Amsterdam, The Netherlands – 07/09 – 07/15

(Michelle) Most of time during the days this week, we were trying to find a way around the Russian visa issue. The Russian embassy in the Netherlands will only give a Russian visa to Dutch citizens or other citizens with a Netherlands residency card. We had to do a lot of research and make a lot of phone calls, but by Friday, we finally came up with an answer. We found a visa support company in Paris that would be able to get it for us. Since Paris is only a 4-5 hour train ride, we reserved tickets for a day trip to Paris (we had room on our Eurail pass, so theoretically the ride should have been free, but they like to stick you with the reservations on the Thalys). There are no border checks between the Netherlands, Belgium and France, so we didn’t have to worry about traveling without our passports, since we had to leave them with the company in Paris. They said it would take about a week.
In the evenings, we enjoyed a lot of tasty home cooking, thanks to our hosts. Between my allergies and TJ’s hatred for mayonnaise, we aren’t the easiest people to cook for, but they were very thoughtful about us and we really appreciated them going out of their way to cook some very nice meals.
We also got to peruse the excellent tv selections in the Netherlands, which include comedy central that shows “the Office” here and the North American Sports Network, which showed a lot of baseball (even a couple of live Cubbies games). Nathan also had a selection of tv shows on DVD, like Scrubs and the Simpsons. Just like comedy central back home, after a certain hour the commercials get a bit raunchy. In Chicago you get the “Girls gone wild” video commercials, in the Netherlands you get Kelly from sexwebcam.nl who is a somewhat masculine female with pig tails who likes to be spanked. They also have a mystery channel here that fluctuates between Monk and Magnum P.I., which is kind of an odd mix. Magnum could seriously rival Mike Donovan from “V” as men from the 80s who can fight evil (human or alien reptile) while wearing extremely tight jeans.

(TJ)

-Thayls has the best food on any of the express trains, riding first class was very nice although I felt a little out of place.
-I’ve now been to Paris three separate times on my trip. I should have stayed with the French in high school.
-I’m not as picky of a eater as Michelle and had no problem with any Dutch (excluding the mayo on the fries) or any other cuisine we had in the Netherlands.
-Netherlands has the best fries in Europe, I even found a place you could get cheese fries (extremely rare in Europe) right on the main drag outside the train station. They’re “Lecker”. Do not order the large size ever, its bigger than your skull.
-If you ever run across a rerun on Magnum PI, watch it and reflect on Magnums shorty shorts and think how that was ever attractive and if it will ever be again. Reflect.
-I think I must have watched a good five years of Scrubs on DVD, a good show that I never watched before. I could definitely see the Grey’s anatomy influence in the more recent seasons however, yuck.
-We also saw Mikey from “American Choppers” outside of a coffeshop one day. I’m sure that is a shock for anyone who has ever seen the show.
-Don’t go to the Maritime museum, its closed until 2008, I found this out after riding a bike in the rain for a hour.
-OH KELLY! SPANK ME!!!

(Michelle) Lecker is a Dutch word that means something like tasty and is apparently used to describe hot women, or in TJ’s case, good tasting fries.
TJ is almost as picky as I am, but somehow he thinks he is not. I will defer to TJ’s parents on this one. Bob can tell some stories about going to McDonalds with child TJ that my dad could relate to: “No, a plain hamburger, with nothing on it, just the beef and the bread”.