Oud West

Abba's post:

This could turn out to be the worst day of my life. Grammy and Johnny and I are playing Oh Hell, and I bid 2 on a deal of 6 and I’m playing it perfectly, and it’s down to two cards and I’ve got the two of spades and the six of diamonds in my hand, neither is trump, and it’s Johnny’s lead. A round of diamonds has already been played, and the only way I can lose is for him to lead a diamond lower than the six, which the odds are heavily against…and he leads the three of diamonds. He’s definitely out of the will, and furthermore…oh yeah, Amsterdam, I’m supposed to be blogging about Amsterdam here…oh well….

So we have some of our usual middle-of-the-night jet-lagged wakefulness, but we finally fall asleep and go until close to 9, and we’re hungry, but Johnny’s still sleeping and we don’t want to disturb him because he’s had to get up early pretty much every morning since we first got to Iceland, so Rebecca goes to take a shower and finds that we have no hot water in the bathroom, either in the shower or in the sink, although weirdly enough the water in the kitchen is plenty hot…seems like this may not be the B&B of our dreams after all…the guy who is renting it to us is also out of the will…you just can’t count on anyone these days, and…oh, right, Amsterdam.

So we resign ourselves to going showerless and stinky today. Rebecca calls Paulo, the guy who manages the houseboat in the owner’s absence, and he’s at work but says he’ll get here at 4 this afternoon and see if he can figure out what’s going on with the hot water…he’d better if he has any hope of being in the will. We notice that it’s 10:30 am now and decide that if Johnny hasn’t caught up on his sleep by 10:30 am, tough, and I wake him up. He deals well with it. We decide on pancakes for breakfast, do some web research and locate a pannenkoekenhuis on the nearby Leidseplein, head out in a drizzling rain which after we’ve gone a block or so turns into a driving rain, but are we discouraged? No, we are not—we don’t even know the meaning of the word. After another block we’ve learned it, but we forge on, following Google Maps to the alleged location of this alleged pancake house and not seeing anything even close…if Google thinks he’s going to inherit a penny from me he can think again…we ask the concierge at a local hotel who points us in one direction, nothing…then we ask someone behind the counter at a tourist agency, nothing…finally we stumble on it right in the middle of the Leidseplein and go in and get a table and share a bacon and cheese pancake, a lemon and sugar pancake, and a strawberries and vanilla ice cream and whipped cream pancake. Rebecca and I have a vague memory of once having been on a low-carb diet, but decide that we’re hallucinating. While we’re at the restaurant Rebecca has a grueling online battle with the Van Gogh Museum, trying to reserve tickets for us this afternoon, and finally wins it. We finish our pannenkoeken and waddle back to the houseboat. (I’m guessing that after this trip I’ll never again have occasion to write that last sentence.)

We hang out in the boat for an hour or two, watching Belgium beat Panama 3-0 after playing evenly for most of the game, working at our computers on this blog or whatever, or dozing off for brief periods, and then it’s time to head out to the Van Gogh. We find the closest #3/#12 tram stop, take it to the stop closest to the museum, get off, head to the Van Gogh, and see a sight I’ve never seen in the many times I’ve been to Amsterdam: all those iconic buildings—the Stedelijk Museum, the Van Gogh, the Concertgebouw, all sparkling clean! Even the venerable old Rijksmuseum down the road, which I’d only ever seen black with the grime of centuries, is shining with what looks like freshly sandblasted red brick and sparkling white trim. I’d previously noticed that the buildings in Amsterdam look cleaner now than I’ve ever seen them and almost completely free of the graffiti that used to cover almost every building wall and door, but this was high drama.

We go through the museum and enjoy it as always, make our way back to the tram and our boat away from home, hang out some more, get a message from Paulo that he’s tied up at work but will come by to take care of the problem by 5 for sure, and we could head out to dinner with untroubled minds. We head out with deeply suspicious minds, walk to Leidseplein, catch a #2 tram to Spui (pronounced Spow with the slightest tinge of a U at the end) and walk to the Restaurant Kantjil en de Tijger for an excellent rijsttafel, that wonderful multidish Indonesian meal. Some of the seasonings get pretty exotic and I’d hesitate to subject many teenagers to it, but it’s no problem for Johnny, who has broader and more sophisticated tastes in food than most much older people I know. We order a rijsttafel for two and have more than enough food for the three of us, then tram back to Leidseplein, walk back to the houseboat, and find that our suspicions were justified and we still have no hot water in the bathroom. Paulo shows up after a while and says that there’s a problem. We keep our astonishment at this news in check and ask what happens next, and he says not to worry, he’ll show up with a plumber tomorrow and get it all straightened out. His assurances provide no relief at all. He disappears into the night and we settle down for the evening, entertained by Tunisia and England battling it out on TV and visions of cold showers in the morning dancing in our heads.

Johnny’s comments

As I write some comments Abba is off taking a nice hot shower (just kidding). Alas today we have resorted to turning into little babies and taking our showers in the sink as not to smell as the geysers in Iceland (sulfur). Since I have now been officially taken out of the will, it seems that the only just thing to do from here is to let you know how much Abba is afraid of bugs and bees! He is so afraid of these thing that at our lovely breakfast at the Café Toussaint he jumps out of his chair in fright screaming like a little girl every time a bee flies by. Whoops never mind that's me who does that. Abba may believe that when I woke up at 10:30 I was dealing with it well. He is so very wrong! He can just wait come 2:00 am when I am still awake, he might have me coming in his room telling him “it’s already 2:00 time for breakfast!” Hopefully that will show him not to awake me from a deep slumber.

Grammy’s comments:

Okay, those two are tough acts to follow, so I won’t.Read more