Saturday and Saturday night

It is Sunday morning here, happy father’s day to everyone. Today’s plans are one last museum; finish up the gift shopping and a cruise on the canals this afternoon with wine and cheese.  I have had more wine here in the last two weeks than over the last year (not complaining). It is not raining now, but the sky looks like it wants to.  Last night we ate dinner in the apartment with all the left overs from our week and Barbara and Rick (Taylor folk from upstairs) brought theirs down as well; it was a feast. We listened to music, drank wine and watched a very cool electrical storm from the beautiful front window.

Yesterday was a blast.  We headed out in the car, in the scary Amsterdam traffic.  There are separate traffic lights for the bikes, cars and people, oh and the bikes really pay attention to none of the lights so it makes for very interesting driving.  We headed out to a town called “Haarlam.” We had a lunch of French onion soup and sandwiches in a little café across from a cathedral that construction began in 1390, no really!  It was magnificent. The little town was bikes and people only so we walked with no real purpose over the whole thing.  We knew we were close to the coast because the large canals had giant, beautiful sailboats docked in them.

We saw a group of men fishing with large ropes and sort of a hook at the end, there was no reel and they simply hurled the rope out into the canal, it was pretty cool.

Next we headed out “The North Sea.”  Wow and very big and angry ocean.  The goal, or rather my goal was to try smoked eel, yep smoked eel.  We used the wonderful navigation system in the car and headed west.  The wind at the shore was so strong it kept closing the car doors with its force.  We found a little (aka: scary) fish stand right on the water’s edge and we bought 4 euro of eel, Rob thought I was nuts.  It was cold and chewy, like smoked pencil eraser.  Rob tried it and settled on the description, “smoked booger.” It was pretty awful. Hahahah

Then it was back to the apartment and our wonderful night of tapas (leftovers) with our neighbors.

Well its 11:00am here and we are off again.  Life will sure seem quite in El Cajon.