The Food Baby

We had a bit of a laugh when we looked at the Wikipedia page for The Netherlands traditional food. It just didn't look very nice. Pea soup, bread, potatoes, pickled herring with raw onion etc.

For our last evening we thought we'd make an effort to eat genuine Dutch cuisine.

We found Moeders Restaurant that does a 3 course fixed price menu. When we tried to order all three courses, the waitress stopped us, explaining that she'd come back later for the dessert order as "often our costomers are too shtoffed for dessert".

We started with "Snert" which is a pea and ham soup. Apparently you can stand your spoon up in a good Snert. I couldn't stand my spoon up, but it was delicious all the same, and very substantial.

This was followed by a Stamppot, a big pile of mash and sauerkraut, with a well of gravy in the middle. On the side, a very salty, fatty, smoky sausage, a pile of very salty, smoky, fatty bacon, and a big meatball. In a separate dish on the side you get a bowl of extra gravy, and lots of mustard.

We were indeed pretty "shtoffed" by now, but we felt a duty to see our Dutch cuisine experience through to the end.

To finish, a tasting plate of three traditional Dutch desserts: a curd topped with blackcurrant, mini pancakes, and ice cream made from 'speculaas', a kind of spiced biscuit.

All this was washed down with a couple of bottles of La Chouffe beer. I was a bit worried that Chouffe sounded like it should be a French word for fart, but the waitress kindly explained that it meant 'gnome'. At 8% alcohol who cares what it's called?

Amsterdam Part 2

Translate the following shop signs:

    Matrassen en bedden

    Fijne wijn

    Eten en drinken

Congratulations, you are on your way to becoming a native of the Netherlands!

Now that Ann and I have been here a couple of days, we must be fitting in well, as we have twice been stopped by Dutch people asking directions! We are making the most of it, as I don't think it'll happen in Rome.

We have been the Van Gogh museum, where we finally learnt to say his name properly (Gokhh, not Goff or Go) as well as looking at hundreds of the best paintings in the world. As so often before, we wondered where his art would have gone if he had lived longer.

An early Van Gogh, from when he was a preacher in a coal mining area of the Netherlands (he was fired for being too zealous):

The last Van Gogh before he committed suicide: "Tree Roots", unfinished:

It really is worth seeing these paintings in the flesh - I now understand what all the fuss is about The Wheatfield with Crows. Not always though - I still think The Sunflowers is too yellow!

The Stedelijk museum is Amsterdam's modern art museum. It's right next door to the Van Gogh, so we went there next. It has lots of Mondrians, which kinda merge together when you've seen a few. There was a special exhibition on Kasimir Malevich, who painted in the early 20th century around the time of the Russian revolution. He was important because he was the first to paint solid blocks of colour.

Malevich isn't really my cup of tea, but I do like this one:

Or I did until Ann said "it looks like a mallet". Now I can't see anything else.

The Rijksmuseum is by far the busiest museum or gallery we have ever been to. You queue to get your ticket, you queue for the cloakroom, then you queue to get into the museum. The afterwards you queue to get your stuff back out of the changing room. It has a great collection of old masters from Amsterdam's golden age 1600-1700, but not a huge amount from after that.

That's Rembrandt's "The Night Watch", if I could be bothered to fight through the people...

If we could only go to one gallery, it would be the Van Gogh.

The Dutch people all look very fit, well dressed (edgy not flashy) and attractive - which is why we are so pleased to be mistaken for them! Also no one is fat. We are in the centre of one of the most densely populated places on earth, and have seen about four people who might be considered overweight. Only one of them was under 30. It must be all that walking and biking.

It's certainly not the food. The traditional Netherlands diet is very heavy on bread, potatoes, meat and sausage. Tonight we are going to Moeders (Mother's) Restaurant to try "Snert" and other Dutch Delicacies.

Amsterdam Day One

The blog has been on hold over the last couple of weeks while we spent time with family and friends, but we are now on the move again!

After landing at Schipol airport we got the train to Amsterdam's Centraal Station and emerged into the city.

The first impressions of Amsterdam are: "Wow, what a lot of people!", "Where are all the cars?", "It's waay quieter than you expect" (did you spot the Dutch spelling there).

There was a mass of people heading over the road, so we tagged along and found ourselves at a gigantic funfair in The Dam. The Dam seems to be "Times Square" in both the good ways and the bad ways, but just like New York, if you take a few turnings you quickly find pretty tree-lined streets. The difference here is that the street is actually a canal, and the "sidewalk" is a narrowish road shared between pedestrians, bikes, scooters, and a very few cars. The wider roads have trams belting down the middle of them. Always give way to a tram - they go very fast, can't steer round you, and have very poor brakes!

We've all seen Amsterdam on the TV and I expected there to be maybe a very small touristy pretty area, but the central bit is all canals and bridges. So as a tourist, with a bit of walking you can get away from most of the other tourists, thus irritating even more of the locals.

Naturally I've been very interested in the bike culture, and I can confirm that there really are thousands of people riding bikes. Fast, slow, posh bikes, old dungers, men, women, kids, all sharing the road with no apparent problem. Having waxed lyrical about the bike/pedestrian culture in New York, London and now Amsterdam I'm wondering whether it's just Auckland that can't manage it.... I'll report from the next cities we visit.

Lunch was a grilled sandwich, washed down with mint tea. The tea was just a big tumbler of boiling water, with a big handful of spearmint in it. Simple, delicious.

