Yesterday we woke up fairly early (9am, that's fairly early, right??) and went down for breakfast. Our plan for the day was to travel in a big circle hitting most of the major sites around town, starting with the "Westerwick" tower, near Anne Frank's house.
There was only one hitch in our master plan....neither of us can read a map.
In a moment of directional brilliance, I decided that instead of following the map, we could simply look at the tower in the distance and head that way. Unfortunately, as soon as we crossed the street, the tower was no longer in view!
So, we didn't quite make a big circle around town; it was more of a series of zigzags, paths and random wanderings around town. Ashley did start to get the hang of the map, though, and we ended up seeing most of the sites we intended to. We never got to that tower, though!!!
We saw the Dam Square (Amsterdam's main square with lots of street perfomers), a church adjacent to the Dam square (not sure which one!), the Old Kerk (Amsterdam's oldest church), the New Kerk (the newer one, I guess?), historic Jordaan, the red light district, countless canals, what we assumed to be the Asian district of town, and many, many "coffee shops." We also stumbled upon the Waterloopein, a massive outdoor flea market (although not as big as the one in Mauritius, nothing can top that one!). They had everything from vintage clothes, to hash lollipops, to jewelry, to bike parts.
After exploring the city for a few hours, we came back to the hotel to rest our feet and take a nap.
Later that evening we went back to the floating flower market to pick up a couple extra souvenirs, and to see it with all the shops open, since many of them were closed when we first went. We also went out in search of dinner. After weighing our options, we stopped at Margarita's Mexican cafe (got to be good, right!?). Our verdict on Dutch Mexican food is that it was.....interesting. But not bad. Definitely not an Alicia's or Ted's, though. Ashley had empanadas, or as I like to call them, "Dutch-Mexican eggrolls." I had the vegetarian taco combo, which consisted of a corn taco, a bean taco, and an avocado taco, but which should have been called a cheesy corn thing, a giant nacho, and grass-flavored guacamole taco. The first two items were actually pretty good, though!
Anyway, that pretty much sums up our second day in Amsterdam! We'll post about today later on tonight.
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