A Shopping Excursion

Today I went on a shopping excursion to the Southern Canal Belt area of town. I had a few specific destinations in mind as I was gift shopping for Katie. On the way, I passed some of the other parts of town that I had been wanting to see.

This is a view of the Singel canal. This is one of the prettiest canal shots I've gotten so far. I like the building facades in this photo. That's the floating flower market there on the right side of the canal.



This is quintessential Amsterdam - I loved taking this photo!



Carnival time in the Dam! If you look carefully, you can see the woman in the lower left hand corner that has pigeons landing on her as she feeds them!



This is just a cute menu I saw on the way. I liked it for the Sesame Street reference, but someone else clearly liked it for the prank potential...



My excursion was successful, as I found a framed print of an old map drawing of Amsterdam for the office, and a surprise gift for Katie!

Later in the day, I ventured back out for dinner. I decided to go to Nam Kee, which the guidebook said was the best chinese in town. It's in the red light district so I figured this would be an adventure. The red light district is nothing to get worked up about, as it turns out. It's basically a chinatown, with some sex shops and some brothels. There are tons of restaurants and pubs and lots of families out for Asian food. Maybe it changes later in the night, but really, it looked like any other nightspot in a big city. Which was fun, because there was a lot going on and lots of people out, and the chinese food was excellent! It was a good place to eat alone because there were communal tables, so you got to know your neighbors whether you wanted to our not. My neighbors ordered tripe, and then decided they didn't like it, and tried to make it sound appealing as they offered it to everyone around them including me, with no takers. We had a good laugh over that. :-)

Tomorrow is my last full day here, I will attend some conference events in the morning, but will have most of the day for touring the town, finishing up the shopping and hopefully taking a bike tour!