I love Utrecht. It's the oldest city in the Netherlands, and some of the canals are over a millennia old. The cobbled streets are crammed with bicycles and little shops and houses hang out over the canals. You can eat lunch on the walkways running at the edge of the water, buy a pastry from a bakery hidden down a twisty alley, and check out the soaring cathedrals. Which is pretty much how I spent my afternoon.
There must be a lot of demand for pet snot in the Netherlands.
For lunch I stopped at a Turkish restaurant. Mainly to see how "Turkish" was interpreted here. The menu was only in Dutch, but the waitress was really nice and went through all the options with me. I wound up ordering a "hummus plate," which involved (I was told) lots of different kinds of hummus and pita. What I got was a plate of babaganoush, tuna salad, cucumber salad, lots of tasty things--but no hummus. There was no hummus on the hummus plate. Oh well.
There's this awesome little park in Utrecht that used to be a 10th century monastery's cloisters. I love it there. It is always full of beautiful flowers--and it always smells like pot. I took my laptop and worked on my novel there for about two hours.
Then, as I was heading home, I came upon--are you ready for this?--KAYAKING. There was a boating company that let you rent a kayak for about four euros an hour--and go boating on the canals! How cool is that!! So I totally flipped out and rented a kayak. I wound up getting pretty lost and wandering around for about an hour before I heard the thunder. There was no rain--it was actually sunny, with some clouds--but it sounded like it was right above me. So I set about trying to find my way back. Overall, a day well spent!
Houseboats!
This is a prison. No idea there was a prison here!
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