Category Archives: amsterdam

queens day.

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the past few days have been busy and fun. sunday was queens night and monday was queens day. queens day is a super fun holiday here in amsterdam. it is an all day all night hang outside drinking dancing eating singing laughing and having fun holiday. the whole city participates. it’s basically a massive party.
but today i am tired, sick and sunburned.

(i’ve noticed now that i live in a country that is pretty north and the sun doesn’t come out so often; that when the sun does make an appearance my skin doesn’t know how to handle it. i had spf 50 on and i’m still sunburnt.)

anyways, i’ll be back to regular scheduling tomorrow.

relaxing weekend.

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it’s nice to have a quiet, close to home weekend every once and a while. this was ours.

it included. ramos gin fizzes – sunset picnics – bike rides – movies about space – bookstores – many walks – sangria – a concrete beach – sunshine – and puppies

summer is over?

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way too soon! i had no idea that the fantasticaly warm spring we had here was pretty much the best of it. so here we are in the netherlands at the end of july and it’s been raining for two months and i finally bought my first raincoat. don’t i look thrilled.

but look how cute that pup is. how can you stay sad with a pup like that.

this is a post about beer.

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a few weeks ago i went to the rijksmuseum. they have a lot of old dutch still lifes (if you can imagine). these paintings are so beautiful and usually feature decadent flowers and food and glassware, etc. this one had this long glass tube with rings around it. with a little more reading i discovered that it was a device for a very old dutch beer drinking game. you have to drink the beer down to the next ring. if you don’t hit the ring you have to keep going to the next ring until you hit the mark.

sounded fun to me! so i told fred about it and we went and got materials and made the game.


remember this.


well, we filled it…. mostly.

and played!



my thoughts- it was fun. you really have to like beer to play this. and be careful because it turns out to be a lot of beer! it’s not super hard, but it does get harder the more you play (duh). fred is way better at it than i.

long weekend.

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it was a long weekend in these parts. and a weekend that i didn’t take too many pictures. but there was a lot of picnic-ing and dog walking and general relaxing. ate some interesting meats like ostrich (amazing!) and lamb. and drank some pear genever and pink wine.

here are a few things i did take pictures of.

we rode the giant ferris wheel in dam square. and while i was absolutely terrified (afraid of heights aparently?) it made for some goooood picture takin’.

it’s baby bird season! i spent to much time squeaking at the tiny duck and feeding them spice cake.

we found the most generic beer in existence.

fred and i took some old man and old lady style tips and now we have sunglass chains and clip on flip ups.

the battleship potemkin was happy.

i made this. more on this later. ( it’s an old dutch thing / game )

and i replanted my succulent babies. note the re-purposed generic beer can. stay classy.

keukenhof flowers.

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my parents came into town this past week, which is the reason for my radio silence. we went over to keukenhof on a sunny day to check out the tulips. basically this place is a giant park/tulip farm where you can wander around and look at thousands and thousands of flowers. then take a wine pit-stop, and then look at more flowers. you have to like flowers in order to do this. it was very beautiful and the air smelled like…. flowers. if you are ever in holland in the spring. i recommend a tulip farm.

i won’t over whelm you with gobs of flower photographs. but here are a few.


now the fields of tulips.

and of course. a herring and pink wine picnic.

(i just love mini bottles of wine. i want to stock my whole refrigerator up with them.)

picnic days.

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as the days get warmer i want to spend more time outside. much more. so saturday we went over to one of the parks in ‘de pijp’ neighborhood and had a little dutch picnic. kaas, brood, and genever. i finally finally got to use my travel bar!

this is my best antique find of all time. i found it in a new hampshire antique store. i thought it was a binocular case but when i  opened it i was elated to find 2 travel decanters. one labeled bourbon, one labeled scotch.

sadly scotch is way expensive in the netherlands and bourbon is practically nonexistent. boo. so i filled it with the local liquor, genever.

we walked back towards the city center, stopped by the apartment to grab glasses and some bottles, and sat by a canal drinking bier until the sun went dim.