Say 'cheese'

Cheesy title to have on a post about a cheese market, I know.....

Yesterday Victor and I went to visit the kaasmarkt in Gouda. We both like the cheese, and it's mentioned as an attraction to be seen in the Netherlands, so why not check it out?

Well, it's not really much to see, as it turns out. There are wheels of cheese lying around on the ground in front of the town hall, and there are women dressed up as milk maids, or something like that, wearing clogs (OMG!), carrying around wheels of cheese in their arms and posing for photos. There were also horse drawn carts standing around, which I suspect also had wheels of cheese lying around in the back. At some point two men were haggling over the price of the cheese, and they didn't seem to come to an agreement. And, that was pretty much that.

Now, you may say, "but Sarah, what did you expect of a cheese market, other than cheese?". Well, seeing as it's supposed to be this tourist attraction, I had imagined they might've created more of an event around the whole thing. There were other market stalls all around, selling clothes and fish and whatnot, but I can find more interesting markets here in Amsterdam anyway. And I had expected that maybe people would be allowed to sample different varieties of cheese. but not so much. Well, at least I can cross that off my list. And Gouda seems to be quite a charming town, though we didn't see all that much of it during our short stay.

"Decorative" cheeses hanging above the street

Cheese!

Girls carrying cheese!

Cheese chair (children sold separately)

People weighing cheese!

And apparently someone just got married.... :)

Stephen Fry agrees

Yesterday I came across a section in Moab is my Washpot, Stephen Fry's autobiography, which made me think of my last post here:

"I had a terror of insects, moths in particular, horrible scaly moths which flew through open bedroom windows and fluttered about the light bulb as I tried to read. I could not rest or relax in a room which contained a moth. Butterflies were fine during the day, but moths disgusted and terrified me."

I'm not the only one..... ;)

Moth menace

I've never been a great fan of any insects other than butterflies and ladybirds, and I also have a problem with spiders as long as they're not very tiny. It doesn't matter that I know they can't hurt me (in this country anyway) - rationality doesn't factor into it.

Then, last night, as I was sitting comfortably on the couch watching Gordon Ramsay yell at some poor sod whose restaurant was going to shit, I saw something moving up near the lamp, out of the corner of my eye. "It's probably nothing" I thought, as I turned my head and my eyes were confronted with the largest moth I've ever seen. I imagine it to have been the size of my fist, but I am most likely exaggerating. I almost froze up with fear, but had enough presence of mind to call for Boyfriend to come rescue me from the winged menace.

Thank goodness for Boyfriend. If I'd had to handle it on my own I'm almost positive I would've thrown up all over the place. Instead I hid bravely under the blanket whilst yelling "take it away, take it away!!".

After Boyfriend captured the fiend in a glass with a magazine over, there was a moment where you could very audibly hear it flapping it's wings inside the glass (involuntary spasms are going down my back as I recollect it). This is the part of the movie that would be made in slow motion, and with every flap of the wings of the moth it would sound like a thousand birds taking flight.


Boyfriend just let it out of the bedroom window and closed the curtain, which naturally left me somewhat apprehensive in regards to whether or not it would manage/want to find it's way back into our home. Thankfully it did not.

Moths are nice, Boyfriend said, they're like butterflies. But they're NOT! They're like the anti-butterfly! Yes, I know technically they are from the same family, but where butterflies are colourful, beautiful, delicate and fragile, moths are fat, hairy, hideously ugly, disgusting, flying lumps.

And I'm damn well going to make sure the curtain is drawn at night from now on!

Eating dos and don'ts

The last week or so has been pretty busy over here, with visits both from the in laws and from old daddy longlegs (my father, that is..), whose legs are not working terribly well anymore. Apart from a social overdose - for someone like me who usually prefers keeping to herself most of the time - there was also a lot of eating out. I was thinking of creating a sort of list of my favourite places to eat here, and also places not to go (of which I only have two yet), but this'll do for a start.

On Tuesday 'Man With Boat' (a friend of Boyfriend's, who doesn't really have a boat, but I believed he did for a long time, so now he is nevertheless 'man with boat') came over, and him, Boyfriend and me all went out to a Mexican restaurant called Cafe Pacifico. They are located in what I like to call the 'gay street' since it has lots of gay bars and gay sex shops. On their web page they claim to make the best Margarita's in town, and even though I've not had a Margarita in every bar/restaurant in Amsterdam (yet...) I do believe they're not far from the truth. In other words, they do make a damn good Margarita! The food is also yummy (though the menu carries little variation), served fast, and relatively inexpensive. And the music playing always has me dancing in my seat.... The combination of all these factors means I can even happily sit through a dinner where Boyfriend and Man With Boat are discussing programming. ;)

