Today was a long, but really fun day. After catching the bus into downtown, we walked the Main Street of Amsterdam: Damrak. It was full of souvenir shops, fast food joints and clothing stores, along with the two best ideas I’ve ever seen. Little stores full of vending machines they put cheap put freshly made food into and places where you can buy a paper cone full of fresh french fries covered in a sauce of your choosing. So cool.

We then boarded our bus for a 5 and a half hour tour of some iconic, extremely tourist-y areas. They first took us to a small – well, they called it a village, but nobody lived there and it was just tourist stores. But along the bank of the canal were four or five actual windmills. Now, I’d love to show you pictures, but the internet today is even worse than yesterday, which I didn’t realize was possible. The windmills were are black and green with white and orange sails on the arms. They were big too. Easily three stories, not including the spinning arms. The one we climbed up the inside of was actually in use, grinding powder for paint pigments. After a swing through the handmade chocolate shop, we attempted a family selfie in front of the windmills and got back on the bus.


We were dropped off in a costal town and taken to a cheese factory, where they told us how they make cheese. But as we’ve all been to Tilamook more times than we can count, it was a little boring. Afterwards they let us raid the adjacent cheese store (as I’m eating some right now, I can tell you that it is very good) and then set us loose on the road in front of the bay to find ourselves dinner and do a little shopping. None of us wanted to sit down in a restaurant, so we hit the street food again. While mom and Michael got regular dinner food, me and dad decided we weren’t hungry enough for that and wandered over to a waffle stand. All I’m going to say is yum.

Then we got on a ferry and trundled across the bay to the quaintest of quaint sea-side villages to ever exist. It was about 6:30 and all the shops were closed. In order to get to our destination, we had to walk through narrow brick streets between buildings, over canals, past several backyards, and one old man who leaned out his door with a cigar to watch the tourists wander past. As soon as the houses ended, the fields began- full of sheep and cows.

After making our way through the village, we entered the traditional wooden shoe factory. A worker demonstrated how they make clogs with a monologue full of bad jokes, then invited us to try on sample clogs in all their sizes to see what fit. In wooden shoe sizes, my feet are less than half the size of my dad’s, even though we aren’t nearly that far apart in normal shoes. We didn’t buy any though, as one pair for the boys would fill up a backpack on their own.

And then the bus took us back, talking about how they have to constantly drain the land to keep it from turning back into marshes and teaching us Dutch which sort of sounds like a cat throwing up (no offense if any Dutch people are reading this for some reason…)

All in all a very intensely tourist oriented day.

Every day I appreciate being short even more. I don’t bang my head on any of the “low” ceilings, I can sit in seats without banging my knees on the wall/seat/person in front of me (even though my feet don’t entirely hit the floor…)
But it does make life easier.

The rest of our time in Amsterdam will be fairly laid back. Actually, the rest of our trip will be. We’re not intense travelers. We take the hop on hop off bus in Amsterdam tomorrow, which has only one loop instead of four and is an hour long as opposed to two hours if traffic is decent. We’ll be stopping by the Van Gogh museum, Heineken store, and diamond something or other. Great word choice, I know.

… I’ll let myself out. Goodnight.