A'dam

Ok, before I talk about our recent Amsterdam trip, first I have to whinge (complain) a bit: it's the 2nd bank holiday (3 day) weekend this month (yay) that it's been miserable and rainy. I mean, it's like a week away from being June, and I was wearing my heavy wool coat and hat today, and I could see my breath at like 1pm. Global warming, my bum.



But last weekend Hank and I took a spontaneous trip to Amsterdam, land of windmills for a very, very good reason (they have some serious wind). It was such a lovely, laid back city with canals weaving through it. There are bicycles EVERYWHERE. We sadly didn't rent any (I didn't feel I could juggle a bike, camera and map, and one bike crash per year is my limit), but it's definitely the way to travel there. The trams around the city were pretty easy, but mostly we just walked and enjoyed the lovely houses and quiet streets. We spent one day wandering around the city and taking a boat tour of the canals, one day on a trip out to the surrounding area to see the town of Edam (yes, like the cheese but not where cheese is made ironically) and touring working windmills, and another day museum-ing.

Most of the Rijksmuseum seemed to be closed off, but we did see the amazing Rembrandts on display. The Van Gogh museum also had so many pieces of his that I'd never seen even in poster form before, really fabulous stuff.


On a culinary note, we discovered how brilliant Dutch pancakes are. Yuuuuum. If you're ever in London, there's a great place to get some called My Old Dutch, however there's still no comparison with the real deal from the Netherlands.


Ooh, yeah, and they have really good cheese sandwiches in the Netherlands as well.

Pics from Stratford-upon-Avon are up!

Feel free to check 'em out here.

Oft expectation fails, and most oft there.

We had another bank holiday weekend (meaning Monday was a holiday), so Hank, our friend Matt from work and I set off for Shakespeare-land: Stratford-Upon-Avon. (My favorite quote of the day, not to tease Matt too much, was, "So, anyone know what river this is?")

We managed to find a couple of plays that the Royal Shakespeare Company was putting on... there were a couple of requests for "The Seagull" by Checkov (no, not the engineer), and as a bonus: Sir Ian McKellen was in it! So, we doth booked our tickets and doth boarded our 2.5 hour train ride out of London early Saturday morn.

Stratford-Upon-Avon was definitely a different city than I think I'd expected. I didn't read up a lot in the guidebooks before going - mostly we just wanted to wander as we'd done before. But there were very few of the typically Shakespearian-style homes (one of which sat on top of what's now a Pizza Hut... shudder), mostly "high-street" (chain) shops, and everything closed promptly at 5pm. I guess I was expecting something a bit more like Hank and I had found in Canterbury where there were nice lanes to wander down, some independent shops, and perhaps something resembling life after twilight.

The play itself got mixed reviews from the three of us - Matt was the most positive, I was the least positive, and Hank stuck to middle ground. I thought the acting was marvelous - were they acting something I could get interested in, I'm sure it would have been a fabulous experience! The story just never grabbed hold of me.

The rest of the weekend we didn't do much, mainly relaxed. I got a bunch of knitting done - I'm so excited to be working on a project (a sweater, even!) for myself, after finally getting out of the "I owe someone a late xmas/bday/bribe-payment present" cycle. The weather up until this past week had been perfect and lovely, but this weekend the rain and solid gray skies set in firmly. We had a hard time getting motivated to actually want to go outside in it all. Personally I blame Taka & Neko for making napping on the couch all day look like such a tempting option.