Redeeming myself at the ACF

It was raining when we woke up the next morning so we ran into the nearest brasserie. I had a blue cheese steak and Lexi had the duck. After breakfast we went to the card room, but we got there an hour before the poker games started so we wandered the Champs Elysees.

We quickly came to the conclusion that there is nothing we want to buy along the Champs Elysees. All the clothing stores are overpriced high fashion nonsense. One of the mannequins looks like Michael Jackson from the thriller video. It would cost you some 1000 euro for the privilege of looking like Mike in his prime.

Back at the card room, we sat down at the first table to form. Quickly enough the player to my right figured out that I was playing rather tight. He even joked with me about it, which is an attempt to get me to loosen up because he was tired of having to throw away hands to my preflop raises. I didn't loosen up though and instead I started catching some cards. I nearly quadrupled up on a wired pair of aces. When I called a tight preflop raiser and two callers with them, I was slow playing for the benefit of the guy on my right who had called. When the flop came down with 3 nothing cards and two clubs with only a low straight possibility, the original raiser bet half the pot. The other two players called and I raised to twice the bet, to generate more action as I felt I was facing an underpair and two draws and wanted to get more money in. The original raiser went all in. The suspected draws both called and I pushed all in. Then the draws thought a while and called. I was a little worried the original raiser had trips, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't have raised pre flop with any of the wired pairs small enough to make trips. In the end, none of the draws came and the raiser only had wired kings, so I scooped a huge pot, which is a rare pleasure to do with pocket aces. After that, I actually started loosening up my game, which also helped me. A 2, 4 of clubs turned into twos full of fours which was paid off by an ace high flush. An ace high flush of mine was paid off by a queen high flush and so on until I left with nearly 600 euros in profit. I felt good about my play in the second half, though it was clear that my table image was quickly recognized in the first half. This allowed me to shift gears and play some bizarre draws profitibly later on.

We caught the Eurostar to London and walked past the London Eye, Westminister and Trafalgar Square (where there was live jazz) to our hotel just behind the giant neon signs at Piccadilly circus. The hotel felt like Ricketts house. You could hear a large group of people partying it up in one of the rooms as we passed. And the band in the Irish pub in our hotel was playing Green Day covers.

Murphy's law of hotel rooms without their own bathrooms. Once you don't have a bathroom in your room you will always need it. Still the room was clean and the bed was comfortable and we had this great view.


That night we went out to the Horse and Carriage for sandwiches and a pint. There is still no ale like Bombardier

Moulin Rouge

So we had never been to a cabaret before. It was like watching a bad musical where half the cast is topless. They opened with a terrible pop techno ballad. To give you an idea, the chorus was, "Dance Dance Party Dance".

Then came the asian dance montage. First some pirates capture a princess. Then a bunch of snake women conjured medusa. Then Medusa sacrificed a woman to a pond of snakes. This was the coolest bit as it involved a hydraulic pool filled with live snakes and a swimming snake charmer. Then the prince and the princess sang a love song while they were suspended by wires and illuminated with black lights. Then some russian dancers fought some tiger women. Then everybody came on stage for the final number with a bunch of glowing japanese heads.

Each dancing section was separated by a cool variety act. The first were two guys that came out dressed up Matrix style. Then they threw their coats off and did balancing acts as good as you see in Cirque du Soleil. The most impressive was a one hand stand off the other guys head.

Then there was a circus musical montage. There were old fashioned clowns that were neither funny nor agile. Then there were miniature horses the size of german shepherds. I'd never seen horses that small, but still the novelty wore off as the whole bit was just them being walked in circles. Then there were two women in one big dress who did a comedy song about being stuck together (I think). Then there were women dressed as lions and a lion tamer. And once again everyone came out on stage for a big finale. I think they relied way too much on the toplessness

The next variety act was a guy on a 6 foot tall unicycle. He did some incredible balancing tricks. He kept kicking cups and plates on top of his head all while cycling on a platform maybe 4 feet in diameter. It was really cool, but not as cool as the balancing guys.

Then they did the traditional French Can Can. There was the kickline and then individual dancers would come forward to demonstrate that they could kick really high. In all honesty, it teetered between dull and absurd.

The last variety act was a clown with a kazoo, that he used to create sound effects to make it seem like he was driving. He was hilarious. He spoke only in mumbled clown babble from which you could occasionally pull out a french, american or german phrase. He then pulled a bunch of audience members on stage and proceeded to put them through a fake filming of a movie. It was some of the best improv I've seen in ages. In the end, when he put the two men on stage to fighting each other, he walked away with one of the women he pulled on stage. Like most good improv, it's hard to recapture the hilarity in the retelling, but he was great.

The final musical number was a montage of American music. It started with the boogie woogie bugle boy from company B, then transitioned into I will survive, followed by an 80's rock montage that reminded me of Gem (the cartoon created because GI-Joe wasn't selling enough my little ponies). The closing number was a reprise of dance dance party dance.

Apart from the free bottle of champagne and the variety acts, I was not impressed by cabaret. It's a bizarre spectical of a by gone era. Showgirls in big feathered hats just look bizarre. We prefer Cirque du Soleil's modern sense of style and seemingly superhuman performers to the glitz and glam of the cabaret by far. Now that I've seen the real thing, I realize the movie was better.

Riederalp Day 2 - Aletsch Glacier

Lexi and I woke up and picked up a picnic to take up to the glacier. At the top of the chair lift, it is hard to believe that it is summer. It's very cold and a little windy and to your right is a giant sheet of ice. The line from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came to mind about how infinity is rather boring as there are no limits to indicate it's immense proportions while the room that they built planets in seems even larger than infinity as you can see the faint indications of it's end in the distance. The glacier felt that way. Besides the immediate expanse below us, parts of the glacier peeked through gaps in the distant mountains making it seem to stretch across the entire horizon.

Sadly, you can see the difference in height caused by the glaciers recent retreat. If the pace of increasing recession continues as it has in the last few years, the glacier will disappear in just under 2 centuries, a blink in geologic time. Next time someone tells you that global warming is a myth, remember that.


We took a hike down towards the glacier. The terrain was ruggedly beautiful, with gnarled little trees crawling out between the rocks. The altitude wasn't an issue on the way down, but the way back up was another issue. It took us twice the time to go back up.

We took another few trips down the cart run on our return before we went to get our massages at the spa. While waiting for Lexi, I relaxed in the hot tub with the alps stretching out behind the window. Then I moved to the hot tile recliner, a heated lounge chair also with a great view.

The massage was nice, though the masseuse didn't use enough force. I prefer deep muscle massages. The masseuse was good at foot massages though, which made up for a lot.

The train ride back was also very relaxing. We munched on chocolate, salami, cheese and bread as we watched the alps fly by.

