A crazy, crazy 30 hours

4 PM Friday

This Friday Deva and I took off from work a little bit early to go to the Bloemenmarkt, a.k.a. the Flower Market. This is one day a year where everyone who lives in Groningen, as well as many many German tourists, buy all of their flowers and plants for the season. They were even having live auctions! Of course, we bought some, though mostly they were gifts for others.

I also managed to get a beautiful picture of the Martinitoren (the Martini Tower), the most famous landmark of Groningen. They even put a little icon of the tower on the weather page of the local newspaper to represent the city!

8 PM Friday

Then Deva and I went over to Shanti's place for some deeeelicious indian dinner! Her and her friend Satwinder cooked up a storm for us. We were soooo stuffed.

In the pic you can see them making Chipatis. They are made of only flour and water. They have a secret to making them puff up (can you see it?), using only a gas stove and a coat hanger!

That night we stayed over until 4 AM or so, gossiping an chatting like girls do. Then we biked back home to pack for our trip....

6 AM Saturday

We caught the train to go to Keukenhof at sunrise. The view was absolutely fantastic. Here you can see a beautiful blanket of fog covering the fields of the Netherlands, a picture taken from a moving train (and one of my favourites!). It was like being in the skies amongst the clouds.

12 PM Saturday

By early afternoon, we finally arrived at Keukenhof, the famous flower gardens of the Netherlands. It was kind of like disneyland when we first arrived. They had everything there : Musical thing-a-ma-jigs, A windmill, sculptures, lakes, and, of course, flowers.

8 PM Saturday

When we got sick of flowers we went to Amsterdam (whoo hoo!). This really is one of the best cities in the world! It kind of reminded me of everything I like about Groningen combined with everything I like about Montreal. There were a gazillion people on the streets, having fun, taking pictures, visiting bars and sex clubs and food stands.

We basically just wandered around the main areas to explore, no map or anything because that, of coures, would have ruined the spontaneity of the whole visit.

We did, of course, run into the red light district which has penis-posts planted on the sidewalks on the periphery. We even went into the sex museum! I didn't take pictures at the museum so that you can just use your imagination (there really was historical stuff in there as well as the obvious things).

We ate dinner at a yummy Italian pizza place and we explored the China town. We saw campus, and canals, and coffeeshops. All this in a few hours.

And the shoe shopping was amazing, just like Montreal! Can you see something odd about the shoes in the picture? Yup. They are all mismatched yet matched. True artists, those Dutch.

1 AM Sunday

We left on the second last train out of Amsterdam. Unfortunately, however, we were in the wrong train car during a transfer in Zwolle and started heading in a direction that was not Groningen! We ended up having to get off in the teeny city of Meppel in order to turn around. It was cold and miserable waiting for an hour or so. But we kept our spirits up by drinking hot chocolate from the machine and gossiping about boyfriends and the Amazing Race.

We finally got home at 3 AM or so and slept, slept, slept...