Bikes Everywhere!

The bike culture of Germany, Belgium, and especially the Netherlands is impressive.  In Germany, I started noticing separate lanes for bikes - often with a divider between the road and the bike lane.  Much safer than Pittsburgh, that's for sure.

As we continued northward, I noticed the emphasis on bikes more and more - parking lots of bikes, bikes chained to every available surface, and more.  Brugge had parking for bikes near a music event.  There was no parking for cars anywhere in sight.

But the Netherlands truly had bikes everywhere:

There are sidewalks for walkers separate from bike paths for bikes (and scooters apparently) separate from the road for cars - pretty impressive!

Many bikes have saddlebags since people use them to do their shopping:

And there are some truly huge parking lots for bikes:

This huge 2.5-level structure is a bike parking lot in Amsterdam near the train station.

Here's a close up of one end of the parking lot:

Bikes are also modified to transport multiple children (and apparently cost several thousand dollars):

It was also common for one person to be peddling a bike while another was sitting side-saddle on the back, although I didn't manage to get a photo of that.

I also loved this parking garage for bikes in Haarlem:

So take note, Pittsburgh, you may be bike friendly, but you've got nothing on these countries.  

Much to do in Amsterdam

Let's start with our arrival in Amsterdam - the train station is quite a lovely building:

Amsterdam has tons of canals and is like a thriving Venice where non-tourists actually still live.  Many of the canals are lined with houseboats:

There are tons of things to do in Amsterdam.  There are museums for everything - Dutch artists (we went to the Rijksmuseum), cheese (we walked past one of these but opted not to visit), and houseboats:

Paul is right at home in the living room

This particular houseboat had an incredibly tiny living area for the skipper and family from the days when it was still used for shipping freight.  The sleeping areas were incredibly small.  You can't really tell, but I'm on my knees in this picture and the bed to my side would have slept two children.  It isn't much bigger than what you can see, and the double bed on the other side was only slightly bigger than that.  There's no way a person my height, let alone taller, could have stretched out in that bed.

While wandering around Amsterdam, Paul commented that Pittsburgh needs restaurant areas like these:

Nice, shady spaces lined with trees and tons of outdoor eating.  We opted not to eat there, however, because instead, we ate in the public library.  We had dinner on the 7th floor, complete with beer!

For the record, we shared the entire meal.  I did not eat an entire pizza and a salad!

The lovely view from the library that you can sort of see in the photo above:

And I just cannot help myself.  Here are a bunch of neat photos from inside the library:

And to end, a Kate and Paul picture:

And the Floor Was Paved with Gravestones

We stayed in Haarlem for three nights, taking two day trips into Amsterdam (stay tuned for a future Amsterdam post!).

In Haarlem, we checked out a very interesting church, the Church of St. Bavo, which had an enormous organ that inspired both Handel and Mozart.  It has over 5,000 pipes.  I would have loved to hear it played, but sadly, the regular concerts were not on days we were in Haarlem:

The ceiling of the church is made of neat wooden arches:

And the floor is composed entirely of gravestones:

We stayed in a lovely little Airbnb apartment in Haarlem, located down this street:

It had a crazy lamp.  Yes, all those light bulbs work - on a dimmer switch, thankfully.  We never turned it up all the way:

Paul was amused and mildly surprised that this Haarlem store accepted bitcoins!

And finally, random legs:

Nijmegen Addendum

Paul reminded me that I forgot to mention the cafe/pub at which we ate dinner both evenings in Nijmegen.  Paul read about it on a Reddit forum for the town, and we are so glad he did.  It's called The Blue Hand (Cafe In De Blaauwe Hand).  It had great beer - Paul tried a local beer supposedly made only for this cafe: Rooie something or other.  Yum!

The two wood boards in the photo above contain Flammkuchen.  According to the English menu, "It was dubbed Flammkuchen from the days when bakers used thinly rolled bread dough to gauge the temperature of the wood-fired ovens. Innovative bakers began to top off this dough with sour cream and other ingredients, and the Flammkuchen was born."  We tried a Mexican one but liked the sour cream, leek, and bacon one the best.  Delicious!  We also had a fried food mix the first night:

The second night, we tried the soup of the day, which was a surprisingly delicious lentil soup, and some more Flammkuchen. 

If you ever find yourself in Nijmegen, you must try this place.  Definitely one of our favorites from the trip for the food, beer, and ambiance.  As a bonus, it was not overrun with tourists.  

Somewhere in the Netherlands

After rearranging the end of our trip, we found that we had a few extra days.  We wanted to find somewhere off the beaten path in the Netherlands (our 10th country of the trip!) - somewhere that would be good for outdoorsy adventures.  While in Germany, we ran into folks from Holland (which actually just refers to a small part of the Netherlands, although people seem to use it interchangeably with "Netherlands" as well, which was confusing), and one of the places they recommended was Nijmegen.

While researching Nijmegen, we learned that it is the location for the Netherlands' biggest festival (a Wikipedia article calls it the International Four Days Marches Nijmegen), which would start the day we planned to leave Nijmegen (July 13).  Apparently, the city swells from 160,000 people to 1.6 million people or more for this marching festival during which people walk anywhere from 30-50 km per day.  We thought it could be interesting to see a city setting up for such a huge influx of people, so off we went.

The first thing we discovered was that our fancy-sounding room was not so fancy.  The online description said it included a spiral staircase.  It did, they weren't lying, but it didn't go anywhere.  It just took up space in the room:

As we wandered around, we learned that the Netherlands apparently has a problem with drunk men peeing all over the place during large festivals.  To combat this, they had these plastic urinals set up everywhere (the sign on the right warns people not to pee in public... and is located rather close to the urinals?):

We also noticed they were making great use of existing structures - using this old ruin to set up a stage:

I also finally took a picture of a Doner kebab.  These are all over Europe, and we've eaten at several:

Our main goal for Nijmegen was to get out and enjoy nature.  To this end, we took a long walk past some interesting sites.  These permanent houseboats lined one of the rivers we passed:

We also saw some horses:

and fields of wildflowers:

and some really big plants:

Lastly, to kill time one evening, we wandered around looking in shop windows.  This particular fashion statement caught our attention: