More Dim Sum :)

Today for our last day in Amsterdam, we headed to the last major tourist sight we haven’t been to – Ann Frank’s house.  Unfortunately, like yesterday, we started off with bad luck because after waiting in line for 45 minutes to buy tickets, we got to the front and found out their credit card machines weren’t working and we didn’t have enough cash on us for the tickets!  When we couldn’t find the ATM the girl at the ticket office directed us to, we decided to skip Ann Frank’s house and headed straight to Chinatown for our final dim sum meal – and this time we knew the correct name of the restaurant my aunt was talking about after another phone call to her last night!

The dim sum restaurant my aunt loves here is called Hoi Tin Chinese Restaurant (the English and Chinese name are phonetically the same) and it is right on Zeedijk , the main street of Chinatown.  Her previous description of it being right beside a place called “fat gong san” in Chinese didn’t help me because I can’t read Chinese, but after asking a couple of people in Chinatown (thank God I can at least speak Chinese), we found the restaurant and I figured out that she was referring to a small Buddhist temple right beside it! 

We ordered the exact same things we had yesterday at Ocean City, and the shrimp dumplings were much better and fresher, but the rest of the dim sum actually wasn’t as good as the stuff we had at Ocean City.   Paul’s favourite, the small sticky rice pockets (lo mai gai in Chinese), didn’t have enough sauce in the filling, making them too dry for his liking, and the shui mai, one of my favourite dim sum items, were ginormous in size but I think I like them better when they are small because they taste better that way.  Overall, I’m happy we got dim sum (two days in a row!), but I still miss the stuff at home!

After lunch we did a bit more walking to finish off our last day in Amsterdam.  We headed over to a street named Herengracht, which according to About.com is the city’s most prominent canal belt address.  The area is nice, but the architecture here doesn’t particularly appeal to Paul or myself – the buildings are very square in shape and all look the same!  The intersection of Herengracht and Reguliersgracht is a popular tourist spot for photos as you are supposed to be able to see 15 canal bridges from here, but I could only count 10 and the view wasn’t that spectacular or pretty, especially after seeing the really picturesque canals and bridges in Brugge.

We finished off our day by checking out a museum with a free photography and film exhibit about the history of Amsterdam and New York, which we stumbled upon when we stopped to look at our map to figure out where we were and their security person offered to help us.  He asked if we needed directions and when we told him we weren’t sure where we were going, he suggested we pop inside and check out the free exhibit.  I didn’t know that New York was founded by the Dutch in 1624 so the whole thing was kind of interesting, although it was mostly just photographs and one black and white film with no dialogue so it was a very artistic history exhibit that didn’t provide much information.

Tomorrow we head to Rotterdam for half a day before we ferry off to England, where I’m looking forward to speaking English again!  Amsterdam has been interesting, but I can’t say it was my favourite place visited so far like so many of our friends say when they come tour Europe.  That being said, I would definitely come back and hopefully one day I’ll get the chance to come and take one of the many cruises of Europe that depart from here