The Miniature Village outside Amsterdam
TOP: (working) Waterpark
2nd: Tanker which catches fire, and fire tug speeds out to it and puts out fire
3rd: Posh (life size) with a miniature windmill
4th: Castle (life size) with Kathy :-)
Although we're focusing on "solo" travel backpacking around europe, today we took a tour group with Posh and Larry so that we could see the outskirts of Holland. It's a very pretty countryside, full of windmills, clogmakers, 6' skinny blondes, and canal cut land as flat as the eye can see. Not even a ripple of a hill.
One of my favorite destinations for the day was this miniature village. It had about 100 different scenes setup, most of them with cool mechanical pieces. The airplanes at the airport moved around the tarmac, the locking system actually locked in a tanker and then locked it out downstream, the cargo ship loaded containerized cargo, etc. Biggest such display I've ever seen, and we spent a couple of hours there. Unfortunately, we could not find a miniature Macy's for Posh, so she was a bit disappointed.
Along with the Miniature City, we hit a pottery maker, a clog maker, and The Hague, where the International Court is housed. An superb city, and I wish that we had more time to walk around it. The tour guide showed us the Iraq Embassy, which was basically a slum house 2 months ago...then one friday night a huge crew showed up, with no markings, and completely rebuilt the embassy over the course of something like a week into a luxurious mansion. She wondered who paid for it....and happened to mention all the "Bushes" around the front of the mansion.
Today we also had the first scare of our time in europe...Troy showed up at our hotel totally wound out. Turns out that after he deplaned, he headed out to his hotel also, got there, slept a bit, and went walking. He ended up in the hospital, severely dehydrated (obviously still not recovered from Kilimanjaro), and played Mary had a little lamb (yes sir, yes sir, 3 bags full) with the IV bags. He was feeling a bit better, but still very sluggish. My heart went out to him, that is what was left of my heart between coughing spells. I was now up to a quart of Kili-phlegm a day.
All in all we spent 4 days in Amsterdam, and really grew fond of the place. It has a lot going for it: vices, canals, shops, bikes. The only real negatives were the graffiti (something that would be a scourge everywhere in europe that we travelled) and the sheer volume of smokers. It seemed like everyone smoked, even on their bikes. This was to be probably the biggest shock of europe, given how spoiled we are in the US with non-smoking laws.
Smokin....
Lumpy out
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