Netherlands Day 2

Day two was all about cramming the whole city into one day.

We had breakfast at the hotel of mint tea, toast with chocolate spread and real butter, and a taste of Dutch cheese. Actually, that's what I ate; Mommy had four eggs. The cheese was meh. I mention the butter because I didn't eat real butter as a regular thing until I was in college. We always had Hollywood margarine, which is so much better.

We walked to the Van Gogh museum which housed a large collection of Van Gogh and his contemporaries' pieces. It was nice, but very smalls. The equivalent of three rooms. Did you know they think he had epilepsy, which was the cause for his psychotic breaks. In the gift shop, I found the coolest children's art book, which I will have to buy from Amazon when I get back. Because I have nothing better to spend my money on than books for my class. (Of which I already have about three hundred.)

We ate lunch of brie - tomato sandwhich (which turned into brie - Twix sandwhich once I finished the meager two slices of tomato) next to a nice, grassy plein, and then visited the Rijk Museum, or something like that. It had a lot of art, and I was not impressed by most of it. What I did like was the wallpaper, which was metallic-taupe and gray, and featured giant floral motif. "That's so Dutch," I would tell myself, although I have no idea.

After all of the museums, we walked back to our hotel without getting lost. By "not getting lost, I mean that we wandered around wondering where the hotel was, sort of going in the right direction, passing many streets that were not on our map, but generally assured that we would end up there in the end. And it was quite a lovely walk anyways, past all sorts of cute little houses with decorated gables and lots of people riding bikes. Riding bikes is what they do here in the Netherlands. Just like in LA, everyone drives. Like, it's sort of not unusual to receive a car on your sixteenth birthday in Los Angeles (crazy, but not unusual), here you get a bike when you turn, oh, say, five. EVERYONE bikes.

For example, just today while walking, I saw the following characters riding bicycles:

• a lady wearing high heels
• a guy pedaling with a girl sitting on the back wheel protector
• a mom biking carrying a toddler
• a mom carrying a baby AND a twenty year old girl
• a girl carrying a bouquet of flowers
• a guy carrying a case of beer

So then obviously we had to join the fray and rent bikes as well. I was very annoyed that they only came with backpedal brakes, something I haven't used since elementary school. Also the seat was too high and the handlebars were way wide and not what I am used to, so I complained a lot.

We biked through Central Amsterdam, through a large green park call the Vondelpark. The path was lined with big, leafy trees on both sides, very cool and breezy. Then we went past several small neighborhoods and saw a lot of different gables. There were the more modest brick squarish ones, then some fancy schmancy Renaissance curly-Q ones, a gable molded from concrete that reminded me of the Soviet Union, and a few flamboyant gables that would look at home in West Hollywood.

We at dinner at a Thai restaurant (they are ALL over the place), bought Mentos (multi-fruit flavor and Drop -- a Dutch liquorice flavor), and went on a really long, fruitless search for an internet cafe.