To Cruise or Not to Cruise ...

Walking 🚶‍♂️🚶‍♀️back towards the hotel from Vondel Park, we stopped off at an intriguing bar called Café Slijterij Oosterling, which breathes an atmosphere as if time has stood still there for more than a century. The café is also a liquor store. The property is from around 1735, when the Dutch East India Company sold coffee, tea, and spices from the Far East. The café has been owned by the Oosterling family since 1877. The brothers Marcel and Oscar, sons of Mari Oosterling, are the fourth generation Oosterling behind the bar. We had an enjoyable couple of hours eating toasties drinking beers 🍻 and just watching the world go past. Continuing our walk back, we passed houseboats on Keizersgracht and had our photo taken by an Australian brother & sister in return for taking their photograph 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨📸
Nearing the hotel on the Amstel River, we walked past the Magere Brug or, more commonly and famously known as Skinny Bridge. The bridge spans across the river Amstel and is an Old Dutch design wooden bridge known as a double-swipe (balanced) bridge. Tradition relates that the bridge was named after the sisters Mager, who were supposed to live on opposite sides of the river. They are said to have had the wooden bridge built to make it easier to visit one another. However, it appears more likely that the original bridge acquired the name from being so narrow (mager means skinny in Dutch), that it was hard for two pedestrians to pass one along another. As traffic along the river Amstel increased, a wider bridge replaced the narrow one in 1871. Whilst Skinny Bridge is no longer skinny, it is by far still one of the most beautiful and most photographed bridges in Amsterdam.
As I have lived in Amsterdam; albeit some 40 years ago, I was deemed the perfect person to go in search 👣👣👣 of a nice restaurant for our intrepid group of travellers to eat in 🍽. So after meeting in the hotel bar, we: Steve & Suzanne, myself & Jayne, Greg & Patti, Jared & Cheryl (Steve's daughter) made our way across the Amstel to the Cafe Restaurant De Ysbreeker for a really enjoyable evening 🍺🍻🍾🥂🍷🍹.Read more