It was suggested by my lovely wife that I should post more pictures of the trip with the blog posting. While I would rather have words, I think it can help the narration. But fear not! I am not giving up creative control.
Before we move on from Amsterdam, let me share several more wonderful and weird sights we saw.
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| Fish on a tree |
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| Rembrand's Night Watch sculpture |
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| A crab biting fox's tail |
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| View from Westerkirk |
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| Me holding my crap together while climbing up Westerkirk |
We had this bright idea of driving from Amsterdam to the rest of our destinations. There were couple of small roadblocks along the way to that. First off, it is unusually hard to find a car with automatic transmission in Europe and it costs more, with me learning how to drive in US, I have no clue how to drive manual, nor do I wish to learn at this stage of my life. Another is, that renting a car in one country and returning car in another will more or less double you rent price. This didn't stop us of course, and neither did the fact, that the only thing I knew about driving in our destinations is that they drive on the right side of the road, literally and figuratively.
Our first planned stop was Keukenhof tulip gardens - a huge botanical park devoted exclusively to tulip growing. We worried that with cold weather there wouldn't be much to see, but a lot of plants were already started to bloom, and the enclosed galleries have always something beautiful growing. We did not spend too much time in there, walking a looking around a leisurely pace took us maybe two an a half hours total.
This day, for some reason, we've decided to push ourselves. We kind of wanted to see Mauritshuis and the Escher's museums at the Hague, but wanted to also spend a little more time in Delft - our next stop over. As we left tulip gardens, and looked at our table we've decided to skip all of them and instead entertain the short-attention ones in the group (Maya and yours truly) and go to Madurodam on the outskirts of Hague.
Madurodam is a small park that hosts miniaturized versions of almost all of notable structures in Holland. It's not really a big place, but i has plenty hands on activities for kids, moving airplanes and trains and cars, and just a fun quick place to see. It is expensive though, so beware.
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| Lena trying to control herself and not stomp out civilization |
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| birds attacking miniature people and trains |
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| This weird human body museum we passed on the way to Hague |
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| model of the Maritime museum in Amsterdam |
I will continue on the Delft and Bruges in the next post.
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