Vrijdag

Friday morning I woke up, showered, and watched a horrible episode of Lois & Clark while getting ready (no WONDER main characters never get together -- all they did that entire episode was talk about their relationship). Casey took my bike to work, and I left a bit later to catch a bus to his office, like many other days. As I was almost at the bus station, I saw Casey, coming back to tell me that the power was out on the Science Park campus, and nobody was allowed into his building. As my laptop, keyboard, and mouse were in there, and the data he's working with are on the local computer in his office, this meant that neither of us could do any work. We quickly agreed that the most productive use of our time would be to run some errands and then see a museum, which would be more crowded on a weekend, and perhaps the free lunchtime organ concert at Westerkirk. Hopefully the power would be fixed by Saturday and we could work then instead.

First: phone cord. Our home phone is not working. When I called the phone company, they said our line was "perfect" and that we needed to read our phone manual (in Dutch and French). We then took the phone into Casey's office, and it worked fine there, but there are two types of phone plugs (the normal US one, and another one that has four prongs and sticks into the side of the phone jack). Anyway, long story short (too late!), before we pay the $75 or whatever for the phone company to come fix our jack, we want to do as much troubleshooting as possible.

So, we got the cord, at a store called "Handyman" with all sorts of adorable logos. From there our idea was to keep walking north and go to one of the two museums we'd heard of that were 17th century houses with French-style gardens. So we left Handyman and walked north, and then we saw what looked like a street market. I spotted some watches a few booths in, and since my crappy Target watch broke last week, I sped over to get one. Long story short (too late!), we had inadvertently stumbled across the largest market in the city, and we were not disappointed. In addition to the watch, we found some spices for our empty cupboard and vegetables, bread, manchego, and italian sausage for lunch. On our way back home to drop off our purchases, I stopped at a health food store and got some vegetarian pate thing that tastes a little bit like liverwurst.

One lunch, a nap, and a frustrating phone test later, we set off again. First we went to the Last-Minute Ticket Shop at Leidseplein for tickets to the Talking Cows at Bimhuis, the new jazz theater. Then we strolled along a canal to the Museum Van Loon, which was lived in as a house from the early 1600s until 1971. One of the bedrooms was last redecorated in 1690-something... So that residents of that house lived with that renovation for almost 300 years!

After the Museum Van Loon closed, we tried the photography museum, "foam," across the canal. This museum was mostly glass and steel, and very fun to explore. The major exhibit was by a Japanese photographer who photographs urban scenes with a small hand-held camera, often with grainy film. Some looked like crap, but I was surprised, after reading the discription in advance, how many of photos struck us both.

Before we had time to tire of museums, we left (these Museumkaarts are great -- as many entrances as we want in most museums for a year) and walked up to Rembrandtplein, where we sat at an outdoor cafe, writing postcards and gradually eating dinner for a couple of hours.

Then, tram up to Centraal, and walk across the construction to the Muziekgebouw, the new concert hall that also houses Bimhuis, the jazz room. We were early, so we joined the disorganized blobs of people gathered on the terrace and watched boats come in, drop people off, pick them back up... To our surprise, they all managed the jump from boat to terrace without landing in the questionable water. Then we went up to the Bimhuis... a small theater with great red leather seats around a stage looking over the city, behind the seats some tables with chairs, and behind a moving wall, a bar with a view over the harbor.

The photo for today is from the show, which was great. The green curvy building behind the bassist is NEMO, the science museum. Part of the fun of the show was the space, with its view of the city and trains going by (we saw an ICE high-speed train).

Not bad for a spontaneous day.