It rained a lot today. We stayed in the apartment most of the day, but headed out as the weather cleared in the evening. Check out Noelle’s new instagram account – she’s got some pretty sweet pics of our trip!

We took a nice walk back to the Leidseplein and museum area.  Our goal was to get some dinner and drinks, and visit the Van Gogh museum.Determined not to make the same dinner mistake as a couple nights ago, Noelle found a really cool “brown cafe” called De Zotte in the Leidseplein area.  The brown cafes in Amsterdam used to be (and really still are) the places where the neighborhood residents would gather, smoke their tobacco, and spend hours drinking and eating.  Well thats pretty much what we did at De Zotte! It was cool, we got there early and had some really good beer.  We eventually ordered some bread and cheese and the special of the day.  It was a chicken plate that came with some tasty sauce, fries, and salad – awesome!After stuffing ourselves and getting just about wasted drunk, we ambled on towards the Van Gogh museum.  An older American couple came up and asked me how to get there – I sort of pointed in my half-drunken stupor and said something like “it’s over there, we can goin together.”  That marks the third set of people to come up to us and ask for directions since we’ve been here. I guess we must look like we know where we’ve been and where we are headed!

Noelle told me to stand by the I Amsterdam sign and she would take a “special” picture… what a comedian! When we finally did make it to the museum, it was already almost 8PM, and we decided the line was just too long.  Instead we strolled along the canal roads back to the apartment to call it a night.  This brings me to another key tenet of our travel philosophy so far: we travel slow and steady to give time for life to happen. If we don’t want to wait in line at the Van Gogh museum, we don’t have to – we’ll be back next week.  Tonight we had a great time in Leidseplein, and I’m really looking forward to what else we can discover on this trip!