Netherlands: Last day in Amsterdam
Today was our last day in Amsterdam. Part of me is sad to be heading home, but mostly I’m relieved. It’s been a really long trip, and I miss my life back in Seattle.
We had the day free to do pretty much whatever we wanted, so I went to Bagel Espresso for breakfast, just up the street. I’m well past the point of cultural exploration through food now; I want familiar stuff, I want comfort food, I want a frackking bagel.
So I had one. With cream cheese and smoked salmon and capers and onions. It was delicious.
I also bumped into Trent and another student while I was there, which was funny because I had dinner with the same people last night. I think I might miss this part of things – the part where you randomly run into people you know pretty much everywhere. I wonder if the tradeoff of having my own apartment again is worth it (hint: OH MY GOD YES).
The Guan Yin Temple was next on my list – it’s a Buddhist temple in Chinatown. I got there a few minutes before it opened, and just wandered around the square for a bit. There was construction going on and most of the street was ripped up, with plywood put down to act as sidewalks. It worked pretty well, although I got far too much sand in my shoe which is the sort of thing that irks me to no end. A few minutes before the temple opened, a man came out to sweep the steps and continued sweeping as people started to go in.
It was definitely a bit touristy. There were a lot of old Chinese women in bright clothes, but at the same time it was immensely peaceful. Shortly after I came in a woman knelt in front of one of the statues and began making obeisances. The rest of the people just flowed around her. I guess that’s just how it works. She didn’t seem to mind.
I stayed for a short while, and then went off to try to find the Jewish Museum. This was unsuccessful, as it turns out – I found the neighborhood, I found the cross-streets, I did not find the museum. There must have been some anti-Sarah force-field on it that day.
I did, however, locate a very large, very elaborate greenhouse – it would be more accurate to say that said greenhouse was sufficiently enormous to not be ignored. So I went there instead. It turned out to be part of the Hortus Botanicus—the Botanical Gardens. Despite my apparent allergy to all things natural, I really like botanical gardens and this one was a doozy. The greenhouse had three zones at different temperatures, and you could walk up a set of stairs and wander around the tops of the trees. The plants were generally organized by evolutionary stage, so you could see the gymnosperms in one cluster and the conifers in another area and then the monocots and dicots and man, it was neat. My camera died just after I got there, so I didn’t get any great photos. This made me terribly sad. They had an ENORMOUS lotus plant in a pond, which I had not realized looked quite so vaginal and dangerous—they have these weird fleshy spikes all over! And then I walked up to a plant with enormous, beautiful glossy black berries. I wanted very much to put one in my mouth, and then I read the little card that identified it as atropa belladonna – deadly nightshade. Let’s not do that.
After I got hungry, I stopped at the little cafe on the grounds and had a slice of apple cake and a mug of coffee. I have drunk more coffee and more alcohol on this trip than I ever have in my life—and I am so looking forward to detoxing.
(The coffee is wicked good, though.)
Dinner tonight was arranged by Trent at the Koffeehuis van’t Volksbond. This was an amazing room, with huge painted roses climbing up the wall and an enormous painting of a comic-book superheroine—always a bonus!
The food was spectacular. I finished with a dessert that consisted entirely of cheese and these weird little nutty toast things. The cheese was very…um…fragrant; my classmates three or four seats down were commenting on it. But so, so tasty. They had shaved it into ruffles, so when they brought it to me at first I thought they had brought me a huge white cabbage leaf. But no. Cheese. Nom.
And then we took the tram back to the hotel, since I would be rising at 4:30 to head to the airport (yaaaaar). There was a smidge of excitement on the way home, since my mouth and throat felt weird and spiky. I advised my two traveling companions of this and of the presence of my epi-pen, took two Benadryl, and coped. Nothing exciting happened; I just love having the “Hey, guys, not to freak you out or anything but if I, like, stop breathing, could you please stab me with this and then call an ambulance? That’d be great. Thanks.” conversation. It always goes so well.
But! As I say, nothing exciting happened. I went home, packed (throwing my favorite shoes away in the process, since they have sprouted actual holes in their bottoms), and went to bed for a scant four hours. Then followed a thirty-hour period of more-or-less awakeness. The first thing I did once I got through customs in Houston was buy a copy of Catching Fire.
And then I was home. Home is beautiful. I missed it.