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We were fortunate to be in the Netherlands at the peak of the tulip season. We took a day trip to Keukenhof Gardens, about an hour south of Amsterdam by bus, near the small city of Lisse. It is located in the center of the tulip growing region of the Netherlands. Keukenhof is open only from mid-March through mid-May so our timing was perfect.

Keukenhof is one of the world’s most spectacular gardens, with acres of displays of tulips and other flowers plus several greenhouses. It is not to be missed. We spent several hours walking around admiring the flowers. A light rain started about half way through our visit so we had to break out our umbrellas but we stayed dry. We were there on a Sunday so it was quite crowded and the restaurants were packed. We avoided the food crowds and had ice cream cones from a cart for our lunch!

We bought Rick Steves’ tour book of Amsterdam and in the book he has a couple of walking tours that you can take. We began the day with an English breakfast, of all things, sitting outdoors next to a canal at Greenwoods. Then we took the trolley over to Centraal Station, the main train station and the start of the first walk. The tour took us through the Damrak, where Amsterdam began, and up to Dam Square, the cultural heart of the city and the location of the Royal Palace.

The next walking tour took us through the Jordaan District, a peaceful residential neighborhood traversed by rings of canals. We enjoyed seeing the beautiful old homes along the canals. We walked past the Anne Frank House but didn’t go in; it was mobbed with people.

We enjoyed Amsterdam very much but it was overrun with tourists due to the King’s Day celebration (I guess we contributed our part) which made it uncomfortably crowded. At times it seemed like being at Disneyland. We were glad we spent most of our time in peaceful Lyon and not in the hubub of Amsterdam or Paris.

In the evening, we went to an Indonesian restaurant, Indrapura. Andy had eaten there before and recommended it. Indonesia was a colony of the Netherlands, called the Spice Islands at the time, so Indonesian food is one of the common ethnic foods in Amsterdam. Their specialty is a rijsttafel (rice table), which consists of over 40 small plates served family style. It was delicious!

The restaurant was located at Rembrandtplein, a square located near a house where Rembrandt lived. The square contains impressive statues of the figures painted in Rembrandt’s famous work, The Night Watch.

We didn’t realized it when we planned our trip to Amsterdam, but it turned out we were there on King’s Day, the Netherlands’ national holiday. It is a huge event, sort of like the 4th of July on steroids. The population of Amsterdam doubles, with people coming from all over the small country for the day (you can go almost anywhere in the country by train in about an hour). Almost everybody dresses in orange, the national color, and for many people the holiday seemed like an excuse to drink all day. Our favorite pastime was standing next to a canal and watching the party boats come by, one after another. Each boat carried anywhere from about a dozen to maybe fifty people, most twentysomethings. It seemed like every boat had a loud boombox and an ample supply of Heineken. One young man apparently had too much Heineken and he was peeing off the side of his boat as it came by us. It was a fun and rowdy day.

After a while we strolled over to Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s huge urban park. It is a tradition on King’s Day for people to set up tables in front of their homes to sell their unwanted stuff. The only day of the year, apparently, where you don’t need to get a permit to do this. The children join in by bringing their unwanted toys to Vondelpark to sell to passersby, sort of a gigantic yard sale. We didn’t buy anything but we did give a couple of euros to a young lady who was playing her recorder. We didn’t stay too long because it was horrendously crowded. This was true in some other parts of Amsterdam, as well. It was so crowded in spots that it was difficult to move around – human gridlock!

We ended up at a south Indian restaurant for dinner, not far from our hotel. We chatted with the young man who served us and he said he had only been in Amsterdam since last fall. Going through the cold, damp Amsterdam winter was quite an adjustment for him.

Videos:

Young men in chicken suit video:   img_6456

Boats were crowded, with techno music blasting. We also had our own view of a live Manneken Pis img_6483

On our first morning in Amsterdam we decided to take a 1-hour boat tour of the Amsterdam canals. The central core of Amsterdam has many canals in concentric rings, so a boat tour is a good way to get an introduction to the city. It was mostly a pleasant ride but we sat right in front of a rowdy group of friends who talked loudly throughout the voyage, even when the tour guide was giving narration. Oh, well.

A big motivation for our trip to Amsterdam was to visit a yarn store owned by Carrie’s favorite knitting designer, Stephen West. So, in the afternoon we visited his store, Stephen and Penelope, located in the Nieuwmarkt district of Amsterdam’s central core. Carrie bought some yarn, of course, and enjoyed spending an hour or so browsing through the goods.

One of the great things about Amsterdam for an American traveler is that virtually everybody speaks English. For maybe the first hour we were there we would ask people if they spoke English but we soon realized that asking was unnecessary. In almost every situation it was possible to approach someone and simply address them in English.

 

Today we took the train from Lyon to Amsterdam. There had been a train strike in France beginning April 1, with the strikers walking off the job two days out of every five. But France being the civilized society that it is, the strikers published a calendar showing all of the days they would be on strike. Due to the luck of our travel schedule we were not affected by the strike, nor were any of our visitors.

We took the French high-speed train to Brussels, where we transferred to another train to Amsterdam. We sat in an outdoor cafe across the street from the Brussels train station while waiting for our transfer, and while we were there three large Belgian military vehicles rolled up and a bunch of soldiers with machine guns jumped out. It seemed like a routine patrol and, much like in France, the visible presence of security made us feel safe.

We waited for our train to Amsterdam…and waited…and waited. Eventually all of us got on the next available train to Amsterdam (only about an hour later). The rumor was that our scheduled train had never left its origin in Paris due to a bomb scare. That made sense, also, since we had seen the soldiers arrive at the train station earlier.