Riederalp Day 1

After some searching, I found a place in Riederalp, a tiny town high up in the Alps. It's right next to the Aletsch glacier (the longest glacier in the Alps). The train wound through the mountains, past tiny villages perched precariously on steep slopes. We even passed a high altitude soccer field. After a transfer in Brig, we caught the cable car up to Riederalp. Most of the others on the cable car were natives. It must be amusing for them to watch the tourists, for whom the novelty of riding a cable car to a mountain village is still very strong. For them it's just the morning commute. They just ran out of Schoko Bons (a delicious Nougaty Treat) or something and had to go to the big store at the bottom of the hill.


We stayed at the Hotel Resort Alpenrose. It's basically a hotel with one masseus, a hot tub, sauna, steam room, heated tile recliners and an adventure shower. Now I have to admit, I was curious what the hell an adventure shower is. It turns out it's a tiny booth that looks like a teleporter from Star Trek. You step inside and press one of three buttons and depending upon your selection you are belted with luke warm to cold to incredibly hot water at random intervals from all directions. This conflagration is accompanied by the sound and light show in the style of A) Pale Green Lighting to the tune of Jungle birds and Monkeys B) A Simulated Thunder Storm or C) something that I can only describe as a Volcanic Eruption. Needless to say, the novelty of the adventure shower wears off fast, that is unless you're a hip hop video director "bling, bling".

After dropping off our stuff, Lexi and I started up the hill. We quickly realized how much harder hiking at altitude was, but we pushed upward until we came across a herd of cattle. It was a little intimidating. Even swiss cows have horns and they are pretty huge. When we showed up, the whole herd looked at us. For a second I thought that they somehow knew about that doner kebab I had last week and wanted payback for their fallen brother. But they quickly turned back to eating their grass. It was so cold that their breath threw up big clouds of steam. Whenever the herd moved, it sounded like a broken cuckoo clock being rolled down a hill. As we started back down the hill, the two closest cows started to follow us. They looked so sad waiting around the gate.


After we went climbing we stopped at the bunny slope, which you can ride carts down in the summer. They have this great sled cart with two wheels in the front, which you steer by leaning left or right on the chassis, which turns the front axle. As silly as it sounds, it was so fun I went down again.

For dinner we had an array of fondues and raclette. The pear and ham fondue was the best, but the mushroom and cheese fondue was also very good. For desert we had chocolate sundaes. There weren't many people around. I guess the tourist season starts a little later. It was pretty nice having a resort town pretty much to ourselves.

London Day 4 - The Second London Bombings

We woke up and checked out of our hotel and then caught a bus down to the tower of London. On the way to the Tower, Mandy found out that her LCD screen on her camera had somehow been broken. It was a shame as she had gone through a lot of trouble in Paris to find the charger to use the camera.

I stayed outside of the tower with the luggage as there was nowhere to check it in. While I was waiting for them, I picked up a baguette sandwich and fed the birds for a while. The pigeons were too slow to get anything from the little brown and black birds that were all over. There was one of the small birds that was so fast that he would jump up and catch the bread before it even hit the ground. I tried to fake him out, but he wouldn't go for it. He just kept hopping around and squawking at me like he was screaming, "Bring it".

After mom and Mandy had finished their tour of the tower, we caught the RV1 back to to Waterloo station. As we walked into the station, I saw a Reuters report about an underground station being closed for some reason. I figured it was just another closing like the ones we had seen earlier.

We got to Paris and stopped to eat at a little cafe outside of the Paris Est station as Mom and Mandy were both fighting a little bit of a cold and were rather tired. I had sausages and french fries, mom had a chicken salad, and mandy had a ham hock with potato salad that was really good. While we were waiting for our meals to come out, this man walked by our table, took a roll out of our bread basket and said Merci. Not only did he not look like a bum, but the roll he had taken out of our basket was the one I had already taken a bite out of, when I was joking with Mandy that I needed to mark my roll so I didn't catch any of their colds. He was just lucky that he didn't grab the one that Mandy had licked, or he would have been cursing the Americans and their infected bread.

It wasn't until we stopped into the hotel bar at the Accor for some white wine that we found out that there had been a second series of attempted bombings in London right before we had gone to Waterloo station. One was on the 26 bus line, which operated in the same area as the bus we took to waterloo station. We could have easily been on that bus if we had been just a block over from where we caught the RV1. I had the horrible thought that the father from the tour the other day, who had been paying for cabs instead of taking public transit in London, was probably thinking, "I told you so". It didn't change my mind about going to London and when Lexi heard about it, she too was still willing to go and was willing to ride public transit. You can't feel threatened when you travel in first world nations because of the fear of terrorists acts. Whether you stay where you live or travel abroad, you're still at risk so why change your habits just for them.

London Day 3 - Stonehenge

On our 3rd day in London, we took a tour out to stonehenge. Our tour bus was a little mercedes minivan with comfy seets for about 15 people. Besides Mom, Mandy and I there was a family of 3 from Michigan.

We stopped in Avesbury first, where the standing stones are located. They mark out a magnetic field, which you can see using two L-Shaped metal rods. The rods cross over each other at the point where you are crossing the field. The stones weren't the only attraction, the village itself was beautiful and there were herds of sheep and cows all around as well as a crop circle. The villagers had put a 50 gallon drum covered by a lid with a slot in it for visitors to donate pounds. Our guide mentioned that the "aliens" might choose to make crop circles in fields that might not net as much profit as a tourist attraction. I'm not much for crop circles or aliens, but I found walking through the field of wheat very calming. Everything was so slow and serene. It was very soothing.

We continued on across more serene countryside. There were 2 helicopters in the sky, circling the various crop circles, filled with photographers who had payed 300 pounds each for the privilege, according to our guide. There was a horse carved into the chalk hillside in one town we passed. Apparently, the horse dates back several hundred years. Apparently someone imitated the artist who had been going around carving horses for villages. He took 50 gold coins from the town and then left after finishing the head of the horse. He was later caught and hung in the town square for his thievery and the villagers completed the horse.

We then passed a group of train spotters hanging out on a bridge in the middle of nowhere waiting for the Flying Scotsman, which was running 40 minutes late. When they talked about trains, they sounded like me talking about poker. "I remember when the Scotsman ran to hot and warped the rails back in August of 87". "I picked up a set of 7 Steam Train DVDs off ebay. Some Canadian chap was selling the lot for 30 pound." and so on. It really doesn't get much more English than this, one of the spotters told us, when he found out we were on vacation from the states.

We then went to Stonehenge, which is out in the middle of this field all by itself. There is a little tourist center and shop with a tunnel going under the road to the rocks. Despite the touristy trappings, the stones themselves still exude a certain ancient mystique. The fact that these huge rocks were hewn from sometimes hundreds of miles away and carried back to this spot for reasons that are still debated today left my mind spinning while I admired them. Why did they carry the rocks from so far away. What would motivate ancient man to complete such a herculean task which spanned several hundred years in its making. Mom and Mandy and I were able to get a few pictures taken before the rain kicked up and we had to seek shelter in the tunnel.

