July 4/5, 2024 (Day 15 & 16): At Sea and Amsterdam
Daniel had big plans for the fourth of July yesterday, considering we would be sailing just outside of England. For weeks leading up to the trip, he posited different ideas from wearing American flag pants to dropping tea over the side of the ship. Instead, he drank tea. Yup, that’s what illness does to one. So, once again, it was a quiet sea day, in which we only complained a couple of times that the ship had made a huge deal out of Canada Day on July 1st, and barely tipped a hat to July 4th. We did, however, make a detour after dinner instead of going straight to sleep – we were told there was going to be silent disco in one of the lounges and wanted to witness it for ourselves.
And there totally was. Everyone who wanted to participate (and there were a lot) picked up a set of headphones on the way in, tuned it to one of three channels, and danced to it silently. Or not so silently – listening to people singing along (out loud) to contrasting songs was hilarious. Even more fascinating, though, almost as a study in human nature, was how many times enough people would switch to the same channel and slowly but surely almost every other person in the room would switch to it as well (you could see what channel they were one by the color of the light on the headphones) as though they couldn’t handle not being part of the crowd even though they couldn’t hear it. We spent far too long just watching them, but it was actually a lot of fun and I’m glad we did something other than just sleep for our last night on board!
It was less fun when we had to get up early today for debarkation. Everyone had to be out of their rooms by 7:30 AM! And, since we are down to only a couple doses of cold meds left, we opted not to take any, so spent the two-ish hours waiting to leave sitting far from anyone else, sniffling, and trying to drink tea and not cough too much. When we finally got off the ship, the line for the taxis was like a mile long. Okay, maybe not a mile, but it felt that way! We had to wait, I think maybe half an hour for the taxi? And then he could only bring us near our hotel, not actually to it, because I guess that part of the road isn’t open to anything but trams, which is fascinating.
Our first glimpse of Amsterdam wasn’t what I expected. I was kind of envisioning quaint, pretty, colorful houses and buildings, flowers everywhere – maybe even strolling minstrels (okay, maybe I’ve seen one too many fairytale-like drawings). My first impression was that everyone was cranky (oh my gosh, so much yelling and honking), the buildings were dingy, and everything was dark. Which might have been influenced by the fact it was a cloudy, rainy day. Also, they were not lying about the amount of bikes everywhere! But the taxi driver, once he got past the initial crush of vehicles trying to get out of the port, zipped up and down and through lanes with a dexterity that was almost frightening, especially when he would go around traffic by taking the tram lanes! But he seemed to always know which way he could go. He also seemed very relieved to drop us off – probably due to the amount of coughing. I can’t blame him.
We were too early to actually check into the hotel, so we dropped our luggage off and headed out in search of more cold medications. Spoiler alert from research I did after we got back to our rooms: the Netherlands don’t have cold meds. At least not the kind we are used to. Apparently one of the active ingredients is considered unsafe so the most you can get without a prescription is something for a sore throat (which we didn’t need), some cough syrup (which did absolutely nothing for me and only worked a tiny bit for Daniel) and some Fisherman’s Friends cough drops. At least that’s all we could find in local stores. I read online that you might have better luck at a pharmacy so we might try to track one of those down. But, as we went in search of meds, we also used the opportunity to start exploring!
My impression of Amsterdam, I must admit, did not improve much. Once I could get over the dark dinginess, the architecture of the buildings was nice, but everywhere we went people were smoking, so I had to hold my breath like half the time to avoid constantly pulling out my inhaler. The canals were pretty, though, and we found one spot that had bikes, flowers, and a beautiful view – far more similar to what I thought Amsterdam would look like. We also found a couple of rubber ducky stores – literally shelves upon shelves of rubber ducks! It was both very funny and fun to look at! But also so expensive. I was not spending 10 euros on a rubber duck.
We ran across a bakery that also offered coffee, which we figured would be safer than a so-called coffee shop since we had no interest in trying Amsterdam’s well-known special coffee, and discovered our first issue. Everything was in Dutch. A lot of the words we could figure out, but some we had no idea what it meant. I figured out pretty quickly, though, that if I used Google lens, it would translate the menu for us, which was pretty cool. We got a couple sandwiches and espressos – and those sandwiches were to die for. My opinion of Amsterdam improved a little.
As we continued walking, we ran across a large square that seemed quite popular with a huge building. Daniel looked up what it was and discovered it was actually the Royal Palace of Amsterdam! We had no idea such a thing existed – it wasn’t on any of the recommended places to see in Amsterdam – and we got more excited when we walked up and realized we could actually tour it for only 12 euros a person. Which, of course, we did. And it was so worth it – the inside was absolutely exquisite. Audio tours came with it, which we also used since we had no clue what anything in the palace was, and the amount of history it relayed to us was amazing. Apparently, the palace was originally built as the town hall, and was used to conduct all business, which is displayed in all the engravings around the building depicting Biblical scenes or gods or goddesses with different meanings to indicate the different uses of the room, such as judgement or bankruptcy or things like that. The audio tour also said that Rembrandt was commissioned to do a painting for the town hall, which was subsequently rejected because they didn’t like it – something about it not displaying the king as powerful enough. Anyway, in the 1800s, Bonaparte made it into a palace after Napoleon made him King of Holland and even after he was defeated, it remained as the royal palace.
On our walk back to the hotel, we picked up some fries that came wrapped in paper with sauce on top – those were also amazing – and stopped by a cheese shop to taste test! Now that I think about it, maybe that was my favorite part. Interestingly, they actually served the cheese with mustard. And the weirdest part is that it was good! Good enough that Daniel and I picked up four rounds of cheese and a four-pack of mustard to go with them. The people there told us the cheese is good for about two weeks on our counter and then another few weeks in the fridge.
By the time we got back to the hotel, we were both pretty miserable though, between the lack of meds, cold, and rain – not to mention the mental strain from trying to avoid being run over by bikes and trams and the smell of weed and smoke pursuing us everywhere, so after a nap, I ran out, passing overfilled restaurants watching soccer, and bought some spicy burgers to eat in the room, where we listened to all of Amsterdam cheering wildly for their soccer team. In another circumstance, it would actually be a lot of fun to be in one of the restaurants watching that kind of enthusiasm – I’ve never heard such cheering! But as it is, we are just hoping we are well enough to actually make our tour tomorrow. (and below is one of the prettiest pictures of Amsterdam we got without all the weed and smoke!)
Forest Idylls 