On Wednesday the in laws came over for a late birthday celebration for Boyfriend (who's birthday was the 7th, an occasion we incidentally celebrated at a lovely - and slightly pricey - Italian restaurant along the Singel called Casa di David). They were very pleasant and very Dutch. Which is to say they spoke a lot of Dutch, and by the end of the evening my head was spinning from having tried to keep up with all of it. I've no doubt I must've learned something new in the course of the evening though. Aaanyway. For dinner we went to a nice Thai restaurant near here, on the Staalstraat, called Krua Thai. We've been there a few times, but only for special occasions, since it's on the expensive side. They have this really nice white fish in garlic and lemon sauce that I always order, and that I've recently tried to replicate at home with moderate success. I'm also a sucker for the deep fried banana dessert. NOT a good idea if you're on a diet....

On Thursday I saw my dear old dad for the first time in 4 years (WAY too long!). And as is the custom with all our guests, we took him out to Kantijl & de Tijger, as mentioned in a previous post, for Indonesian food. Once again it was a great success. Later in the evening dad and I drank too much wine (something of a theme for his stay here... Irishman, you know. ;)) and reminisced about old times. It was good!...

On Friday we were planning to go for Sushi, since it's one of mine and Boyfriend's favourite things and dad had never tried it. However, our usual sushi restaurant is quite small and it was completely full. We decided to try an "Italian" place nearby. We soon came to regret that decision.... You know it doesn't bode well when you see a dessert menu on the table with the most tacky pictures and descriptions you can imagine, including a pic of grass green ice cream combined with some sort of weird candied ice cream that I'm sorry to say I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture of. The dessert menu also tried to tempt us with real orange ice cream with real orange bits, inside a real orange... Same with lemon and coconut... We had a good laugh about that. Funnily enough, me and dad stopped by an other "Italian" (which in most cases apparently translates to Lebanese, as far as staff/owner is concerned) place on the Damrak on our way to the station. It had the same real lemon and real orange in the dessert menu. I'm happy to report that the pizza at this other place was actually quite nice though.

Real lemon ice cream in real lemon. Quite the rage at "Italian" "restaurants" in Amsterdam, it would seem. I bet you I wouldn't find this on the menu at Casa di David.

A picture of the exterior of the "Italian" place on the Rokin, so you are fairly warned:

Well, when we got our food, it for the most part did leave something to be desired, though some of it was also perfectly adequate. I had some rubbery and tasteless snails for an appetizer, even the garlic butter didn't taste anything. I should've known better than to order snails in a place like that of course, since they're not the easiest thing to prepare. I did however imagine it would be safe to order a pizza - how can an "Italian" place screw up that, right? Well, it was edible, but with a faint and unpleasant aftertaste of mould. The low point of the evening however (which caused much amusement and disbelief) was when we opened a single serving ketchup portion and discovered the ketchup to be dark brown, rather than its usual red. We subsequently opened the second package on the table, with the same result.. Boyfriend dared go where I did not, and tasted a tiny bit of it, saying it tasted old - not surprisingly. On the bright side, it did give us something to laugh about. And I will give them a plus point for having a cat. Some people may not like having cats walking around in the dining room of an eatery, but as mentioned previously I happen to be extremely fond of these little creatures.

Yes, the ketchup was actually this colour...

We had a similar bad eating experience at an "Italian" place in the "gay street" when we wanted to take my friend Marte to Cafe Pacifico but had to make other plans quickly when we discovered that most things on the menu there were incompatible with Marte's lactose intolerance. Which goes to show that nothing good comes of improvising when hungry. At least when you end up in an "Italian" "restaurant".....

After our dining disaster on Friday we decided to have dessert at Häagen-Dazs on the Rembrandtplein, and for the first time we went to sit in the restaurant section in the back. GOOD choice. They had the most mouthwatering selection of combinations of ice creams, pancakes, sauces and fruit you could imagine. And when the food arrived it was at least as good as expected. Obviously not somewhere to go every day, seeing as it must contain about a million calories,but if you love ice cream and want a real treat, then this is the place to go. Although I don't recommend going right after dinner, since I had great trouble getting down the last few bites of the dish below, even though it was delicious:

On Saturday we had been wise enough to make a reservation, and we finally got our sushi. This restaurant is a small and cosy place, in the beginning of an alley leading up from the Rokin, just opposite where the tour boats leave. And for being sushi the prices aren't bad. I also had Unagi (the eel kind, not the state of total awareness) for the first time ever, and it was yummy. I've been daydreaming about it several times since... After our sushi we went across the street to take a candlelight boat tour with (copious amounts of) wine and cheese. Boyfriend and I took a similar tour last year for my birthday, and it has been lovely both times. Particularly recommended for couples.