After stonehenge, we went to the nearby village and ate at the local pub. I had the roast again and mom and Mandy had the meat pies. The food was good and the beer was much cheaper than in London. it was only 2 pounds for a pint, where London beer regularly costs 4 pounds. Hand pumped cellar cooled ale is really tasty. I was a little skeptical about warm ale, but it is so good. The ale is flavorful enough that it works at slightly warmer temperatures. It's not as carbonated as cold lagers we're used to in America, but that also works better with the warmer serving temperature. Over lunch, we found out that the family that was taking the tour with us, was not taking the tube while in London as they were worried about the bombings. They had been taking cabs everywhere, which must have cost them a fortune. Cab rides of decent length were averaging us about 15 to 20 pounds each.

When we were finished with lunch, we went to the Salisbury Cathedral. There they have the original Magna Carta, which I finally saw in person after hearing about it in all those high school history books. There is a lot of ridiculous etcetera that accompanies the historically important precedents. Perhaps the most egregiously profane of these is the line that states that a husband may only beat his wife with a cane no larger in diameter than his pinky. Back when it was written, it was all the etcetera that people cared about more than the important precedents it set. It was more of a practical solution to what was viewed as a temporary political problem.

We hung out in the town a while and got some gelato and chocolate and then we were back on the bus to go home. The driver got a call from his company, who asked him to drop off the van somewhere far from the other families hotel so he asked them if he could drop them off near a tube station they could reach their hotel from. I don't know whether he had not heard them at lunch or was specifically forgetting to get back at them for being too scared to take the tube. Eventually he gave in and took them to their hotel, telling the rest of us afterwards that anyone who lives their life that scared is already dead. I understood the fathers concern for his family, but I also agreed with the tour guide in that you aren't living if you're living scared. The father's concerns would be proved correct the next day though.

After we got home and had some decent but not outstanding Indian food, mom and Mandy went to bed as Mandy was fighting a cold and mom's foot was bothering her after a day full of walking, so I caught a double decker bus to the Gutshot Poker Collective. There was only Pot-limit available so I set down 70 pounds and proceeded to fold a bunch of busted draws. When I was at about half my stack, I caught a flush with my suited ace and tripled up. Then I doubled up on trip 8s that survived a flush on the board. Then in the only hand that I won using any skill, I broke a player with a double backdoor Ace high flush. I had raised the pot before the flop with an Ace Jack offsuit and was called by the aggressive player who was steaming from an earlier loss to me. The flop had two hearts but didn't hit me so I checked and so did he. Figuring that he must have missed the flop as he bet every pot that was checked to him, i bet the minimum on the turn as another heart came out as a sort of defensive semi bluff, figuring to be raised if he hit his flush and he called. When another heart came out, giving me the nut flush, I quickly bet the pot to pretend like I was bluffing in the hopes he had a decent diamond and had called with a weaker flush draw on the turn. Luckily he had a queen of hearts and called all in. At this point I had nearly quintupled my stack so I decided to leave as I was getting tired and we had to leave the next day for France.

Le Cinq

I had the best meal of my life in Paris on Sunday. We went to Le Cinq (at the George V Four Seasons hotel) for lunch. A small mix-up about the location left Andrew and me waiting for the others in the restaurant's waiting area, which gave me time to admire the decor. There are these little bamboo things, and chairs that make you sit up straight, and lots of ornate ceiling decorations. Also, "smart casual" means "sure, the ladies can wear khakis and button-down shirts, but sir, please borrow the house jacket".

I was going to say that this was a six-course meal, but I realized I'm not sure how many actual separate courses there were, because food kept arriving. We ordered from the market suggestions menu, so that's definitely three courses there, but there was a starter of cucumber gazpatcho with little poofy pastries containing brie. Yummy! And we were offered chocolate on at least three separate occasions. My first course was tuna belly with tabouleh salad, which I wouldn't have ever guessed would go together. (The other choice - salmon with green jellylike stuff around it - was tasty too.) I had the entree of beef carpaccio, which was good except that I think I might not be a huge carpaccio fan. Between all of us at the table there were also chicken and goat entrees, which had really interesting sauces. We ate all the chocolate that was offered to us (chocolate rice pudding; squares of chocolate; coffee that involved chocolate; boxes of chocolate), and it was all good. What sets this restaurant apart from other fancy places I've been is the level of service. The waiters ancipated everything and kept all my wine glasses full. This was just a fantastic experience all around.

Afterwards we went to the Louvre, which is a lot harder than it sounds if you've had that much wine. We revisited part of the renaissance wing and saw part of the Greek sculpture wing before the museum closed.

London Day 2

On the second day in London, we decided to take it easy as all the standing at the museum the previous day had been hard on moms foot. So we took a double decker bus which we caught right outside of our hotel to the British library.

The library has an old copy of the Magna Carta, An early Shakespeare folio and my favorite, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible. The Gutenberg Bible is one of the earliest works to be printed through a 2 sided printing process. It represents one of the great leaps in connecting common people with the written word. Before the printing process developed by Gutenberg, a copy of the bible would have to be written by hand, which took 3 years and cost 500 gold pieces (about 2.5 houses). The Gutenberg bible was created in 3 months (along with several other copies in the same batch) for only 1oo gold pieces. That drop in price would lead to further drops in price that eventually got us to the five dollar paperback and fifty cent newspaper that we take for granted today. In Civilization, the Gutenberg Bible is an early wonder you can build to gain a bonus in research and religious revenue and it was remarkable to see a real copy.

We were almost going to leave, when we got drawn into a conversation with a friend of the British Library. Now, I went to my mom's library often so I have met many a friend of the library. They are typically elderly people who have a passion for books and are eager to share it. As friends of the library go, the Friends of the British Library are the Big League Championship team. This guy knew his history, down to the funding disputes over the various wings. We could hardly pull ourselves away in time to catch a bus and a cab (as we were going to be late) to Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

I had bought some tickets to the Theater so that Mom could do something that would keep her off of her foot for a while so it could heal. The play we saw was Pericles Prince of Tyre. I stood with the groundlings at the front of the stage and Mom and Mandy sat in the bottom set of seats. The groundling tickets are just 5 pounds and you even get pulled into the show. In the second half, the pimp of Mitaline was trying to sell his girls to a guy next to me. He kept asking for 50 euros and the guy was holding up 50 pence. As a joke, I held up my credit card and the actor grabbed it and motioned the girls towards me. The whole theater laughed. He then went over to the other side of the stage and tried to sell my credit card to someone else. Finally in a later lull in the play, he came over and gave me the card back. This kind of playful interaction with the audience and the dramatic interpretations of the shipwrecks and the tournament of Knights gave me an insight into Shakespeare's works that I hadn't experienced before. Many shakespeare plays that one sees in movies or in traditional theater settings are essentialist interpretations, which focus on his timeless prose. There are other parts of his plays that were written to satisfy the demands for dancing, baudy humor and dramatic catastrophies, which audiences of his day demanded. At the globe theater, they still use these parts of his plays to full effect. They have series of ropes hanging all over the theater, even down along the fronts of the seats, where the actors would climb and swing holding different corners of a makeshift sail, turning the whole theater into a ship tossed by an angry sea. Its such a very personal experience, especially among the groundlings, where actors speak to you when they are not immediately involved in the play.

