Amsterdam House boats

Mothers restaurant Amsterdam

Foodhallen Amsterdam

More house (million euros +) boats Amsterdam

Canal Houses (2million euros +) in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Flower market Amsterdam

Services connection Houseboat Amsterdam

Amsterdam

We’ve been a bit quiet here, mostly because of awful internet access. The Airbnb place we stayed in in Wormerveer near Amsterdam was marketed as a ‘business listing’, but their wifi was terrible. We complained a few times, they claimed that no one else had ever complained, they turned the router off and then on again and so it went on.

It’s the last day of our trip today, we’re starting the long journey home from Amsterdam tonight. We have about 20 hours in Dubai between flights and we’ll get out and do some stuff, then do another overnight flight home to ADL.

We were lucky that we had lovely weather for a couple of days in Amsterdam, not too cold with blue sky and sunshine. We drove into the centre of AMS on Tuesday and walked and walked and walked. Greg had done some research and paid EU10 to park in a parking station for the day – a bargain as everywhere in the city charges EU5 per hour. I’d noticed when we used a parking station in Rotterdam that our car’s number plate was on the ticket we took out of the machine … and that’s how it all works. Number place recognition. So we drove into the AMS parking station, then when we got to the boom gate to leave, it just magically opened up for us after the number plate had been scanned.

We spent the day walking along the canals and streets and lanes. I had read about a colourful street, Wijdesteeg, so we went to find it, but it’s been demolished! It had been taken and ‘decorated’ over by squatters a few decades ago and I guess someone decided it was time it all went. There were other tourists standing around looking puzzled when we were there, so the tour guides haven’t caught up with the news that it’s gone.

Next day we drove to Haarlem, west of AMS. Lovely old town square and we sat on the edge of a canal and ate lunch in the sun, then drove to Edam, north east of AMS, because …. cheese!

Thursday we had a ‘home day’. Greg went to try and find a laundromat, then we did a big walk along the Zaans River and streets near the apartment, and walked through Wilhelmina Park, where there were more hints that Spring is on its way. All the snow from last weekend has now melted, and we don’t need to worry about slipping on icy footpaths.

Yesterday, Friday, we drove across the whole country  – 140kms,  it took just over 90 minutes! – to Nijmegen, to catch up with our favourite Dutch people, Mickey and Jaap. We had dinner at their place and caught up on each others’ lives since we last saw each other a few years ago. I can’t think of a nicer way to finish our holiday.

Applebol – cooked cored apple covered in puff pastry

Lunch on the canal in Haarlem

At the Foodhallen with Bitterballen

Dunkirk/ French: Dunkerque / Dutch: Duinkerke means ‘church in the dunes’ and it is the world’s northernmost French speaking city, with a population of around 100,000. It’s 10kms from the French/Belgian border. We headed straight to the beach for a look and a photo or 2. In summer it would be a seething mass of holiday-makers, but there were just a few well-rugged up people walking and one crazy wetsuit-clad person swimming in the surf. We spent 20 minutes or so there, and he was in the water the whole time. Then we drove to the museum, which is only open from April to September, and on a bit further to East Mole, the long stone and concrete breakwater to the south of the beach where nearly 200,000 troops embarked on ships in late May-early June 1940. More info about Dunkirk here, and the 1940 evacuation here

There is so much war history in the area, and also in Belgium, and it’s a hot destination for war history buffs. We could have spent days or probably even weeks visiting places and museums, but it’s not really our ‘thing’ so we just visited one more place. And that was thanks to a movie we stumbled into by mistake a few years ago. We got free tickets to see The Last Station and went into the wrong cinema and saw Beneath Hill 60 instead. We did eventually watch The Last Station and thought that Beneath Hill 60 was a much better movie. So we drove to Ieper / Ypres, then a few kms out of town to Hill 60, which was originally created when the railway line was built in the mid-19th century. You can read more about it in the Wikipedia link above, and here, but one thing that really amazed me was how little distance there was between the 1915 German front line and the British front line, which both run through the boardwalk on Hill 60. There’s barely 30 metres of ‘no man’s land’ between them!

