Open Garden Days and Protestors in Amsterdam

Our friends/neighbors, Bruce and Linda, had told us about the Open Garden Days that was occurring this past weekend in Amsterdam.

http://www.opentuinendagen.nl/

We decided to go, since we're always looking for ideas for our garden!

Before leaving Haarlem I went over and took care of Bruce and Linda's kitties, then Andrew and I stopped at Gary and Louise's to take care of their cat. They live close to the Haarlem train station, so we got on the train when I was done. From Amsterdam Centraal we took Tram 24 to the Keizersgracht stop.

The first place we went was Keizersgracht 672, the Museum van Loon where we bought our tickets for the walking tour of the gardens.

 They were serving a drink mix called "Campari", which we ended up trying later in the day....It's quite bitter.....we didn't care for it. It sure looked pretty in the glass though!

There was a boat cruise included in the price of our ticket....and was a "hop on, hop off" type of thing. It was a nice way to see parts of Amsterdam we hadn't see before!

Lots of houseboats!

We ended up touring through 11 of the 29 Open Gardens.....along Keizersgracht, Herengracht, and Prinsengracht. As you can see, we walked along Leidsegracht also!

Here are a few pictures of them:

We found that many of the gardens were not maintained very well or had little to see. It was a little disappointing. Maybe we're looking at it from "American" eyes and need to change our point of view.

In between looking at some of the gardens, we stopped to have some lunch at St. Jame's Cafe, in the Rembrandtplein area.

Well, the beer (Palm....my favorite!) was good, and the fries were good.......I took a chance and ordered a hamburger-thaaaaat was a mistake!  Mystery meat, that's all I can say to describe the texture and flavor of the burger. I ate about 1/2 of it only because I was really hungry. There is only one place I've found to get a tasty burger here and that is the Jacobus Pieck Restaurant in Haarlem....now they make a goooood burger!

Later on in the day there were some protestors that passed us by:

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This morning I woke up with a different kind of headache. I did a little cleaning and was so exhausted I thought I'd better lie down for a bit. I woke up 3 hours later with a slight fever. Sooooo, I'm nursing it today with fluids and some Advil and just rest!  The weather is supposed to be warm tomorrow and I don't want to miss it!!!