Unfortunately Mandy had to leave halfway through the play as she wasn't feeling well. So mom and I went out to chinese food after the play. The place was a bit pricey, but they didn't use any MSG and the dishes were prepared very simply and all the ingredients tasted very fresh.

Mom went back to the hotel and I went out to visit a few pubs I had wanted to see. I stopped at the salt bar first, with over a hundred whiskies available. I tried a tamnavulin, which was light and malty and a sherry casked, highland malt which was pretty forgetable. The bartender and I had a great conversation about American Bourbons, which he is a huge fan of. They even had peychauds bitters, which are nearly impossible to find in the states. After the salt bar, I caught the tube to Leicester square as Covent Gardens station was closed and walked over to the lowlander, a dutch and belgian beer bar. Unfortunately, the bar was only tables so there was no place to stand and chat. But I took a seat at a table on my own and found that they had Rodenbach. I had been searching for Rodenbach since I was told back in LA that they no longer produced it. It's a wonderfully tart red double fermented belgian ale. I found out that the brewery had just been bought out, not closed down and now the new company was producing the beer again. I'll have to find a way to get it shipped to the states. After the lowlander, I walked back to the horse and carriage for another sandwich and then caught the tube home.

We spent a lot of time on Saturday walking through Paris. We arrived in Paris a little before 0700 and took the metro most of the way to our hotel in the 6th, walking the last few blocks. This early on a Saturday morning the city looks pretty dead - no chocolate croissants to be found whatsoever. The bakeries don't open until a little later, and no one's out on the street except for sanitation workers putting out new trash bags. (Paris has an interesting take on the "design a trash can for a city street corner" interview problem: wire hoops with bags hanging from them.) Anyway, after dropping off the bags we got a good walk through some historical sites and even found a little farmer's market. The market had everything: all kinds of meat, cheese, chocolate bits, sandwiches; even shoes for ten euros. After nibbling, we went to wander around a shopping district near Montparnasse. After some walking and shopping, it was time to escape the heat by eating baguettes in the shade at the park (luxembourg palace something-or-other? It's big). I snagged a copy of the new Harry Potter book on the way.

I figured I'd be the only dork reading Harry Potter in the park while eating lunch, but no - there were at least four others. Plus there was a high school band putting on a show. After hanging out in the park for a while, we visited an assortment of chocolateries in the neighborhood (chocolate should not taste like flowers!) and went back to the hotel to check in and shower.

After a quick trip to the card room, during which I made the single most expensive mistake I have ever made at a card table, Andrew and I met up with the others at the Eiffel Tower for dinner. We opted not to wait in the super-long line to go up the tower and took a river cruise instead. (As it turns out, there's a skyscraper at Montparnasse Bienvenue that's almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower, cheaper to visit, and has no line, so we did that on Sunday. Plus, from there, the Eiffel Tower is part of the skyline.) The river cruise was neat - we'll post some goofy pictures once Andrew gets back to a computer - and at the end, the Eiffel Tower lit up with lots of blinky white lights. I don't know if this is just for Bastille Day or if it happens all year round, but it's pretty bright - I can't imagine living around there with it blinking that much.

London Day 1

It's been a long time since I updated as we've been travelling, but here goes.

On Monday we checked out of our hotel and took the metro to Gare du Nord to board the chunnel train. The check in is like a sped up airline checkin and we even got stamps on our passports, which hadn't happened to me on any of my travels before. The trip was only about 2 and a half hours. The time through the chunnel is only 20 minutes or so of a lot of ear popping.

On our arrival, we picked up some 3 day travel cards, which gave us free access to all the tube and bus systems in London and took the tube over to our hotel. Unfortunately, the closest station to our hotel, Queens Park, was closed for renovations so we got off at Lancaster Gate, right across from Hyde park.

We stopped at the first pub we saw, I forget the name, but it had Goose in it. Mandy and mom got Fish and Chips and I picked up the roast of the day. The Guinness did taste better than in the states, but it might have been the psychosomatic effect of drinking it at an actual London Pub.

After lunch, we walked to our hotel. The room was not much to look at, but we had a second story view of Hyde Park which was really stunning. It was so stunning that we went for a walk right after we dropped off our bags.

Hyde park is huge and its design is interesting. Only the areas right next to the walking paths are mowed, the rest of the huge expanses of the park are tall grass and scattered, untrimmed trees. The untrimmed grass is a welcome change from Paris, where most of the parks have dirt paths and fenced off grass that you can't walk on. We made our way from the northwest corner to the southeast corner of the park. On our way we came across the serpentine gallery, a free art museum near the middle of the park. There are a lot of free museums in London. Even the British Museum and the British Library are free. The serpentine gallery is not as large or as majestic as those museums, but its selection of ultramodern displays are really cool. One display was a working household, where people were living and sleeping in plain view of hundreds of visitors. It was the epitome of life as art. My favorite exhibit is a giant wooden jigsaw puzzle of about a thousand pieces, which you can sit down and work on. The puzzle is a picture of a black and white design which is devilishly similar all over. I could have sat there all day and worked on that puzzle. After the serpentine gallery, we walked along the lake in the park and came across the Princess Diana memorial fountain. I'm not a Princess Di fanatic, but I came across a short article on the checkered history of her memorial fountain. At its unveiling, the fountain was accused of looking like a sewer drain, which admittedly, it does. It is a short granite half tube which curves in a circle. The goal of the designer was to capture Diana's friendliness and willingness to accept people of all backgrounds. However, the smooth granite fountain was too smooth and many early visitory slipped and hurt themselves. The granite also started growing a lot of algae and mold. After a while, they had to hire a team of workmen to carefully rough up the granite and treat it so it didn't grow so much crud on it. There was no algae on it when I saw it, but even though I'm not much for royal majesty, it didn't look majestic enough.

After the park, we caught the tube over to Westminister station, which we left right before they closed the station temporarily. We saw a K9 police vehicle pulling up. There was probably a bag left somewhere according to a local paper seller who overheard us debating what might have happened. Right across from Westminister station is Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Big Ben is really a sight to see. Standing alongside the houses of parliament the whole area has a feeling of imperialism and industry of a bygone era. My lifetime of playing Civilization made me really want to click on it and watch little political envoy units pop up.

We walked to St. James park and went to the Cabinet War Rooms museum. These rooms were the actual bomb shelter that Churchills war cabinet used to fight World War 2. It has been preserved in the same state that it was back then. They have the actual tables they met in to plan the assault on Normandy. The international telephone that connected Churchill with the American Presidents was kept in a locked room that used to be a lavatory. As the rest of the shelter had no flushing toilets, many were convinced that it was the only flushing toilet and that PM Churchill refused to let anyone else use it. The most incredible piece in the museum for me was the map where they tracked the transport convoys from America. There were thousands of pin holes, which held little cardboard ships with the number of ships in the convoy. It must have been the most depressing job in the war room, constantly erasing the number of ships and writing the new number as the convoys were attacked by u-boats.

