really cool “brown cafe” called De Zotte in the Leidseplein area.  The brown cafes in Amsterdam used to be (and really still are) the places where the neighborhood residents would gather, smoke their tobacco, and spend hours drinking and eating.  Well thats pretty much what we did at De Zotte! It was cool, we got there early and had some really good beer.  We eventually ordered some bread and cheese and the special of the day.  It was a chicken plate that came with some tasty sauce, fries, and salad – awesome!After stuffing ourselves and getting just about wasted drunk, we ambled on towards the Van Gogh museum.  An older American couple came up and asked me how to get there – I sort of pointed in my half-drunken stupor and said something like “it’s over there, we can goin together.”  That marks the third set of people to come up to us and ask for directions since we’ve been here. I guess we must look like we know where we’ve been and where we are headed!

Noelle told me to stand by the I Amsterdam sign and she would take a “special” picture… what a comedian! When we finally did make it to the museum, it was already almost 8PM, and we decided the line was just too long.  Instead we strolled along the canal roads back to the apartment to call it a night.  This brings me to another key tenet of our travel philosophy so far: we travel slow and steady to give time for life to happen. If we don’t want to wait in line at the Van Gogh museum, we don’t have to – we’ll be back next week.  Tonight we had a great time in Leidseplein, and I’m really looking forward to what else we can discover on this trip!

This trip started off on a great foot when our first connecting flight was canceled. Ok, no worries, we got re-booked on a later flight that still allowed us to get the same international flight from DC. Then, one of the wheels on Noelle’s carry-on bag fell off on the gangway. No worries, I scooped it up and just kept walking – we got this! Finally, we stepped off the plane in Schiphol full of anticipation and excitement; we made it to Amsterdam!

After fumbling around with baggage, and getting on the wrong platform, we found the train to Centraal Station.  From there we took a tram out to the Jordaan neighborhood where we will be staying for the next two months.  We dropped our bags and went out to explore.

Visited Sara’s Pancake House, and had a very tasty little breakfast. The little pancakes might have cost double the equivalent meal in the US, but hey they’re worth it right?!

We soon found a few other classic Amsterdam sights like Westerkerk, the Anne Frank House (although we’ve already been there and aren’t too keen on waiting in line!), and of course the cheese museum!

After checking in to our apartment and taking a much needed shower + nap, we headed back out to explore the immediate neighborhood.  Our first overall impressions are that the place we are renting is awesome, the people in the neighborhood are friendly, and we will have everything we need to make this an amazing experience.  To prove that point, we were able to make a great first dinner to cap off an amazing first day – day 2 here we come!