Dad on the boat

Magere brug by night (and through the glass window of a moving boat).

This post may make it seem like I am a little food obsessed. Apart from that not being terribly far from the truth, I do also hope it may help anyone who comes across it in their search for decent place to eat in Amsterdam...

A little more Rotterdam

Since, like mentioned in the previous post, I spent most of my Rotterdam day in the zoo, I didn't get to see all that much more of the city this time around. I'll have to go back and have a look around one of these days. The thing that sets Rotterdam apart from other Dutch cities I've visited is all the modern architecture and tall buildings. The other Dutch cities I've seen usually consist mostly of the same type of old stone houses. But as you probably know, dear readers, Rotterdam was bombed by the Germans during WWII, so it follows that a lot of the buildings here are of the more modern variety, which makes for an interesting change. I do still think I prefer the older buildings, partly since it's what I've come to associate with this country, but nevertheless Rotterdam is interesting. Here are some pictures of what I've seen so far:

The tallest building in Rotterdam, possibly in the whole of the Netherlands. There was a miniature of this in Madurodam, which was still pretty tall.

Bicycle art. I suppose. It's too big for anyone to actually use anyway.

The famous cube houses, which I'm still very curious about. It seems like such a weird (and inefficient) idea to build houses this way. Apparently you're supposed to be able to go inside one of them and have a look, but it was already late by the time we got there, so further investigations will have to wait for the next visit.

A detail from a weird and interesting sculpture near the cube houses. After some googling I've discovered that it was made in honour of a Dutch Cartoonist called Marten Toonder.

When we were at the train station waiting for my train back to Amsterdam, an old fashioned steam engine showed up on the next track.

If you want to see more of Rotterdam without actually going there, this page is pretty cool: http://www.dakvanrotterdam.nl/index.php?option=com_dvrgmm&category=1&Itemid=38&class=r

You can click your way onto the top of different buildings, and have a look around by dragging the image up, down, left and right with your mouse.

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

(A little bit of a misleading title, since I didn't see any lions or bears, and only one tiger. But I recently re watched the Wizard of Oz....)

Yesterday I went to Rotterdam to visit Victor, and we ended up spending (almost) the whole day in the Blijdorp zoo, which was fun. It's a really nice zoo, where they seem to have done their utmost to create a comfortable and natural environment for the animals and give them space to roam around in (and a chance to hide if they don't feel like being stared at by a bunch of silly humans). It has a large variety of animals, and covers quite a big area. We were there for a little over 5 hours, and by the time the zoo closed we'd covered most of it, if not absolutely every inch. One of the coolest things was the butterfly room, which is the closest I've ever come to the rain forest. It as very warm and full of rain forest/jungle type plants, and there were all sorts of colourful butterflies flying about. The Oceanium with the sea lions and the underwater tunnel was pretty cool too! I also added some animals to my list of animals I'd like to have (whenever I see one I like, I add it to my list...). This list is of course not terribly realistic unless I become extremely wealthy and can keep my own zoo, since most of these animals aren't exactly household pets, but a girl can dream. Among the cutest were the swift foxes, the dik-diks (which I've been wanting to see ever since they were mentioned on an episode of QI), and the fishing cats. The fishing cats had babies, which were so cute my heart just melted. I could've sat there staring at them for hours there they lay sleeping all huddled up together. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a good picture of the fishing cats since they were behind glass, and it was rather dark in there. Here are some other pics though:

Prairie dog, which doesn't look anything like a dog, but which is awfully cute.

Sea lion

Swift foxes, which are quite small and quite adorable.

Flutterbies....

Dik-dik is cute-cute!

Elephants

Camels

Monkey business

Timon (or alternatively, meerkat)

Giraffes

Some kind of antelope.

Madurodam

Madurodam is a theme park made up of miniatures of important buildings/streets/places here in the Netherlands. It's located in Den Haag, and we went to visit on our way back from Delft. It was fun to see, and it was really nicely made, with little people in the streets and little cars and boats actually moving around. Nice eye for detail. It must've taken a long time to make all of these displays. It costs 13,50 euros for adults, but the nice thing is the proceeds (after taxes) go to charity. And it's definitely something that's worth seeing if you're interested in this country. Here are some pictures:

Overview

Miniature parliament in Den Haag

Miniature town hall in Gouda, outside which they have the cheese market that I still want to go visit one of these days. Love that cheese....

Miniature Dam Square. Strange to see a miniature of something so familiar to me. I see this square almost every day.

Miniature Magere Brug, and miniature people on pedal boats.

Miniature red light district.