After the museum, we walked up to Trafalgar Square. I just love places like this where there are hundreds of people just hanging out, eating lunch by the fountains, feeding the pigeons, climbing on the statues, chasing the pigeons and so on. There aren't enough communal city areas like this built now-a-days, but then again there are few history changing naval victories against Napoleon happening now-a-days to require the building of city squares.

We walked from trafalgar square up towards Soho but stopped in an internet cafe when it started raining heavily. Internet cafe's are only 50 pence a half hour. Mom sent off a quick email to dad and I started, but didn't finish this post.

From the internet cafe we walked past the gala opening of Fantastic Four, with huge TV screens and fire spouts, and on to the Horse and Carriage on Greek street. It's a great pub, with hand pumped Bombardier Ale (my favorite English Ale now) and homemade sandwiches for 1 pound each. These sandwiches provided a perfectly delicious counterpoint to our high priced lunch at Le Cinq in France. There was a very friendly English chap who talked with us over a pint while he was waiting for his mates. He asked if we had been on the tube and he was glad to hear that we were. He suggested that we need to get out of London to really get a feel for what its like to be English.

After the sandwiches, we caught a little black London cab over to the London Eye, the giant ferris wheel hung over the Thames. We happened to get the ride right at sunset, so we watched as the lights came on all over London. You ride in these big glass capsules with air conditioners, which we didn't need but must be nice during the rest of the summer. Big Ben still dominates your field of view as you look across London, though the high rises spread much farther than they seemed to in Paris and are a sight in and of themselves.

We caught the tube back to Lancaster and walked home to our hotel exhausted from a full day.

Cobblestones

I'd always thought of cobblestones as being "old". Like in the movies, when someone's riding an old-school heavy black bicycle up a cobblestone path, to the sound of accordions. Today when I left the house there was a construction crew working on the cobblestones on the street near our house. These cobblestones (before the construction) looked perfectly new. So that got me thinking - does that mean there's a market somewhere for cobblestones that are very modern, in the construction sense, but look old? Once the workers laid down the new cobblestones, you couldn't tell there was construction at all because it blended in so well. So what I want to know is, why do they re-pave the street with cobblestones instead of brand new industrial strength pavement? Is it just because pflugstrasse was always cobblestones and thus always shall be cobblestone? cause that would be funny, if in a hundred years there's little flying cars ("It's the twenty first century. Where are my flying cars?") and they're flying on top of cobblestones.

But the thing where you ride an old bicycle up a cobblestone alley, to te sound of accordions - that's surprisingly soothing. There's pigeons too, who have been socialized to stand still and demand food, and lots of people on foot who won't get out of the way, but otherwise it's fun. Thump thump thump *ding ding ding* thump oooooh there's schoggi-crepes screeeech mmm. Yesterday morning I acquired a chocolate croissant without speaking a word of English (hey, not by pointing and gesturing wildly, either).

My morning routine has become something like "buy a croissant from the restaurant for a franc / bike downhill to work / write some code / eat lunch with people / think about email"
Croissants for breakfast and a fifteen minute bike ride to work? Couldn't ask for much better.

UN and International Red Cross in Geneva

On monday I took a nice 3 hour train ride into Geneva. The swiss countryside is beautiful. Within the first hour I already understood why there is so much cheese, white wine and wheat beer in Zurich. One nice side effect of the trip was that I left behind the storm in Zurich for clear skies in Geneva. It was a little odd to get out of the train at another city in the same country and suddenly find everyone speaking French. I left the hauptbahnhof but I arrived at the Gare.

I took a cab to the UN as I wanted to make sure I caught the last tour before my train back. The UN office in Geneva is a lot older than the New York offices and is more focused on the research and support activities and less on the politics,which mostly happen in New York. The building was the home for the League of Nations, before it was dissolved and drawn into the UN. There are all this great 1920s and 30s architecture and art around the building. The chamber where they outlawed the antipersonal landmine was done by a great Spanish artist, who worked in the themes of freedom, technological advancement, economic prosperity and peace into giant murals throughout the room. The ceiling has a picture of five figures, representing the five continents, all grasping hands in solidarity. It was really moving.

The book store had a great variety of international statistics. I browsed for about a half hour through topics that are so dull that they would make your eyes roll into the back of your head. Selected studies in comparative industrialization strategies in developing countries in East Asia was one of the medium sized titles for these reports. I picked up a book on the WTO and it's role in global governance before I left. The WTO was once a part of the UN but broke away when it realized it had actual power and could enforce decisions with real consequences.

Across from the UN office in Geneva was the Museum of the international Red Cross. It is a small museum, but the story it tells is very moving. There is a huge library of index cards, each one representing a prisoner of war from WWI. They have the care packages delivered to WWII POWs. The most moving display is a room covered with pictures of orphaned children from the genocide in Rwanda. Their latest display was a collection of photographs from the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, which were hard to look at. They presented the more graphic images of the war that you don't see on CNN, including people cleaning up bomb sites and a half melted Iraqi soldier. Seeing these images, you just wish that the whole conflict could end.

It was a bittersweet experience to see the hope that the UN represents and all the atrocities the red cross has intervened in. With the nation state weakening in the face of international companies, there is a need to develop a functioning system of international governance to guarantee that the emerging global marketplace protects individual rights. Terrorism is in effect an attempt to rebuke globalization. Extremist religious sects don't want to be part of a global community, they don't want to accept the cultural changes necessary to compete in the new global economy, and they resent the poverty that has resulted from their refusal to adapt. China and India were also impoverished, but were willing to change are flourishing in the new global market. In part the difference may be due to the abundance of oil in the middle east. There is no reason to adapt when you have a steady stream of income from natural resources. Unfortunately, those resources have been controlled in such a way that few people share in their revenues. China and India have not had the same store of natural resources to derive an income, they have had to rely on productivity and innovation to compete. But I digress. In general the global economy is not just about sharing market revenues across more places. Every country that increases its ability to compete grows the market which helps everyone. If we can bring the rest of developing world up to speed while averting the looming energy crisis with more investment in alternative fuels, quality of life world-wide should improve.

New Words

Thanks to Batman Returns and War of the Worlds, I now have a slightly bigger German vocabulary:

tot: dead
fledermaus: bat
toeten: kill
ausrotten: exterminate
Waffe: weapon
Krieg: war
Halluzination: hallucination
Panzer: tank

and I know that "kampf" has several shades of meaning, from "struggle" to "life's mission". So there is some good in going to the movies after all.

Actually, I enjoyed Batman a lot. Did you notice that whenever he wore the bat suit, the complexity of his sentences was reduced? That was pretty funny.

War of the Worlds failed to live up to my imagination. See, in my imagination, aliens are capable of basic project planning, and have good structural engineering skills. So, instead of burying spindly-three-legged machines below the ground and waiting for humans to evolve before engaging them in combat, they would just squish a settlement into the primordial goo and be done with it. Or at least have space rays of doom.

