Amsterdam Day 4

For some reason, Ladybugs in laid into the sidewalk remind Amsterdam-ers to be kind to one another. Okay I totally cannot remember the explanation that Paul gave me, but it was something along those lines. Check the comments, hopefully he'll correct me! Regardless of their purpose, I thought it was pretty funny that for a "can't believe I don't have a baby yet" vacation where I was skipping out on the adoption world for a few weeks, I run into a big fat ladybug in the sidewalk! (and, a whole lot of other interesting coincidences as well...notice the City Orphanage info in the last blog entry? I had not idea until I was in the museum...that was a total fluke...)
There is a lot of tile in Amsterdam, sometimes in seemingly unlikely places you see really beautiful tiles...
as seemingly "kitchen floor linoleum" as it looked from afar, this one was quite pretty close up.
Lots of interesting graffitti in Amsterdam, Even Anne Frank made an appearance in the graffitti.
This "tag" was everywhere....Prints & the Revolution. It made me laugh...
Ahh...maybe my favorite people pic of the trip. My first chinese classmate Paul & I on the 'skinny bridge'- a bridge built by, umm....failing memory...a king? Someone important, someone with a lot of cash and a spoiled daughter...so his daughter could ride her horse across the bridge- never mind there are bridges directly up and down the canal from this one not 3 blocks away, apparently she didn't want to go out of her way to get to a bridge, so daddy built her her own bridge...

Back to the theme of leaning houses. The dark brown house was on the end-so no other house to hold it up...look at how close it is to it's neighbor on the bottom, then look how far it is on the top! I hope it doesn't topple into the street in the next 50-75 years...!
For some reason I got the idea that it would be fun to go to the torture museum, I picked up a pamphlet & thought it would be an interesting & out of the ordinary sort of museum to go to...my friend Leslie was in town so we picked her up at the houseboat she was staying at and all went over to the Toture museum. Simon playing in the stockade...
Okay amusing perhaps was not the appropriate definition so much as macabre. This rather famous chair was about the least frightening of some of the things they described. I won't go into it, but we all could have done just fine without the torture museum. One of the biggest surprises to read was that women who experienced infertility or frequent miscarraiges were seen as CLEARLY WITCHES, and therefore must be tortured or killed in some way. Frightening.
We had a wonderful dinner of Indonesian food after- a "Rijstaffel"- I'm not sure how that translates, but it's bascially like a "set menu" of many small dishes of many different kinds of foods. A sort of Tapas of Indonesian food- quite lovely!
The Gasshopper Inn on our way back...lit up at night in a wonderful shade of GREEN.

Cool canal Houses...
Amsterdam Graffitti:
Canal Houses at night:
And who could resist a photo of this window? Okay so there was no photography allowed in the Red light district, this is about as close as you come. These were latex suits. I kid you not...hard to see but check out the blue latex sailor suit. eek. How amazingly uncomfortable would that be???!
Tomorrow: PARIS!