Sadly enough, this vacation has drawn itself to a close with an anti-climatic loss of my luggage by Delta (it’s being delivered tomorrow). After being gone ten days, I can get a taste of why Europeans call their 3+ weeks of vacation “holiday.”
We spent Friday taking a day trip out to Zaanse Schans, a little town outside of Amsterdam that has preserved 6 of the 100+ windmills and operates them in the 1700s style, producing oils, mustard, paint pigments and other things. It’s an incredibly picturesque town, with beautiful wood homes, windmills overlooking the Zaanse river, small canals (seems to be a Dutch pastime), couple of animals running around (sheep and the like). It was quite beatufiul.
After Zaanse Schans, we made our way back to Amsterdam and checked out the Museum Van Loon, which is a preserved 18th century canal home owned by the Van Loon family that shows how one of the canal mansions was kept during the period and the architectural style of the day (including false doors to preserve symmetry in rooms). We had dinner at an Italian restaurant that was filled with locals near Vondelpark (on the southwest side, near tram line 2). The food wasn’t anything to comment on, but it was a good way to end the trip. The cable I need to pull the pictures off of my iPod is stuck at the office, so I won’t be able to pull them off until Monday.