We had a nice lie in and enjoyed breakfast in our lovely apartment looking at the canal. We headed down ?? Street which is a faux sting street of many different styles of architecture and a lot of independent shops. We spotted a pancake shop that looked good but sadly it wasn’t - we ordered coffee and pancakes but after over half an hour and the pancakes still hadn’t arrived. We gave up after 40 minutes and walked out minus pancakes (we did pay for the coffee). There were a lot of unhappy customers.
We continued ‘pancake-less’ towards the Dam which is allegedly where the centre of Amsterdam was created. I’ll be honest, we really were not impressed and it seemed a tourist trap and the only impressive bit was the war memorial. The Berjenhof was just a few minutes walk away and that was lovely, some nuns still reside in this medieval area of the city. We continued walking - stopping briefly for lunch - until we got to the famous Portuguese Synagogue but unfortunately it was closed so we couldn’t look around. It started getting very cold as we walked near the docks and I spotted a parakeet which ate quite different to our ring-necked parakeets.
After a disastrous attempt to take the 48 bus back to our apartment we took a somewhat circuitous route back to the apartment. We were tired after all our walking for the day so booked a table for 8.00 at a recommended Dutch restaurant just a few minutes walk away. It was very good and we could watch the owner and chef cooking dinner as we ate. My chicken satay was the best I’ve ever had.
