Diiiimmm Suuummmm!!!

Because we felt like we scheduled ourselves for too many days in Amsterdam, these last two days have been rather uneventful and we decided to stay near the B&B to catch up on some sleep and explore the area we’re living in.  Today we headed out to continue our sightseeing, with a plan to catch a weekly free lunch concert at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam’s prized concert hall (every Wednesday from September to June you can hear the featured orchestra rehearse for the evening concert for free at 12:30 pm), and then head to Chinatown to try a dim sum restaurant that was recommended on the Internet.

I managed to get Paul to wake up shortly after 11 and we caught a tram over to the Concertgebouw right away, but I wasn’t sure where the main entrance was so when we got off the tram we decided to follow two ladies in front of us who looked like they were heading to the concert as well.  We all headed to the right side of the building but got turned around at the entrance we found because we needed to go to the main entrance on the left side.  We rushed back over to the other side of the building, but by the time we got there the concert was full so we could only sit on the benches in the foyer to listen.  Unfortunately, there was some kind of loud construction happening just outside, making it almost impossible to hear the speakers so we decided there was no point sticking around.

Since I was kind of upset that we just missed making it to the concert by a few minutes and I wasn’t hungry yet, Paul tried to cheer me up with some browsing at a nearby flea market, but after a few stalls I decided I wasn’t in the mood to buy flea market junk (which I’m often tempted to do).  We caught a tram over to Dam Center and did a bit of browsing at De Bijenkorf, the flagship store of a upscale department chain here in the Netherlands, similar to Bon Marche, Galleries Lafayette, etc.  Even though I can’t really shop at these kind of stores right now, we always seem to check them out for comparisson sake, and today we were interested in the Nespresso coffee machines in the housewares department.  The B&B has one of these machines for us to use and it makes really great individual cups of coffee so we were curious how much the machine and the capsules cost, and we were surprised at how relatively affordable it is – about 150 euros for the machine and 15 euros per box of coffee.  It’s not exactly cheap coffee, but it makes hassle-free individual cups of coffee that taste perfect every time and it’s much cheaper to buy one of these than go to Starbuck’s everyday!

From there we headed to Chinatown, the highlight of my day since I haven’t had a proper dim sum lunch since leaving Vancouver and I miss it a lot!  I got a hold of my great-aunt on the phone last night and she couldn’t remember the exact name of the restaurant she loved the shrimp dumplings at, but she said it was ”right in Chinatown and called Ocean-something.”  Paul decided to Google “good dim sum restaurants in Amsterdam” and found a restaurant named Ocean City which got good reviews, so we figured that was it but when our shrimp dumplings arrived we both thought “this can’t be right!”  I mean, the food was good but by no means spectacular, and the outside shell (the white part) of the shrimp dumplings was soft and mushy, a sign that they were likely frozen before cooking and not fresh.  I know my aunt has really high standards for Chinese food so we either had the wrong restaurant or the cook had been replaced by a really poor substitute since she was here about a year and a half ago! 

After lunch we did a bit more shopping and I bought my first clothing-type item on this trip, a nice purple summer scarf!  I don’t know what it is, but anytime I get a piece of new clothing or accessory, it always cheers me up – and I think it’s the same for any girl!  I’m not that into shopping (this is the first item in 3 months so I’ve been pretty good at holding back), but once in a while you just get the urge to add something new to the wardrobe, which I think is fair!  If only Paul could understand it’s not just “buying junk”