Tuesday, September 10

NOTE: having major problems uploading pictures and other stuff. Connection is not that good here. Will repost tomorrow, but for now here is post with grammatical errors and missing photos.

Monday started as every day does on the ship, with coffee and breakfast. I sat by myself and had some fruit, scrambled eggs, hash browns and bacon. The coffee in the restaurant is not very good, in my opinion. It is very strong, which I don’t mind but it just doesn’t have a good flavor.

Next up was the canal tour. We walked a few blocks from the ship to get on one of the canal tour boats. We had a guide who was rather humorous. We were told to take our QuietVox, a system that allows you to hear the guide thru ear buds. Everyone got their systems working, and the guide kept saying he wasn’t going to say anything until we got on the boat. Once we got on the boat he had a PA system so we didn’t need the damn things at all. Kind of funny.

The tour was pretty good. We learned more about the canal system and the housing situation. One of the most interesting things I learned was that you can tell if a church is Protestant if it has a swan on the top of the spire. It is Catholic there is a rooster.

There were many houseboats of all kinds along the canals. Some were quite dilapidated and others were nice. Being a boat owner, I wondered where their waste water went. I was going to ask but he was talking so I looked it up. I guess they decided to have all the houseboats hooked up to city sewer by 2017. They had a team that went out to every houseboat to see what kind of connection they would need since they were all different and the city paid to connect them.

After the tour, Don, Frankie and I went in for lunch. Frankie and I had the two Dutch specialties – mustard cream soup and a dish of meat balls (although they were actually flat) with vegetables and potato noodles.

The soup sounds kind of weird but was quite nice. Not an overwhelming mustard flavor. The meatballs were tasty and in a mild tomato sauce. The noodles were interesting and looked more like a roasted vegetable. (I am forgetting to take food porn photos.)

The ship left Amsterdam around 1:00 in the afternoon. It moves along a little faster than I expected. Great scenery everywhere. It started on a canal and then went through locks to the Rhine River. It was funny because I was taking a shower and when I came out of the bathroom it was dark out my windows and I thought we were next to another ship so I was hiding behind my towel. Then I saw brick walls and realized we were very, very close to a wall and learned that it was a big lock.

We then sat in the lounge and watched the scenery for quite a while. We had not seen Celia or Barb since we got back and they hadn’t answered Frankie’s text. Turns out they had taken a 3 hour nap!

While in the lounge, our cruise manager, Agnes, talked about the various excursions on Wednesday. She is Hungarian and very friendly. She did get a little frustrated because her PowerPoint presentation did not work. It never fails when you have a 100 people waiting technology fails.

We were joined for dinner by a couple of elderly women from Oregon who also had a place in the Bahamas where they spent 8 months of the year. It has been destroyed by the hurricane so they weren’t sure what they were going to do or even if it was covered by insurance.

I had an appetizer that had a shrimp filo packet and carpaccio and other things. I thought it was two different appetizers on the menu but it was not!

My main was chicken stuffed. With feta and Olives (but I didn’t see any olives) with mushroom risotto. The food has all been very good and a lot of variety. The wines every day are from the local areas that we travel thru and we haven’t met one we didn’t like!

After dinner, there was a musical performance in the lounge. There were two violinists and a guitarist. They played mostly classical and were very, very good.

Funny thing was that the ship slowed near a high wall and the three musicians literally jumped onboard with their instruments. We did not see this but heard about it. We kind of wondered if it was really true. Don and I went up after the performance and bought their cd. We asked the guy and he said it was true. He also said it was scarier jumping off than on. Can you believe it?

I have really enjoyed the cruise so far and don’t think I will ever go on a large cruise ship again. But, you never know.