Not a great weekend

Lexi and I woke up late on Saturday and went down to the longstreet carnival to get some lunch. Though the ads showed that it would start at 2pm, not much was happening when we arrived at 3pm. We were able to find a sausage and a crepe for breakfast, which were so filling we had to take shelter at the cinema and watch War of the Worlds. We would come back after the film to see if things had ramped up at the carnival by then. The movie was about what I expected. Tons of pretty CG city demolotion which was hard to see with Tom Cruise always getting in the way.

First bad thing. After the movie, I got an IM from the coordinator of the New in Zurich meetup group. I was expecting it to be the address for the dinner event that night, but instead it was a message to let me know he had cancelled my membership in the group because there wasn't a good fit. Lexi and I were floored. We had a great time talking with Paul and Candace at the last event and as far as I could tell, they had fun too. Candace was even trying to get us to go back to the Netherlands with her and Delia sometime. We hardly even spoke to the organizer that night, as we were sitting at the other end of the lounge. There wasn't anything we could figure out that we did that was so horribly wrong that he would kick us out of the group. Maybe there is some cultural misstep we made without knowing it. Still, the sting of rejection clouded the rest of the evening as much if not more than the gathering rain clouds.

We wandered the street fair, which wasn't much more than alcohol, food and souvenir venders mixed in among a bunch of DJs playing techno or American rap. No one was dancing yet. People all seemed to be huddled into groups. We weren't feeling very social by then so we went home.

Once we got home, we decided we would try to go to St. Gallen early. They advertised a Texas holdem contest on sunday on their website and they also said they had a table of texas holdem at the casino so we figured we'd get in an extra night of play before the tournament the next day. Well, once we got to St. Gallen and checked into a pricey hotel room (the price of being spontaneous) we went down to the casino. There was one, empty, roped-off poker table. The floor manager explained that they don't have any players for open play so they only use the table for tournaments. And as they only have one table the tournament the next day was full (should've called first-Doh!).

We went back to our hotel room, which was totally IKEAfied and watched them evacuating Birmingham England on CNN and British news (the only English stations).

After a good nights sleep (the bed was very comfy and came with 2 blankets so there was no blanket tug of war as we usually have) we woke up and went down to have breakfast in the Hotel restaurant. The restaurant turned out to be really nice. There was live piano music and the buffet (which was all you could order) was great. There was chocolate mousse, sushi, sausages, croissants, watermelon, and a roast ham rapped in bacon. It was all really good and some prosecco was included as well.

We wandered down museumstrasse afterwards and went to 2 museums. One had some nice local landscapes, some disappointing modern canvases (all one color, black with a white dot, green with one line of tan across it, etc.), and a room full of TVs all playing one of 3 videos to a soundtrack that sounded like someone took a muddy waters harmonica riff, merged it with the death rattle of a sea lion, and scratched it to the rhythm of a bad break-beat trip hop mix. It was so monumentally bad that it was actually entertaining.

The other museum had a bunch of swiss history and some artifacts from other cultures as well. In the courtyard of this museum, they were setting up for a concert that was part of a culture festival, but it was raining so much that the band was playing to the beer venders only.

We caught a train back to Zurich and joined the rest of the Zurichers at the Migros Supermarket under the train stations (most every other food store is closed on Sunday). We picked up some bratwurst and baguettes for dinner and went home to (ironically) play some poker.

Not a total waste of a weekend, but still some severe let downs. According to the Swiss culture book I read, making friends is not something the swiss take lightly. It takes a lot of time but then you have a friend for life, so claims the book. Americans, on the other hand, our immediately chummy with folks, opening up about almost everything very quickly with people, which the Swiss find frivolous and off-putting. They book uses the metaphor of the coconut and the peach. The Swiss are like the coconut, hard to crack and a bit rough on the outside, but really sweet once you get to know them. And Americans are like peaches, immediately sweet and soft but a little too runny for some people. I had not seen anything to confirm this and in fact found many of Lexi's Swiss coworkers to be quite friendly and talkative upon first meeting them, but now I wonder if cultural factors like these led to our expulsion from the meetup group.

Hanging with the Meetuppers

We joined two different meetup groups. The New in Zurich group and the American Expatriate group. This past Wednesday we met up with the New in Zurich group at a bar in the Oerlikon area. The bar was a converted industrial warehouse with cranes and boilers and other manufacturing equipment still strewn about. The decor was best described as crome Ikea and the panels behind the bottles slowly changed color.

The meetup group was a nice bunch. A girl from Fresno, who's doing some type of executive assistance job while trying to get her swiss citizenship (One of her parents is Swiss). Another girl, who once lived in LA, but has been travelling the world for a while and moved here with her boyfriend who owns a travel company. There was an Irish IT consultant, who drank (no stereotyping or joking here) 5 double Jamesons without it seeming to effect him at all. It was a diverse group and it was a lot of fun to hang with them.

There has been a bit more rain lately, but I still got out to hike at least, and I've kept up with my exercises all week. While exploring the restaurants on the Zagat list, I came across Rive Gauche, where the bar has over 100 single malt whiskies. Sadly their selection seems to be underappreciated as the Swiss businessmen who came in to the bar only seemed to order wine or gin and tonics. I tried the Strathisla 1960, which was pretty good with mild overtones of malt and rich fruits.

Shoes!

While we were in Amsterdam last weekend, I bought new shoes.

No, seriously, this was a moumental occasion for me. I'm a one-pair-of-shoes type of person. Or, one pair of street shoes and a pair of nice shoes for special occasions, and a pair of softball cleats. Anyway, I'd had these street shoes for a long time. I ran miles in these shoes every day for months when I first wanted to lose weight, before a trainer suggested that I get real running shoes. I wore these shoes to a Bob Dylan concert, to a ball game when Barry Bonds hit his 666'th home run, to the NASDAQ on the day of the IPO, to poker games in three states and two countries. The fabric had been worn off the insides of these shoes, and there were holes in the soles. I could feel the bumps of the cobblestones of the back streets of europe through these shoes, and when it rained the left shoe was squeaky.

But, when it rained I could also feel very wet and cold, and thus I was convinced to buy new shoes. We found an "alternative culture" shop in Amsterdam that carried skate shoes (go figure!) and I picked up a brand-new pair of brown Vans. They're super comfy, dry, and don't squeak, and I think cheaper than in the states, but I miss the bumps of the cobblestones.

Belvoir Park

It's been rainy in Zurich. Every day it rains atleast a little bit. Atleast it's a lot cooler and by the time the clouds part in the late afternoon, it's really beautiful and the air is so crisp and fresh that you forget the grey morning altogether.

On our first day back, I spent the whole day blogging about Amsterdam and doing my usual workout and a quick bit of shopping. That evening we went back to this little fondue place, raclette staub. They have a very simple menu, 3 cheese fondues, 1 meat fondue, and raclette. We tried another of their cheese fondues, one with vacherin cheese only, no oil or wine. It was a little thicker, with a slightly nuttier flavor than the typical emmental, vacherin, oil and wine blend.

