Love You, Phant

Saturday

I have so many photos, I'll tell the story through captions.

First shot of the day. Like I said, we slept for about four hours, ate, then started our adventure. I'm pretty sure I was not aware I was looking at a draw bridge when I took this because looking at it just now surprised me. Obviously, this was in between cups one and two of coffee.

As much as I enjoy studying French and Spanish and would like to learn another language sometime, I'm not planning on picking up Dutch anytime too soon. The spelling would kill me, check out those words in the blue strip at the top.


This was at Museumplein, the park near museums such as the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum. There are over 100 elephants throughout the city and they'll be auctioned to raise money to help Asian Elephants in Thailand. Elisabeth is with "Love You, Phant."

The park is also the site of an I amsterdam sign where we stopped for photos. I think we look like we're coming out of some doors with that m there. And for this backwards a photo, Elisabeth gave the photographers at the front a nice view.

Houseboats!

Please note the tram on the left - they run on tracks through the street and I got the impression that cars sometimes drove through the same areas. They're pretty frightening. I would also like to comment on the "Grilled Sandwiches" sign - there were some instances of bizarre uses of English (ie no anglophone would name a restaurant that), but pretty much everyone in Amsterdam spoke English really well. I heard it on the streets a lot too.

We were pretty tired after all that walking, so we had a late lunch, changed into some nicer clothes, and left the hostel again to wander around near the venue before going to see the Felice Brothers. I asked a girl at the hostel to take a photo of us and handed her my camera oriented this way so she could get a full length shot...guess she thought that was a pretty important wall behind us.

It rained on the way to the concert. And pretty much throughout the day.

The concert was amazing! The band is so energetic! I worked with them once over the summer and this show sold out, but the tour manager said he'd get us in. Since I hadn't received a confirmation, we showed up a bit early, happened to see one of the guys, and he got us in. The opening band, A.A. Bondy, was really good too and featured another musician I like on bass. When we went up to James, the accordionist/pianist, to thank him for helping us out, he invited us to hang out after the show, so we walked around the city and went out for drinks. Wonderful.

And since we don't really sleep, we went back to the hostel and again talked to our new Australian friend Jono, laughing about the oddities of living abroad until the wee hours of morning. Oh, and we cheated the sytem and got a free hour together in Amsterdam because at 2 am, the clocks went back an hour.

Here's a clip of The Felice Brothers performing "Frankie's Gun."