Sightseeing (and stuff) in Amsterdam

We started our day not knowing exactly how to get to Amsterdam. We got direction from Ety’s husband, although doubts got the best of us.

Ety’s husband is well over 60 years old, perhaps pushing 70. Needless to say, he’s a retired man, living at home everyday watching TV. He’s a bit timid at times, but overall a nice old man. Most impressive of all, he understands and speaks Indonesian. He lived in Indonesia for 12 years in Garut. So, I communicate with him with Indonesian, as with Dutch or English, nothing would make sense.

His direction to the nearest bus stop was actually quite accurate. We went up to a nice little river where there are houseboats sitting afloat the water. Farther up, there’s a small bridge which we crossed. Amazingly, on the other side of the bridge is Amsterdam, and the river serves as the border. Then shortly after that is the bus stop for bus #192. After asking a couple people, Lala using her Dutch of course, we managed to figure out our routes. About 4-5 stops with bus #192, followed by tram #1 all the way to the Central train station.

Once there, we checked out the immediate sceneries. The city center, perhaps like other European city centers, is very old-looking. There were a lot of old buildings, some turned into museums. Churches here are prominent as well. We walked around a little bit as we strayed towards the smaller alleys, which were filled with little shops and restaurants.

We finally ended up in what might be Chinatown, although there were also restaurants of different origins. We went to New King Chinese restaurant to meet with two friends of Lala’s. Their names are Masha and Angie. They were all high school friends. They moved into the Netherlands, a city called Almere. Masha was from Moscow. Angie, she came from Bandung too. In fact, she is Lala’s 2nd cousin. The food at the Chinese restaurant was considered good, though not quite so high class. It was certainly much better than Panda Express.

(Abraxas coffeeshop; see Abraxas post)

Afterwards, we said goodbye to Angie and went for more sightseeing. We passed through several streets and alleyways completely decorated with shopping stores of famous brands. It would be like a shopper walking through heaven. We stopped at some stores here and there, particularly H&M. Lala purchased a few items; I simply looked around at their collection.

A few more sightseeing and strolls thru the city, the temperature begun to plummet as the sun disappeared. Soon enough, it was dinner time. We met up with Masha and her sister, Zjenja, another Russian girl, another high school friend. We went to a tapas restaurant. The prices were expected, but the food was very tasty.

After dinner, it became much colder, and we just decided to call it a night. So Lala and I backtracked, and we took the tram and bus back to Badhoevedorp.