Day 3: Windmills, Hobos, and the Day of One Thousand Pictures

Today was another late-ish start. I had trouble falling asleep so we only got out of the apartment at about elevenish. We kept talking about getting over to the Rijksmuseum but had to get food at the grocery store first. There's all kinds of cool stuff, like little chocolate soy milk boxes for one. So cute and refreshing and, as the box advertises, "A source of protein." Not a good source, mind you, but we take what we can get.

Apparently, you have to weigh your own produce at the grocery stores here, so messed that up. Managed to fix it in time and we carried the groceries back to the apartment, which luckily was not far. They don't seem to give out grocery bags here, which is how it should be in my opinion. Unfortunately, I didn't think to pack reusable bags in my backpack, so we carry our food in our arms. That's fine with me.

Have I shown you our train station yet? This is the glass on one side of it.

Here's some graffiti on the side we don't go to since it's for metro only

Casey and the graffiti. Hey, that's a pretty cool band on his shirt there. Have you heard of them? 

We decided we wanted to stay out of the city center today, which turned out to be a good idea. On the train platform, we were accosted by a hobo who spoke particularly good English asking for coins. I went with my go-to "I don't understand you" in Russian, at which point the man bothered Casey, who was carrying our bag of food for the day. He asked us for a sandwich or something, so I offered the man my sandwich. He took it for a second, asked what it was (banana and peanut butter for the protein) and promptly rejected it, which was the most hilarious thing to happen thus far. Homeless Dutch men don't cotton to silly vegan lunches.

The train was jam-packed. Like, we were standing on the stairs and in danger of falling every few seconds. The girls next to me on the train were straight up drinking rum out of paper cups and chatting with an elderly couple who was taking their granddaughter somewhere from the Central Station. I love the trains in Europe. Yes, you're constantly in danger of being pick-pocketed or slamming into someone's gross armpit, but that's how the world is. That's how life is. We're all packed together with one another's disgusting habits and forced to deal with it. At least public transportation here reflects that. Same in Asia, I think.

We ended up North in a little town called Zanse Shaans, which is what I think of as the Dutch equivalent of a frontier town. They had little museums of different traditional Dutch crafts and adorable windmills and canals everywhere. The gardens were lovely and the town you walk through to get to the bridge to cross to Zanse Shaans is a chocolate manufacturing town. The entire place smells like the darkest, most delicious, perfect European chocolate. The air is saturated. Seriously, we kept expecting Willy Wonka to pop out from behind a bicycle somewhere.

There were a large amount of Korean tourists everywhere today. It was nice to see tourists from other countries. There were families, groups, and individuals from all over the world visiting this little Dutch town with all the windmills. Nature was beautiful there and there were farm animals, local food, and the tiny museums were free and very informative. I'd have never thought I'd want to learn so much about clogs or cheese making but I did.

I know that was a massive picture dump but that's about all that happened today. Enjoy the pretty pictures. The last one is a point of curiosity: I see Albert Hijn grocery stores all over here. They're quite convenient and have pretty much everything I would want and anything I could imagine wanting. Fresh bread, fruit and vegetables, raspberry chocolate muesli (a granola-like cereal with real chocolate bits and freeze-dried raspberries--yum!), etc., etc. Is this sign advertising the first Albert Hijn ever or the first one in this tiny town? No idea because by the time we got here, it was after 6, and almost everything around here closes at 5.

Tonight is the World Cup final. I should go to a bar or something to watch it but I'm very tired and we have to go to the Rijksmuseum tomorrow because we're leaving the day after to go to Germany. How quickly the time passes!

Tomorrow, I need to find a post office to mail off all these post cards for people in the States (If you got your address to me before I left, I will send you one. If you didn't, try to contact me via Facebook now and I'll see what I can do ;-) ), go to the Rijksmuseum finally, and do some souvenir shopping. I have a decent sense of where to find somewhat inexpensive products so we'll see how decent of deals I can get. Everything is crazy expensive here. Probably because it's a big tourist town or something.

Peace and love,
Maria