While we were in Dunkirk, we stopped in at a large French supermarket, can’t remember the name, but it wasn’t a Carrefour. We bought essentials – baguettes, apple tarts and far too much French butter (but really, it’s probably one of those things that one can never have ‘too much’ of), and a couple of other things just because it was my birthday the next day and I was going to cook what I wanted to eat rather than eat out. Cocquilles St Jacques, and raclette cheese. The raclette was sort-of influenced by popular culture. One of the first books I read all by myself after learning to read and getting beyond learn-to-read books was Johanna Spyri’s Heidi. When Heidi goes to live with her grandfather, he put a wheel of cheese by the fire and when it had melted, he put slices of the melty cheese on boiled potatoes or bread or both. Almost 50 years later, I finally got to try it for myself

It started snowing on Friday night, and we woke up to it still snowing and quite a lot of snow still on the ground on Saturday morning. Definitely a memorable birthday, this one, my first snowy birthday. We went to an outdoor market in a square in Brugge. The square is being renovated, so there are piles of cobble stones and dirt, but I’m sure it will be looking good by summer. The market sold mostly clothes and food, and lots of locals were there doing their food shopping. There were at least 6 huge stalls selling rotisserie chickens, roast potatoes and prepared meals. I wanted to buy everything, but settled for a bag of roast potatoes to take home and have with the raclette for lunch. There was a young man selling mini Belgian waffles, so we had a few of them too.

My birthday dinner was probably a bit strange to everyone else, but we were happy … I ate all 4 serves of the frozen Cocquilles St Jacques on the shell that we’d bought in France, Greg ate rhubarb & raspberry crumble and we drank Belgian beers – Belle-Vue Kriek Extra, a fruit beer brewed with cherries. Gorgeous colour, and it tasted good too.

Deserted Dunkirk beaches

The remains of East Mole Dunkirk Harbour

The front line at Hill 60

Memorial to Australian Tunnellers at Hill 60. The bullet holes happened during WW2

The two opposing front lines at Hill 60. Judy is standing on the German front line marker

Once again we’re staying a few kms out of the city centre, on a property just outside Zedelgem. It was built in the 1930s and the original owners ran it as a hobby farm. The current owners seem to be very keen gardeners, although there’s not much happening in the garden at the moment. When we drove along the road towards the house, we knew we had found the right place because our hosts had a blackboard sign out which read ‘Welcome Judy and Greg’. That was a nice touch, and I wish more hosts would do it – finding some Airbnb places can be a major pain.

It snowed for an hour or so yesterday morning. Big, fat snowflakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground, but it was pretty to watch. We drove to the Brugge central railway carpark in the afternoon, then walked into the old town centre. Not much activity, not many people around, but I’m sure it is a popular place to be when the weather improves. I had worn the wrong glasses and couldn’t see very far in the distance, but it was foggy all day and not really possible to see very far in the distance anyway. We sought refuge in a chip shop on the town square and shared groot frienten and a frikendel large hot chips and a sausage, sitting upstairs to warm up and look out at what was happening in the square.

We walked back to the car through side streets and along the canal and I spotted the first hint that Spring might make an appearance soon – a drift of tiny snowdrop flowers just starting to flower, and some other bulb just poking some leaves up on another grassy bank. But otherwise it’s very, very wintery here still.

Our Welcome sign at the AirBnB

Why add chocolate sprinkles to your bread when you can add slabs of chocolate?

The choices in chocolate sprinkles in Belgium for your bread

Brugge tower town square

Brugge town square

Brugge canal

Brugge curved streets

groot frienten and a frikendel

We went back into Rotterdam on Sunday, so that we could have a walk around the centre of town, find some lunch and have a look at some of the interesting buildings that this city is famous for. We parked in the Markthal carpark again and headed to the shopping mall nearby. Fine day, but cold, and this time we’d brought our gloves and hats, so it was quite nice to walk in the 7C weather. It was the final day of the Rotterdam International Film Festival and we wandered into the Imax theatre, but they were just showing non-Imax films for the festival, so we kept on walking … to the beautiful modern Central Station, then to Witte de Withstraat, a street full of restaurants, nightclubs and a ‘coffeeshop’ or two or three. Then back to the Markthal, with a few stops to look at the 2-level bike parking near the metro station, and the Cube House and the outside of the Markthal, and a visit to one of the many bakeries inside for afternoon tea. This article has some great photos of the Markthal.

We drove to the Hook of Holland yesterday to have a look at the Maeslantkering, the storm surge barrier on the imaginary dividing line between the Nieuwe Waterweg waterway located at Hoek van Holland and the river Scheur, and one of the largest moveable objects in the world. Then to the coast to look at the beach and the North Sea. Not many people around on a chilly February day, but if the size of the carpark is anything to go by, it’s a popular place in summer.

