Skip to main content

The best trip ever, part drie.


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.

Fish on a tree

Rembrand's Night Watch sculpture

A crab biting fox's tail

View from Westerkirk

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.


Lena trying to control herself and not stomp out civilization
birds attacking miniature people and trains

This weird human body museum we passed on the way to Hague

model of the Maritime museum in Amsterdam

I will continue on the Delft and Bruges in the next post. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things you never cared to know about Mayonnaise

I have decided to start a new Rubric. Once a week I will write a post about a random subject. Having the subject coming out of MY head, it can be about anything. I constantly have a lot of random "Why?" and "How does?" questions floating around in my head. I will try to explain how I arrived to the subject at hand and promise to do diligent research on Wikipedia and provide you, the unfortunate reader, with either the interesting or unusual bits of info. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED! In addition to that I have a slight fetish for trivia. The rubric will be called: Things you never cared to know about Today's topic is Mayonnaise . How did I arrive to that? As I was making breakfast in the morning, I decided that I wanted to take a pita pocket and stuff it with something. The pitas are usually fairly dry, and you have to toast them. I did not have Hummus or Babaganoush (GOD! I just love saying BA-BA-GA-NOUSHHHHHHHHH!) I put a little Mayo inside to soften it up. So, ther
10 comments
Read more

Crazy ideas - UPDATED

Here's a crazy survey I thought off. If you had a time machine where would you travel first? Assuming the fact of course of universal invincibility. ----UPDATE---- As my brother mentioned, with time travel universally available getting rich schemes would be less than doable. My aim is more towards investigating great mysteries of history. Therefore: a. To the Big Bang b. To see an asteroid killing dinosaurs c. To see the exodus of Jews as it really happened d. Try to see if Jesus hubbub really happened e. Forget the past, I'd go to the year 2020 to see who winds World Series and place a bet accordingly. f. Suggested by Ilya . Back a day or to to purchase winning lottery ticket. e. Try to see if Atlantis existed. f. Travel to the future to see the explosion of our Sun. I am torn between the dinosaurs and the World Series. Please suggest the choices. Should I add Buddha and Muhammed to the list as well? From the curiousity stand-point. I still rather see the dinosaurs.
9 comments
Read more

Sunday Night Blogging.

I used to hate olives. Really really hate them, to a point of gagging. I have recently tried on a personal dare to eat the big green greek olives with crap stuffed inside of them. Some think it's anchowies, some think it's salmon, i think it's pepper. I've bought a small cup of them yesterday. They were with peppers inside of them, little red jalapenos, sticking out a bit. For those of my readers who ever had a male dog, the picture is precisely what you are thinking. I am not saying anything else. BTW, the peppers were spicy, although not too spicy. My little one take a look at one of them and proudly declares: "Daddy, the chiken almost got out of that one!" And here's the offending fruit (berry? vegetable? what is an olive?) just before I devoured it.
9 comments
Read more