Most of the stores and many of the restaurants in Amsterdam are closed on Sunday. Andy, Jana, Karsten, and Britta wanted to go to the park to break in their new bicycle. I decided to head up to tourist central at Dam square to pass away a few hours.
I walked up and down a many of the side streets between the Dam and Centraal station, grabbing a bite to eat here and there. I didn't have enough time to try some Belgian fries while in Belgium, so I had to settle for the next best things, Flemish fries in Amsterdam. I have to question the thinking of the people who decided to name their food chain "Manneken Pis". For those of you unfamiliar with Dutch, this translates roughly "pissing boy" and is a reference to the infamous statue in Brussels, which also serves as the restaurant's logo. In front of the stand, there is a six foot plastic replica of a cone of fries, which, as it turns out, is fairly close to actual size. I made the mistake earlier in the week of ordering a large, and could barely hold the fries in my hand. I had to throw out the rest of them after eating only about a third of the fries, which was actually much more than I should have eaten. This time I made a much wiser choice and bought a medium.
As I was finishing up my fries, it started to rain. It soon became clear that this would be another heavy rain, so I headed into a souvenir store to pass the time away. At first, I occupied myself with the typical souvenirs, looking at shirts, and wooden shoes, and Delft windmills. This got boring, so I traveled back further in the store to the drug paraphenelia souvenirs. After a while, I briefly passed through the sex souvenirs, but these were rather offensive and I finally decided it was better to walk back out into the rain.
Eventually the rain died down and I made my way to another souvenir shop that I had found earlier in the week. This one had a selection of wooden shoes big enough for me to wear. I spent some time trying to decipher the sizing chart. I wear a slightly unusual size of shoe, so it took me some time to compare the American, British, and European sizes marked on my shoe label to the recommended wooden shoe size. I opted to buy at the upper end of the range, figuring that a wooden shoe wouldn't have quite the same amount of stretch that you would find in a leather shoe. I also picked up a Delft tile painted to look like a Vermeer piece for Jana, who seemed quite interested in the Vermeer paintings at the Rijksmuseum.
This was quite enough adventure for the day. I jumped on a tram and headed back to the apartment, where I was forced to model my new shoes. I expect photos will show up on Jana's Flickr stream any day now. The shoes fit fairly well, I suppose. They were a bit tight to slip on, but a little too loose once my feet were in, but this can probably be corrected with a bit of padding.
It is interesting to note that the French would call these wooden shoes "sabots", and that disgruntled factory workers wearing them, known as saboters, would sometimes express their displeasure by throwing their shoes into the factory machinery, thereby committing sabotage. I am now ready, then, to fully participate in the next revolution.