We went out later in the afternoon to find some dinner, but it started to rain. So, chips with mayonnaise, under the awning of a shop that seemed to be selling some rather unusual domestic appliances.

The famous "Coffee shops" are dotted around the central city, full of tourists. The locals don't seem to bother with them. Possibly because they've seen what happens if you try to design a public building when you're high:

Sex, Death and Bagels

We are really into New York. It has so many of the things we like: Great food, great art, great transport options, lots of interesting bikes, everyone incredibly polite, whether they are elderly ladies dripping with gold in Madison Ave, or the lady in the subway ticket booth coping with idiotic questions while a huge queue built up behind us.

Even the the bad things aren't that bad. Yes it's a bit dirty, a bit smelly, VERY noisy. But other bits are like this:

Sticking to the formula of Doing Things We Like, we started the day by going uptown a few blocks on the subway to Zabar's, a Jewish deli for one of their lox and cream cheese bagels. Yum.

Then a stroll across Central Park via the John Lennon memorial to look at the Guggenheim (only the outside as we were saving our arty energy).

Next the Neue Galerie, which has German and Austrian Art from the early 1900s. Artists like Klimt and Scheile, their work is all about love, sex, death and spirituality. What else should art be about?

Back into Central Park for a sit down to give our legs and brains a rest...and a $1 hot dog.

Then a couple of hundred yards to The Frick gallery. The Frick is the house (mansion) of a wealthy New York robber baron, which was turned into a museum after he died. Wow, the stuff he bought - 3 Vermeers, 2 Holbeins, an enormous Rembrandt and scores of old masters. He had more great art in his dining room than most national museums have in their whole collections. A must-see.

I'm not a Rembrandt fan so I felt I deserved a treat after the Frick, next stop was Serendipity 3, a restaurant frequented by Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol etc. for their signature Frrrrozen Hot Chocolate. Jackie O once tried to buy the recipe but the owner refused.

Is it a coincidence that Andy Warhol died from his gall bladder?

New York City Second Day

After waiting for the rush hour to die down (if it ever does in New York) we walked a few blocks up to Grand Central Station. It's huuuge, and wierd because we felt we'd been there before - which of course we had in so many movies.

We've been keen to get up high to see NYC from above. The obvious answer is to go up the Empire State Building, but of course once you're up it, it's the one thing you can't see. So for us it was The Rockefeller Centre. The queues weren't bad, but they cunningly shunt you around from place to place, so each time they move you, you think you're about to go up in the lift. But no, around the corner was another coraal. Anyway the views were great. Haven't we been lucky with the weather?

Morning tea was long overdue by the time we got down to the street, so a coffee and an almond croissant was in order. We can now confirm, after four days in the USA, that Ann's initial verdict is correct: "This coffee is SHIT!".

Next up was The Museum of Modern Art. It was great for Ann to see so many of the great pictures that she had modelled for her friends Pablo (Picasso) and Willem (de Kooning):

MoMA is worth a visit, even if you aren't very arty. The collection is much smaller than the Met, so you can go there without feeling like you've missed more than you've seen. Also there is a combo ticket deal with the Rockefeller so you save a few $$$.

New York First Day

Onto the subway to the western side of Central Park. The plan was to get the bus over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the eastern side of the park. The buses come every 6 minutes but after 2 minutes we decided to walk (can you see a pattern here?). A good call as we were in the museum 10 minutes later.

We saw some old friends.

And made some new ones.

After the museum we had a great meal at E.A.T. down Madison Ave. a really nice part of town - posh shops, shady trees etc. Jeez the tipping thing is weird. On your bill you get a little printout at the bottom saying "your bill is $xxx. An 18% tip would be $xx, a 20% tip would be %xx, a 22% tip would be $xx". So using my amazing powers of deduction I can tell that they really expect a 20% tip. Just pay your staff already! Ok rant over.

After lunch we took the subway down to the Brooklyn Bridge. What you do is walk straight ahead halfway across the bridge, and only then turn round and look at the city. On your right you can see the Statue of Liberty in the harbour, and on the left, some very high density housing in Brooklyn.

Back into the city, and a left turn down Wall St and The Bull. We were amused to see how many tourists were queuing up to have their pictures taken for good luck. Most were up at the head end, but some subversives were at the arse end. I think they might have been the kiwis...

It's so easy to get around Manhattan. The subways are nowhere near as scary as you think from movies like The Taking of Pelham 123, The Warriors etc. The city is essentially flat, so there are loads of bikes of all different vintages and degrees of coolness. There is a "Boris Bike" hire system like London which is ideal for visitors, specially ones that don't have to worry about helmet hair any more.

We kept walking south until we arrived at the tip of Manhattan for the Staten Island ferry. This is a free, half hourly service that takes you right past Ellis Island and The Statue of Liberty. When you get to the other end, you just hop off and get the next one back.

We were pretty tired by now, so back on the subway and dinner at an Italian Restaurant over the road.

New York City

We're staying on the 29th floor of our hotel, with a view of the Empire State Building, the New Yorker building, and down to the river.

We took an evening stroll out to Times Square last night. It's crowded, bright, noisy - just like Times Square is meant to be! We saw the clock and the ball from Forrest Gump and tried to imagine what it would be like on New Years. Lots of hustlers - we were offered everything from a hand painted space scene, to sushi eaten off a naked woman.

There are people dressed up in costume all over Times Square. I could show you a picture but if they see you taking a photo then it's time for a big tip - and we all know it's not a good idea to get The Hulk angry...