Please note this is a coffeeshop, not a café. What’s the difference, you may ask? You get coffee at a café. At a coffeeshop you get weed. (This was not something either of us knew back then, but we weren’t interested in coffee either so we didn’t go in lol I just took the picture for the shop name)

This is the remains of the organ at Our Lord in the Attic, a secret Catholic church from when the Protestants were being mean (and I was still religious at this time). It’s built across the attics of three buildings that are separate further down.

The church/museum is on the edge of the Red Light district, but I certainly was too innocent to notice.

We went on a canal cruise this day, so this is St. Nikolaaskerk from the canal. I like the historic mural on the construction screen.

An old defensive tower with an ornamental top added later.

Tharash had been complaining about the sun in his eyes, I think, so while we were in Amsterdam we went to a hat store because I wanted to get him something. I was looking for a Tilley kind of hat, and they didn’t have them exactly (since it’s Canadian) so I got one of a similar style.

The canal boat is between Amsterdam and Amsterdam Noord; seeing all the different time periods mashed together like this is fascinating

Centraal station

On a new day, I went for a walk with his parents in one of the nature reserves in one of the two hilly areas in the centre of the country. The elevation is caused by ancient glaciation pushing up sand and gravel into huge ridges, which you can see most clearly on satellite images, and it allows for different vegetation than the lower lands, such as this heather and different trees.

The heather was gorgeous and smells like honey

Those mounds are ancient tombs

The sun did come out briefly

One day we went to Marken Island, which is an island a little ways north-east of Amsterdam (connected by bridges for easy access)

The Village of Marken

The organ in the church in the village of Marken

It’s difficult to have right angles and straight lines in a house that’s a few hundred years old and built on basically sand

A pillow- I mean, a sheep

We walked pretty much the whole way around the island on the dike that rings it, while Tharash told me how dikes eventually became the system by while the Netherlands conquered the sea. They didn’t start out that way, they started just by elevating the ground that their homes and villages were built on, but then they began fencing out the water with the dikes, and eventually they went so far as to start making polders from lakes, and at the present it’s culminated in the entire province of Flevoland being claimed from the Ijsselmeer (formerly the Zuiderzee).

This lighthouse is named The Horse (Paard van Marken)

There were a ton of sailboats out that day

On the dike returning to the village

We, um, fed the sparrows with crumbs from our lunch. They were quite threatening. XD

The dunes

Apparently this whole area floods at high tide

Just inside the dunes is farmland

More heather

Taking a rest, because we had just walked about 6km

I love this winding road

At last, the beach. I seem to remember we stopped at a café on the beach for a snack/drink, but the wind was so strong it was blowing a little sand right onto the patio?

Kite-surfers, I think

This bird made us late for the bus.

These tree-tunnels are awesome

It looks like a hill from the outside, but it is actually trees

The bird again

Having to take a later bus, it was dark when we reached the ferry back to the mainland

On a last visit into Amsterdam, I was pretty amazed by the concept of ‘more bikes than people’

I later traced this picture to give it an artistic look

Sunset in Diemen