It’s best when it’s fresh.

Next up: Los Angeles. New Orleans to follow

It’s been a week now and I’m having a hard time adjusting to the time difference. I’ve traveled extensively and usually right my jet lag in a day or two, but despite the fact that I’m nine hours behind, my body will not give up on the belief that I’m still in Amsterdam.

It finally snowed here in Amsterdam today!

In Amsterdam, language has held us back ever so slightly from making new friends; not in a way that is tragic by any means, but enough so that the few people we’ve gotten to know here will hold a significant place in our memories of the time we spent here. I don’t have any doubt that if we’d have stayed longer we’d have gotten to be good friends with many more of the regular faces in our neighborhood, but we were here just long enough to not be seen as tourists before it was time for us to go.

The people at Bij Kees are an example of this; we’ve just started to get to know them, but we have enough so that we felt that we should say goodbye. We stopped in for a drink, happy that our favorite bartender was working and the owner (Kees) was there as well. Our favorite seats (tucked away at the corner of the bar) were empty, so we took them.  She greeted us warmly, stopping what she was doing to pull the bottle of Jameson from its place without our having to ask. She had people to tend to in the dining room upstairs so we speculated on the life of the house cat that sat sleepily on one of the shelves while we waited for her to return. We she did, we asked her about the trip to Switzerland which she’d been excited about going on when we last saw her and she was very happy that we’d remembered.

Kees came out limping and when we inquired about it, he told us the story about how he’d stepped on a broken wine glass and it had penetrated his shoe and deep into his foot. Insult had been added to his injury in that it had been dropped into the street by one of his friends, who he’d given the glass to take with him from the restaurant when he left. He sat down next to us to finish the telling of it and ended up drinking with us for the rest of the evening.

We talked about our travels to different places in the world, particularly the ones we had in common; Kees had visited New Orleans a number of times and had been to Las Vegas as well. The bartender had been to Detroit for one day to perform in a theater there on a tour. We talked about Amsterdam as well; what we all loved about it the most and what we didn’t care for (for us it’s definitely the reckless scooter and bike riders).  They told us that Amsterdam is a wonderful place in the summer and that we should stay or at very least come back again then.

We had the sort of night that we wanted (needed) as we prepare to leave Amsterdam. In the circumstances that have led up to us deciding to return to the States, it would have been easy for us to become frustrated or disenchanted and to have missed out on the value on what was left of our time. Instead, we had one last night of real living in Amsterdam and it made me appreciate this experience even more.