Weekend of June 6

I hope this is in decent chronological order. I think these are the days when these things happened.

On Friday, as we often do, we walked over to the nearby Pijp district. We checked out a pizza place a friend had clued us in on. It looked delicious, but we decided to take a pass. As we were walking, we found more Laser messages. We continued on and then we ran into the friend who had told us about the pizza place. That night, he was eating at a Surinamese restaurant. We ended up getting take-out from there and it was fantastic.


Surinam is a former Dutch colony located in South America, just north of Brazil. Inexplicably, many of the restaurants that serve Surinamese cuisine serve it in conjunction with Asian cuisine, such as Indonesian or Chinese. This restaurant served delicious food. Warung Spang Makandra, where we ate also served Indonesian, so our meal had that component. We ate noodles, rice, tegg, chicken, coconut vegetables, cooked banana, and a special soup.





Saturday was a pretty laid back day. We made vacation plans at the travel agency. Dan put together Liliane's big girl bed and we went grocery shopping. We also went to a store in the nearby town of Amstelveen that carries a large amount of American products called Kingsalmarkt. I bought some cake mix and Dan picked out some Jiffy corn muffin mix. The products were a few times more than they cost in the US, but it's well worth the markup if it's something you really need.



the dazzling array at Kingsalmarkt

Dan believes these are Penn State knockoffs.

On Sunday, we drove out to the Hague which is about 40 minutes away. We stopped at a flea market along the way and ended up buying some toys for the kids. There was a very interesting table there with German army items from World War II. Had I known more about what I was looking at, I probably would have bought something.

After the flea market, we arrived at our primary destination - Madurodam. Madurodam features all the major landmarks of Holland on a scale of 1:25. It was built in honor of George Maduro, who was a member of the Dutch Resistance during World War II and who died at Dachau. His parents founded it. Madurodam was really interesting since we had been to many of the places featured and it gave us some ideas of places we may want to see. Although it is interesting in and of itself, the main reason we went there is because Madurodam has been featuring Sesamstraat characters for the summer. On alternate days it features Bert & Ernie, or Elmo. Liliane loves them all, so it was fine that Bert & Ernie were the stars that weekend. overview of Madurodam

we are in the reflection

Below is the Rijksmuseum. Through the window is Rembrandt's Nightwatch.

Gouda Cheese Market - couldn't find the exact picture of this that I posted when we went there, so look back to our Gouda postings to compare.



Revelers on boats



Liliane & Amelie in the Sesamstraat car.
Waiting at the Meet & Greet.
Liliane dancing with the broccoli forest in the background.



We got back to Amsterdam at about five and had a jones for some pizza. It was such a beautiful day, we got our pizza, filled our picnic backpack with some wine and chocolate, and met some damn good looking people in Vondelpark. You can see in the background that several hundred people also had the same idea.