Yesterday, I explored the theatre district and found out about a skateboard competition this Saturday here in Zurich. I'm going to try to get Lexi and I some tickets. I bought a hiking back pack because I needed to be able to carry groceries and such on my bike and I needed something to take on the trip to England. I spent a little time in the bookstore, reading up on Swiss wine country, there is a section near Geneva, accessible by train, that seems to have the highest concentration of Swiss wineries. If we end up having a free weekend we might check it out. I also found out that we will be in Zurich for the infamous street parade in August. It's supposedly bigger than the love parage in Germany. It's something between carnivale and a rave.

We cancelled the second trip that we had planned with the French wine tour company as we can't trust that he'll get the details right after our driver never showed for us on our trip to Epernay. We might change it around to be a longer trip across more countries, perhaps France, England, Germany and Italy if possible over 10 days. There's a Swiss Holiday in early August so Lexi can stretch her time off a little farther.

I picked up some groceries at Migros. My new back pack can carry about five 1.5 liter bottles of diet soda, an important feature. After dropping them at home, I met Lexi outside of her work and we went to Belvoir Park for dinner.

Belvoir Park is a restaurant attached to a cooking and hospitality school. They had a great 5 course Prix Fixe. It started with a vegetable mouse, which was very tasty and went well with the fresh baked rolls. Then came the selection of 3 different sushi bites with a great creamed wasabi sauce. The champagne and butter cream and spinach soup came next, with a little fried ship full of marinated mushrooms. A small salmon and shrimp dish with seasoned rice followed. The new trend in serving up fancy rice is to create a tapered cylinder of rice on the plate. Then the main course chicken stuffed with mushroom with butter noodles and vegetables. The most outstanding thing about the food was the perfect texture of each of the components. The vegetables were peeled and through some combination of steaming and pan frying cooked to aldente perfection. The noodles were also the right balance of soft and rigid and the chicken fell apart with a fork. Finally the desert cart, where they scoop samples of 3 different deserts for you. Lexi had white and dark chocolate mousse with black berries and I had german cream cake and almond cream loaf with blue berries and black berries. Then came the tiny chocolates to finish the meal. It was great and the service was great. Cooking schools always give the best value for fancy dining. Everyone is still eager and trying to prove themselves to potential employers. The waiting kept the right distance throughout the whole meal, letting us enjoy ourselves without intrusion but never making us ask for something when it was needed.

After that description of that meal, it pleases me to report that I'm staying in shape. In fact, I've lost 3 pounds since the start of the vacation. It's all because I only eat 2 meals a day and always do my set of exercises and/or take a long walk or bike everyday.

Lexi's Birthday in Holland - Day 3 - Cirque

We woke up later than we wanted to the next day and had to grab some muffins from some cafe (it started with an "A") on our way to the train stations. The muffins were a white chocolate raspberry muffin which turned out to be pretty good, but a little heavy on the butter.

We slept for most of the train to Rotterdam. Lexi set her cell phone alarm just in case, but we didn't need it. We found a cab just in time to grab our tickets and sit down at the Cirque du Soleil production of Dralion. We had seats 3 rows back, but luckily, the clowns didn't decide to screw with us. We had a close call back in Vegas at Mystere, when the character of the little baby almost chose us as it's parent. The poor woman next to us who was chosen, got pulled on the stage 3 or 4 times. The production was good, but not the best Cirque we have seen. There were highlights, like this guy who used a giant trampoline to help him run up a wall. The contortionist was unbelievable. She could bring the soles of her feet up to the back of her shoulders while balancing on one hand. However, some of the other acts had some mistakes, a group of balancers couldn't keep their three person tower up, but no one was hurt in the fall. Some of the tumblers hit the tinly little circles they were trying to get through and the human pyramid that was jumping rope almost got the last guy on top of their 5th layer. Honestly, I can't complain, cause I couldn't do any of that. It seemed like they might have been training some new troupe members as many of the actors seemed younger than average for Cirque performers. The few mishaps couldn't ruin what was a spectacular show and we got back on the train for Amsterdam satisfied and still a little sleepy.

Once we got back, we picked up our luggage at the hotel, bought some dutch chocolate pastilles (soooo good) and had a quick bite to eat at a brasserie outside the train station. They had pretty decent food, but nothing spectacular. They did manage to serve us in a half an hour, which is faster than most sit down restaurants we've come across have managed.

Our train ride back had us sharing a compartment with 4 swiss teenagers, all playing Jass (a Swiss card game with a special deck of cards). We took the top bunks and got some sleep while they played. We only woke up when they had to switch engine cars and our AC was turned off, which turned our compartment into a sauna for 45 minutes. Once the new engine was hooked up, the AC was on and we actually got about 9 hours sleep on the train.

Finally, here are some other pictures that I just had to share.

So far, we have seen more painters at work in Amsterdam than in Paris or Zurich.

There are some great signs of a strong counterculture. It's a little hard to make out, but someone has put a raptor on this Manpower sign. Manpower finds temps for companies.

Max Euwepine Square. The giant pieces are public property and free for anyone to use.

You gotta love a city with more bikes than cars.

Lexi's Birthday in Holland - Day 2 - Older than The Pantry

We woke up late and went to Helder, a very modern dutch sandwich house. Their sandwiches were really good. Mine had aged smoked roast beef and herb cream cheese spread. Lexi had a club sandwich with an egg and bacon in it. Everything was on fresh baked country bread. They weren't very big sandwiches, but they were delicious.

After that, we went to the Rijksmuseum. Only a small section of it was open because it was undergoing renovations, but the collection available still took us two hours to see it all. The pieces were arrayed in sections that represented different eras in Dutch history.

One of the many Dutch chapels who shares design features with the Rijksmuseum

A popular form of painting in Dutch history was the merchant group photo. Rich merchant guilds would pay famous artists to paint them in a pose where they seemed to have been temporarily disturbed from busily doing their job. They then hung them in their offices as to say, see, I'm so busy doing good work for you that I couldn't even stop to pose for a portrait.

I had not seen Rembrandts religious paintings before. He chooses parts of biblical stories that most other artists skip over. These moments encapsulate the intricacy of emotion in the entire story behind them in ways that other artists don't. His portrait of Jeremiah mourning the destruction of Jerusalem where we find Jeremiah in a cave with Jerusalem burning in the back ground, set aflame by King Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. The bible story tells mostly of Jeremiahs warnings to the leaders of Jerusalem and less about how he must have felt after he failed to prevent the burning of his city despite his foreknowledge of the threat.


There was also a great painting of these young Dutch couple right after their wedding which was a quite controversial composition back when it was painted and even compared to wedding photos now. The couple in the photo are dressed in less official and more contemporary clothing seen in other paintings in the romantic garden genre. The couple are flung about each other under a tree, seeming to have slipped away from the wedding party for some time alone. They look flushed as if from exercise or drinking. Few couples in this time had their pictures taken together. Even most wedding pictures we see now are bride and groom posed in dress and tux in front of a bunch of flowers or a fountain. After I thought about it for a while, most of the pictures from our wedding are posed more conservatively than this portrait. Its refreshing that more Dutch artwork seems focussed on trade or some form of sensualist romp (be it feast or frolic) than on war. Oh they do have some war paintings too, but they are outnumbered by stodgy merchants, still lifes of tables full of fine food, people getting drunk in gardens, and at least one blushing couple by 3 to 1 atleast.