And then on to Gouda, which is a bit north-east of where we’re staying. Greg did a very impressive parallel park along one of the canals, and we walked to the town centre to find … cheese! Of course. We tried a lot of different cheeses in one cheese shop and bought some smoked gouda and some farmers cheese with holes.

Central Station Rotterdam

Light-ship Rotterdam Harbour

Two storey bike racks at Rotterdam Metro Train Station

Cube Houses Rotterdam

Outside Rotterdam Markthal

Drying our washing in the AirBnB barn

Boat repair yard on the Canal

Driving to Hook of Holland we saw dozens and dozens of large greenhouses covering many acres

Maeslantkering, the storm surge barrier

Gouda Town Hall

Gouda Square

careful parallel parking in Gouda

Behind the property is a canal, the Delftse Schie, across the canal is the Hoftwijk Crematorium, and in front of the property are more farmhouses and fat, woolly sheep. To get here, we have to drive along a single lane road for a few kms. The road is also used by cyclists, walkers and horseriders, but there are small ‘pullouts’ every half km or so for cars to pass each other, no one is going fast and it all just sort of works. We’re close to Rotterdam Airport and can hear the planes taking off.

Yesterday, Saturday, we visited Delft and Rotterdam. There’s a Saturday flea market in Delft, in the streets around the old town square, so we went to have a wander and a look. First stall we spotted was selling stroopwafel and other sweet Dutch treats, but rather than jump right in and buy some, we walked for a few blocks to build up an appetite. Oh, the cheese shops! and the flower shops! and the smallgoods! Some of our Facebook friends are either Dutch, have Dutch relatives or have visited the Netherlands and liked the food,  and we seem to have crowdsourced lots of recommendations on what to eat while we’re here. We popped into a bakery and tried a couple of sausage rolls – one with minced meat, the other with sausage. We ate half of each one, then swapped.

We didn’t find anywhere else selling stroopwafels, so went back to the stall and got a Super stroopwafel each, hot off the griddle, and a pack of smaller ones to take home. 2 layers of thin waffle with syrup spread between them. Delicious!

Then we headed to Rotterdam. Greg had read about the Fenix Food Factory in an old warehouse on the south bank of the Nieuwe Maas River, so we went to find some lunch. Great variety – Moroccan, Asian, bakery, cider, microbrewery, waffles, cheese. We had pork belly rolls from the Asian stall and they were delicious. This area of Rotterdam looks like it is being trendified, but I imagine in the not-too-distant past it probably went through a long phase of being the dodgy part of town. Just across a footbridge is the New York Hotel which is located in former head office of the Holland America Line. The HAL moved its head office to Seattle in the 1970s, and the hotel was opened in the early 1990s

We drove and parked in the Markt carpark in the Rotterdam CBD, so we could have a look at the Rotterdam Markthal  Market Hall, a new building which opened in 2014. It has amazing artwork on its arched roof, and in addition to the food stalls and other shops on the ground floor, it houses offices, apartments and the city’s largest underground carpark. We found a stall selling hot chips friet in paper cones, so we shared a large one and watched the chips being cut from whole, peeled potatoes while we ate.

There’s a well-stocked kitchen shop in the Markt and we wandered around it for a while and  found an electrical brand we had never heard of before – Expressions of Australia. There was an interesting-looking slow cooker / sous vide machine, some coffee machines and a portable grill all with this Expressions of Australia brand. Some online searching and it seems to be the Sunbeam brand, renamed.

By then, it was around 4pm and raining so we came back ‘home’, stoked the fire and settled in for the night.

I’ve just found a website called Stuff Dutch People Like and I think Greg is going to apply for Honorary Dutchman status – top of the list is Bicycles, and number 3 is Hagleslag chocolate sprinkles!

Rotterdam Markthal

Some of the roof of the Rotterdam Markthal

Ordering pork belly buns at Fenix Food Factory

Canal in Delft

Another canal in Delft

Sprinkles or Hagleslag choices at the supermarket to put on your bread

Ordering a Stroopwafel

The delft flea market

The Barn we are staying in and the canal

The other side of the Barn we are staying in

Bikes are are parked everywhere

prepackaged ingredients at the supermarket