Adventures after Retirement

Today started off cloudy and cool with a threat of rain, typical Amsterdam weather for this time of year, so we packed up the umbrellas and put on the raincoats and went to do some exploring.

Picture of the Eye museum by our apartment. Beautiful wildflowers planted nearby.  You can see the grey start to the day.

We got back on the tram, having found it to be a convenient and inexpensive way to save a few steps during the day and allow us to cover more ground.  We went back to museum area with the intention of walking over to an area known for stores with antiques and collectibles.  After stopping for coffee, we found the area we were looking for and it was so fun and interesting.  We went in one store that had a number of hand-painted Dutch tiles dating back to the early 1600’s for sale.  They also had some very fine small porcelain vases and a number of decorative items.  Beautiful things to see and they were very gracious allowing us to look and giving us information about the items we were interested in.

We stopped for lunch at a small restaurant and I ordered a sandwich that seemed as Dutch as possible : It was Dutch cheese with apple syrup, greens, balsamic vinegar and walnuts.  WoW! It was delicious and I am going to do my best to try to recreate that at home although I’m not sure where I can find apple syrup.

We went back to the Dam area and poked around the shops again, we found the red light district and walked through.  It is interestingly unsexy to me, as Jack said “Just a bunch of women standing around in their underwear”.  Many were on their cell phones, a sign of the times I guess.  It was 4 or so in the afternoon so that had an effect on the ambience, I’m sure.

We continued to stroll with a stop for a late afternoon beer and then made our way over to the area where we had a reservation for dinner tonight at Max’s the Indonesian restaurant that we booked last night.  Turned out to be the right choice.  This was our best meal in Amsterdam so far and last night was pretty good.

I had a grilled asparagus and goat cheese salad to start and Jack had scallops in a cream sauce.  For main dishes (seen above), I had the sea bass cooked in a banana leaf in the foreground and Jack got mushroom and asparagus in a flaky pastry package with a mushroom cream sauce.  We had a bottle of white wine that they recommended to go with this food which is on the spicy side.  It was delicious, a bit sweet but not too much.

For dessert, they recommended the banana pie with coconut cream ice cream and they steered us right. It was as good as it looks.

We walked back to the ferry and took the right one tonight so we got home and gladly put our feet up after many miles today.