I also never noticed that the decline of the dutch trade empire coincided with the rise of steam power as steam ships were heavier and couldn't fit in the dutch harbors that sail ships could use without trouble.

After a walking tour of the city through the floating flower gardens, past the university and through the bar district north of vondelpark, we went back to our hotel and changed for dinner. Dinner was at Silveren Spiegel, which Lexi's friend Nelson suggested to us. Not only was it a great restaurant, but it was also over 350 years old, makes the Pantry seem like an upstart chain in comparison. The restaurant even hid Jews from the Nazi's during the occupation. It was totally old school posh dining experience. There were only tiny christmas light sized bulbs on the chandeliers and we couldn't read the menu until they brought in another candlestick. There was a member of low level British royalty sitting to the right of us, talking about her nephew's title to a younger woman who seemed to be her caretaker. We had bacon wrapped scallops and suckling pig salad for starters. The waiter suggested a very reasonably priced French red to go with our rib eye, which was not only the largest steak we've had in Europe, but the most perfectly cooked. The center fell apart like steak tartar. I tried a 20 year old dutch spirit with desert Oude de Genever, which tasted a lot like a very mellow whiskey. Desert was a tiny molten chocolate cake with cherries in a brandy sauce. It was very pricey, but also very worth it. The service was excellent. They even decanted our wine for us.

There was no way to do this picture without flash. It was that dark inside.

After dinner we went to see Boom Chicago, an American Improv Group permanently stationed in Amsterdam. The show was great. They did this song which was all about how being an American meant that you loved peace and freedom but then switched gears and started throwing in things like guns and oil. They did some other typical improv stuff, working off of audience participation that was as good if not better than some of the later "Whose Line is it Anyway" skits. They also did this bit about dutch product names. There are products in Holland named things like:

Sissy Boy (Clothing)
Notities (notes)
Retard Capsules (cold medicine)
Rabobank (finance)

It was a great show. I think I laughed hardest when audience suggestions ended up with Ghandi as a pimp.

After the show, we had a beer at one of the local pubs and watched all the fratb0yesque English Tourists go by. There are a lot of 20-something English men and women listing about in great loud groups on weekends in Amsterdam. I didn't see any real trouble, but the English do stick out. That is also true in Switzerland, though I must also add that the Americans in Switzerland stick out worse than the English do there.

By this time it was well after 2am so we went home to catch some sleep before Cirque du Soleil the next day.

Lexi's Birthday in Holland - Day 1 - Poker

Our train ride was much longer than the ride to France, which meant we actually got about 7 hours of sleep. The cots were a little stiffer than the last ones, which caused Lexi's shoulder to get a little sore, but she said it cleared up after the first day.

We picked up some I Amsterdam cards, which get us entrance to all the museums and free use of all public transit. The cost came out to a wash, but it was nice to have complete freedom to go wherever we want, whenever we want.

Our first stop was at mega-brand HEMA. A quarter of the dutch population wakes up to HEMA alarm clocks. A third of dutch men wear HEMA undergarments. A quarter of all women do the same. HEMA is to holland what ACME is in the old roadrunner cartoons. They make everything. They are a very brandless sort of brand. We really needed something warm to wear as it was raining when we first arrived. My HEMA jacket and Lexi's HEMA hoody sweatshirt came to less than 30 euros. They might have also helped us to camouflage ourselves as natives a little bit.

On the canals in our new HEMA clothes

On our way to the hotel, we tried a chocolate covered waffle from a local bakery. The waffle had more of a soft donut-like texture. It was sooo heavy, it was practically a full breakfast for both of us on its own.

The canals near our Hotel

There was a little trouble with the hotel. Our electronic reservation was not on their books, but they got us a room at their sister hotel for the same price. The hotel had a 24 hour concierge, so we had to drop off the key every time we left. It was a small room, but the bed was comfy and we had our own shower. The place we stayed was on prinzengracht along one of the many canals.

I could've sworn I parked in 2407. Or was it 2047

The bike is the ride of choice in the netherlands. There were more bike lanes than car lanes in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam. There was this huge bike parking lot outside the central station in Amsterdam. There must have been thousands of bikes parked there.

After we checked in to the hotel, we went to the Van Gogh museum. The museum isn't very big, but it's almost all Van Gogh layed out in chronological order. It was fascinating to watch his style change with the new influences he picked up in his travels through France and the personal tragedies he endured. You can really see the way his fading health affected both the quality of his technique and his choice of subject matter. My favorite piece was The Sower. The theme of rebirth combined with the subtle religious imagery was painted in a period where Van Gogh was recovering from another set of attacks. Lexi's favorite was Trees and Undergrowth, which is a great example of Van Goghs tipple effect. Color has not only a sense of depth, but direction. The jabbing strokes form swirls of color that create a sense of movement.

After the Van Gogh Museum, we took a walk around Vondelpark. It feels like the pan handle in San Francisco. There was a whole lot of hackysack going on and a whole lot of dreadlocks. Wandering back from the park we came across caffepc (not an internet cafe). We had an early dinner of a chicken wrap and a set of mexican tapas. The tapas were really good, lots of bits of crusty bread and cheese and seafood. Lexi's wrap was really good too and came with a sweet pepper toppenade.

After dinner, we took a cruise of the canals. Taking a group of friends out on a boat for drinks and sometimes even a floating barbecue seems to be the Friday evening thing to do. It's a pretty chill way to see the city. We passed the Nemo science museum, one of the examples of the ecclectic modern style that shares the landscape with cathedrals from the golden era of Dutch trade.

Nemo the Science Museum (Not the fish or captain)

After the canal boat ride, we went to the Holland Casino in Amsterdam to play some holdem. They had one 10-20 euro limit holdem game going there. Lexi put up 200 euro and I put up 300 euro and we walked away with 900 and 700 euros respectively. We haven't actually hit a cash machine in a euro spending country since we first got to France. We've turned our 400 euro into cash enough for two trips plus about 900 leftover to boot. Lexi was really on fire. She was catching cards and getting action. I was doing all right, but got drawn out on 2 big hands, which hurt my profits a little. The action was great, everyone there was desperate to play, not desperate to win, so they played too many hands too far. All we had to do was wait for real hands and rake in the winnings.

Mmmm FEBO!

We stopped at FEBO for some snacks on the way home. FEBO is a dutch fast food chain, where they put the burgers, kaasouffles (Melted gouda inside a fried crust. Yes it's as good as it sounds), and croquettes (Meat and gravy inside a fried crust. Do you see a theme forming?) inside little windows which you pay a few euros to open. Nothing costs more than 2 euros there and it was a nice little guilty pleasure on the way home.