Amsterdam - Day Two... The Dutch Central Park and Canal Bus
While we were walking around the day before we had made a note to remember this one particular pancake place so we could have breakfast there the next day. We the next morning we walked back to where we had seen that pancake house... but, didn't "see" it as we had seen it before. This really perplexed us and we could have sworn that the place was supposed to be right there. So, think we missed a street or something we decided to walk around again to see if we can find the pancake house. And again... we ended up right where we had gone the first time. But, we don't see the pancake house and we're literally standing right in front of what should be the place. But, it doesn't look right. So, now we've wasted nearly 30 minutes of walking around and damn it if we weren't REALLY craving pankcakes. So, we decided to totally retrace our steps and we headed way WAY around the neighborhood before turning back around. This time it actually worked. By this time we were now standing across the street of where we thougth the pancake place was supposed to be... only now we SEE THE SIGN!!! It's there!!! We finally found the pancake house!! Only as we cross the street do we start the realize that it's the EXACT same place we had gone to several times before.
So, here's where things went wrong. If you stand if front of the place we ate at it says nothing about pancakes. It's just got some regular looking signs in the window about breakfast lunch and dinner. Only when you are a across the street do you see the "Dutch Pancake House" near the top of the building. When we walked in the hostess said she noticed us walking by several times and wondered if we were ever going to come in. Dutch Pancakes + good laugh at ourselves = breakfast of awesomeness! Now it's time of tourist fun and more Amsterdam exploration.
- Julie and I decided to take a Canal Bus tour of Amsterdam. It was roughly 30.00 Euro's total for the two of us and I think worth every dollar crushing penny. The Canal Bus, NOT the Canal Tour, let's you hop on or hop off as many times as you want and affords you a fantastic open air boat tour of the city. There are several different lines that take you to many different landmarks around Amsterdam. Not too mention if you just wanted to stay on the boat and take photos all day you can do that as well. Many of our photos for the day were taken from the tour. FYI - takes roughly 90 minutes to take a complete Canal Bus ride from start to finish.
- One of the stops we decided to hop off at was VondelPark. VondelPark is by the famed Rijksmuseum and is absolutely stunning. The park is named after Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel. Whom many consider to be the Dutch version of Shakespeare. Now, I just googled Joost van den Vondel and nothing about a comparison to Shakespeare comes up. So, that may be a very loose comparison. None the less the park is huge and very much like Central Park in New York. Since we had a short amount of time we only walked a very small portion of this beautiful park before we stopped off at the Film Museum (it's in the park) and sat outside and had a quick bite to eat at the cafe there.
At this point Julie and I agree that we'll be back again soon and we'll spend a little more time exploring Amsterdam.