We eventually reached Amsterdam in the early evening. Our hotel was in a great location, just across the canal from the Leidseplein and only a couple of blocks from Vondelpark and the Rijksmuseum. We were ready to explore Amsterdam.

Video of the French countryside from the high speed train – It is a large file and takes a minute to download. Click on “img_6427”, then click on the the small white type in the black box to start the download. The video does not work properly for us using Firefox so try a different browser if you have problems.

During our last week in Lyon we decided to do some random exploring. We got out the bus map, identified a route that looked interesting, rode to the end of the line, and got off and wandered around. One day that approach took us to Montessuy, a hilltop suburban community between the two rivers and north of the center of the city. It was interesting to see some of the more modern parts of the city, away from the dense population in the city center. The bus stop at Montessuy was surrounded by apartment buildings, ten stories or so, that appeared to have been built in the 1970s or 1980s. There was a small shopping area nestled between a couple of the buildings, offering all of the necessities (grocery store, pharmacy, barber shop, etc.). For some reason there was also a school to teach people to be clowns. It was closed when we were there but we could see unicycles hanging on racks inside.

On another day we took a bus about 15 km up the Saone to the village of Neuville. On the way we passed by the famous Paul Bocuse Restaurant, one of the finest and most famous in France. It’s out of our price range (and also not really our style) so we never went there to eat. Neuville is a small village located on the banks of the Saone. We strolled around the curving narrow streets, past the type of old church that seems to exist everywhere in France. We stopped at an outdoor cafe for a cold drink and then took the bus back to Lyon. The trip along the riverside highway was very scenic.

Photos of the Montessuy area

We wanted to explore the northern part of Vieux Lyon, a neighborhood that we had not yet visited. We took the bus to Gare Saint-Paul, an old train station in Vieux Lyon located next to one of the many old churches in the city, Église Saint-Paul. Like many European cities, Lyon has multiple train stations, each serving regional and commuter trains coming into the city from different directions.

One of the streets in northern Vieux Lyon, Rue Juiverie, was the home of the Jewish Quarter during the Middle Ages. Although Jews were an important part of the Lyon community they were segregated from the rest of the city and lived primarily along this old narrow street. It was interesting to stroll along this ancient street and imagining what life was like for the residents.

Carrie loves textiles so we couldn’t leave Lyon without visiting the textile museum, Musee des Tissus et des Arts Decoratif. This small museum is housed in an old mansion that was the residence of the mayor of Lyon at one time. It has two separate parts, one devoted to textiles and the other devoted to decorative arts (furniture and such). We spent most of our time in the textiles section. Owing to Lyon’s history in the silk trade there were some impressive examples of silk fabrics. There was also an old Jacquard silk loom on display.

For some reason, one room of the museum was hosting a music lesson. A schoolgirl was there practicing her violin, with her teacher interrupting her for pointers now and then. It wasn’t clear why there was a music lesson happening in a museum, but the student was pretty good so her music provided a pleasant backdrop for touring the museum.

Chris did some web searching and found a silk screening shop to visit, L’Atelier de Soierie. It turned out to be an enormously interesting place, one of our highlights in Lyon. The shop consists of a workshop downstairs where they do all of their silkscreening, as well as a small retail shop upstairs. A young lady who spoke excellent English spent most of an hour with us, describing and demonstrating each of the silkscreening steps. At the end we couldn’t resist so we bought several beautiful silk items from the shop.

We had lunch at a nearby bouchon, Chez Paul. Earlier in the week we had dinner at Daniel et Denise, which is a bit upscale, but Chez Paul was a different experience, more like the original working class bouchons from which the modern bouchons evolved. The food was served family style, which perplexed us at first. The waiter brought out two huge bowls, one with lentils and the other with marinated ox cheeks. There were only four of us and we didn’t know how we would ever eat so much food, especially with more courses to come. But after we had spooned our portions onto our plates the waiter took the bowls and passed them on to the people at the next table, and so on throughout the restaurant. It was that way throughout the entire meal, all the way through dessert, a huge bowl of applesauce, prunes in red wine, and a long creme caramel from which we each took a slice. It turned out to be a memorable lunch and we were all glad we went.

Our friends Chris and Reed arrived to spend a few days with us in Lyon before they ventured south to Avignon. Over the next several days we took them to a number of places we had gotten to know – Vieux Lyon, Notre Dame de Fourviere, Saone boat cruise, Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, dinner at Daniel et Denise. Reed was able to exercise his French language skills in Les Halles, purchasing an array of cheeses from a vendor who was very friendly but knew only a few English words. We enjoyed the cheese with some wine and baguettes back in the apartment that evening.

But the unexpected highlight of the week was a stroll in Parc de la Tete D’Or. We had taken a picnic lunch and we stopped to eat in a gazebo that housed an outdoor grand piano, covered only in a large blue tarp. While we were eating some young people arrived and one young man began playing the piano and singing. More and more showed up until there were a dozen or so, taking turns playing the piano and singing. We supposed they might have been music students from a local university. We spent the better part of an hour watching them perform. It was one of those totally unexpected occurrences that adds richness to travel.

Photos in Parc de la Tête d’or – Clicking on the first photo will enlarge the gallery for better viewing

Video of impromptu musicians in the park – It is a large file and takes a minute to download. Click on “img_6291”, then click on the the small white type in the black box to start the download. The video does not work properly for us using Firefox so try a different browser if you have problems.