Conclusion of the first day in Amsterdam

After the Vincent Van Gogh Museum Kate and I took in Vondelpark, a large city park in the center of the city. Interestingly the pictures of Amsterdam make it look so much more sleepy than it actually is. The Vondelpark much like the rest of the city was filled with aggressive cyclists. Here we saw children sitting precariously on the handlebars of their parents bicycles, or more commonly we would see trailers for bikes towing small children. None of whom were strapped in or wearing helmets. The beauty of a less regulated society.Kate next to a weird looking sculpture, I guess its some sort of bird? Photographing some abstract and insignificant public art piece tends to be something that Kate and I do routinely on our trips. Kate and I appreciated watching the families frolic on the playground. One thing we really did not capture is how the lack of law suits probably contributes to playgrounds that are much more fun than their American equivalents. High up rope jungle gyms, aggressive looking swings, and teeter totters abound, where these sorts of things have all long been ripped out in states because kids would almost certainly misuse them and of course this would have nothing to do with negligent parenting or a lack of supervision, and would all be a result of the city, the playground designers, and the manufacturers, who would all be promptly sued.We liked this wading pool- or at least watching the kids play here. It was probably only in the mid 50s Fahrenheit, and here are these kids playing in the water. I think some bystander would have suggested child services take away these children from their families, had this scene unfolded in the United States. The contraption below was a sort of water based toy, you poured water into it and it flowed around the contraption. It was not captured very well here.One of the main pedestrian shopping streets above, and Dam Square below. While Dam Square is one of the more notable locations in Amsterdam it was not my favorite. It had a mix of the sort of street performers you might find at Fanieul Hall (actually they were pretty much a more PG-13 version of the same tired acts), protesters (some social or monetary cause typically), it was loud, dirty, chaotic, and had sort of a dark undertone to it that I thought made it stand apart from other equivalent areas such as the major squares/ plazas in other cities I've been to. We cross this area routinely over the remainder of our time in Amsterdam due to its central location.The Royal Palace of the Netherlands is situated on Dam square.Kate walks through a bank of bikes not far from Centraal Station the main train station and our original arrival point in the city. Below is Sint Nicolaaskerk, a large Catholic Church that we pretty much walked by daily (multiple times) due to its location en route to the Plantage. Here I am with my good friend Rusty the Monkey. Rusty lives near a canal not to far from the Plantage where Kate and I were staying.

It was time to eat and we decided upon an Italian place called Palorma which was almost across the street from our hotel, abutting the Zoo. We were seated upstairs near the back of the restaurant in a nook overlooking some gardens where a cat was up to no good. Hunting for Tweety no doubt.
The food was excellent, really a great stumbled upon place, affordable, great atmosphere. The waitress didn't speak English, I got the feeling she was actually Italian and that Dutch may have been her second language. She was very pleasant and one of her colleagues came up and talked to us briefly. He helped us attract Sylvester's attention long enough to snap a photo of it (I think he thought he was going to get a slice of pizza, perhaps an anchovy?).

See the cat off at the corner of the roof. The cat would frequently jump off, scale fences and bounce around attempting to catch some noisy birds that I'm sure were making a game of taunting it.

It was a long but productive first day in the Netherlands. Kate and I were becoming more zombie like by the minute given our jet-lag, so before we began attacking fellow pedestrians out of a desire to eat their brains we locked ourselves in our hotel room and prepared for the next day.