davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

Much to my delight, the Dutch love apple pie perhaps even more than the Americans do. Of course, they would never bake an apple pie from scratch at home. Heavens no, baking isn’t for doing at home, it’s for buying in a store. Check out the length our friend Beth had to go through to locate staple baking supplies in this city.

Fortunately, apple pie is on every cafe menu in the city so naturally it was our responsibilty to devote our seven months here to tasting every variety, rating them against each other and then proclaiming a ‘Best Apple Pie in Amsterdam’ winner. It would be rude not to. We weren’t so outrageous as to literally try every piece of pie in the city but we did try six, so roughly one per month considering time spent out of Amsterdam for the holidays and weekend trips.

Here are our results out of five bicycle bell dings: (more…)

Dave Says: 

Our apartment is situated on a piece of tourist trivia. It’s not that tourists flock to it but should they find themselves at our canal they can be heard letting out sighs of “ah” and “oh yeah” and muttering numbers under their breath. Thirty meters to the left of our front door is unofficially named the Seven Bridges, it being the only place in Amsterdam where seven bridges bridge several canals and all the spans can be seen at once. So, in homage to the tourists and the bridges, my final entry from this most agreeable city will be seven things beginning with “B” that have made our life here quite sublime.

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Dave says:
As our time here in Amsterdam draws to its inevitable conclusion, we find our lives filled with the abstract and the detailed. They interchange, interact and generally serve to confuse as we prepare to pack our bags and hit the road. Here for your reading pleasure is a brief synopsis of our combined psyches:

Details
Even after only seven months of residency, it has become necessary for us to make the kind of detailed to-do-before-we-leave lists that serve to remind us our extra-ordinary¹ lives are still buttressed by the everyday and ordinary. The paper must be canceled, as must our poor Dutch imitation of Netflix, the bank must be informed, health insurance suspended and so on and so forth. At some point in the not to distant past, one could work, be paid in cash and then use that to buy bread, milk and DVD’s. Now I can’t even sneeze without it involving an internet connection, a dimly recalled username/password combination and translation confusion whist I attempt to manage ‘mijn account’ or contact ‘klantenservice’. For nomads we have a lot of business to cancel. (more…)