Ireland, Amsterdam

We just returned from a week in Ireland and a week in Amsterdam. We lucked out with the weather (hardly any rain in Ireland!) and fell in love with Amsterdam.

Highlights

• Great Western Greenway: 25-mile bike path through Irish countryside

• Sam's wedding in Adare, Ireland

• Amsterdam's biking culture and canals

• Photos

This is the longest bike path in Ireland: 25 miles through beautiful farmland with no cars. It was built just a few years ago along an old train route with land donated from some 300 farmers. It's been such a success that they're working on extending it all the way around Ireland.
We drove (on the left side of the road with a stick shift!) to the Cliffs of Moher, where Cat remembered being really scared of falling off when she visited 10+ years ago. We scared ourselves a little this time too.
The first thing we noticed upon arriving in Amsterdam was the huge number of bikes. Thousands lined the walkway to the train station. People do everything on bikes! Some surprising bike sightings:

• Five girls in fancy attire apparently biking to a party.

• Carrying a bookcase and chair in the front trough.

• Amsterdam has more canals than Venice.

• The canals are designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

• They look about the same as they did when they were built in the 1600s.

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Great Western Greenway


We rented a couple bikes in Westport, biked one-way, and got shuttled back from the other end. We had the whole path to ourselves since it was a weekday. The weather was perfect: overcast but dry. The scenery was beautifully green, thanks to the Irish rain. Most importantly for Cat, the route was mostly flat. We got to pet a couple dwarf horses (Shetland ponies?) who knew how to handle tourists: petting in exchange for an apple.

Cliffs of Moher

Sam's wedding

Sam and Alberto got married at a beautiful castle called Adare Manor, in a small town in the west of Ireland. We played an exciting game of Clue with friends the night before the ceremony. (It turned out to be Mrs. Peacock in the ballroom with the wrench!) A celtic monk married the two and then we had a delicious dinner and danced to live music.

Thanks for having us, Sam and Alberto! Enjoy your honeymoon.

Amsterdam's bike culture

We rented our own bikes for the week and loved riding along the canals.

Canals

Cafes, bikes, and canals made Amsterdam look like a scene from a romantic movie. We stayed in an Airbnb apartment by the Prinsengracht canal (in Jordaan) and loved the warm neighborhood feeling. We paddled around in a paddleboat to get a different perspective of the beautiful place.

We were treated to a seemingly impromptu concert in a canal while we had tea at a cafe. (Turns out the concert happens every Tuesday.) A man motored up to Westerkerk (an old church) in a tiny boat and started playing his trumpet. The bells in the church responded. They continued back and forth for 20 minutes or so. At the end, the trumpet guy called up to the church, and the bell guy responded by waving a handkerchief from the church tower. What a treat!

Some facts about the canals:

Dutch language

We kept thinking we were hearing English when we were actually hearing Dutch. Sometimes the only difference is a "d" instead of "th". We were having lunch at "De Ysbreeker" cafe and were amused when we asked the waiter how to pronounce the name of the cafe: it turned out to be "The Ice Breaker".

Some of the words look like things Dr. Seuss might make up. We were tickled with one of the flavors in an ice cream shop: "hazelnoot".

Cooking in the apartment

We found a local farmer's market on our first day and bought some pasta, olive oil, vinegar, lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers. We enjoyed the fresh pasta and salad so much that we ate at home several more nights. What a treat to stay in an apartment with a stove and refrigerator rather than a hotel!

Museums

We lived right across from the Anne Frank House, so we visited it one evening. (The line is shorter in the evening.) Eight people hid in that house for two years until someone betrayed them and they were taken to concentration camps. Only Otto Frank, Anne's father, survived. Going through the rooms, we imagined staying quiet and indoors for two years.

We spent a few days at the Rijks Museum and Van Gogh Museum. The Rijks Museum just opened a few months ago after a decade of remodeling, so we were lucky to see it.

The highlight of the Rijks Museum is a painting called The Night Watch, by Rembrandt. They had a bear of a time figuring out how to illuminate it when they first installed it at the turn of the century. They built two huge rooms for it, trying to let in the right amount of sunlight without creating a glare. In the end, the invention of electricity solved their problems.

The Night Watch is so important that it has a custom-made trapdoor built into the floor beneath it so it can be whisked to safety in an emergency. It was used during World War II.

We enjoyed the Van Gogh Museum even more than the Rijks Museum because it was more focused, so we learned a lot about one subject: Van Gogh. We never knew he was influenced by Japanese art. It was sad to read his letter to his beloved brother Theo just before he shot himself, in which he said he felt like a failure. (He never sent the letter.) The poor guy lived on coffee, bread, absinthe, and cigarettes. He never knew the influence he would have on other artists. On the bright side, it was uplifting to read about his exploration of new techniques, the years he spent drawing (before he "graduated" to painting), and his productivity (sometimes finishing an entire oil painting in a day!).

Windmills and clogs

We spent a day at a nearby village of working windmills, called Zaanse Schans. They were sawmills: the windmill wings pushed pistons up and down as they turned, which in turn pushed a saw up and down to cut a log. The steam engine and electricity rendered most windmills obsolete.

The windmill village also had a clog museum. Clogs served to keep peat workers from sinking in to the soft surface they walked on. Later they became decorative: it became a tradition for a husband-to-be to carve a clog and present it to his lady at their wedding.

Red light district

A little depressing. It was interesting to see the nearly-naked women beckoning from behind glass doors.

We went to a coffee shop in the red light district. ("Coffee shop" has a special meaning in Amsterdam.) It just looked kind of dark and subdued, and we were pretty sure the food wouldn't taste very good, so we left.