Early in my visit and the kids' move, we figured out what you do and don't do on the weekends. Center of town and Dam Square -- not unless you want some good people watching and love crowds. Museums and other top tourist attractions -- absolutely not. Even if you have pre-purchased your tickets... the queues are extremely long, and in this laid-back country, they don't really understand the purpose of scheduled ticket times. So on the weekends, we were challenged what to do with ourselves since we couldn't move their belongings into their new place, we couldn't meet with immigration or municipality personnel; there weren't many things we could accomplish on the weekends. Sometimes we would use those days to sleep in a bit, and then we scheduled a mid-morning enormous pancake breakfast. Sometimes, we would travel about the city and take in the sights. We had tram passes that were pre-paid with Euros, therefore, we could get off and on as we pleased.
We scoped out the flower markets, which had bulbs for sale as well as bouquets of fresh flowers. We observed lots of people carrying large stems and bunches of fresh flowers home with their groceries on Saturdays. Not sure if they did that every weekend, not sure if flowers were cut and the freshest on that day, just an observation. My folks had already warned me to not to bring any bulbs home in my luggage unless I wanted a diversion in customs, so I shipped some. They had a very small amount with a pre-authorization and approval sticker on them, and I think it held them up when they traveled through there recently.
On a recent Saturday, we ended up in the center of the city, on purpose. There was one shopping establishment we (I) wanted to revisit, and a huge park, Vondelpark, was located there -- which we thought prime for people watching on a weekend with a beautiful day.
Sure enough, people were enjoying the park everywhere. We saw several gatherings of bachelorette parties, birthday parties, couples, and individuals just enjoying the day and reading in the sun.
We enjoyed it, too.
At the end of the day, we were back in our little neighborhood -- where we were staying, not where the kids will live. We stayed in Zuid. It's a neighborhood pronounced, "zoud," like 'loud.'
Beautiful city!
