Day Trip to Leiden

I went on a day trip to Leiden, which is 40 minutes' train ride away southwest of Amsterdam. It is a university town.

 The entire Netherlands is still in lockdown so I could only bear a couple of hours of walking around before I got too cold and needed to go back to Amsterdam. However, it would be nice to come back and rent a bike to bike around.

When I got off the train, I needed to go to the washroom. The washroom only accepts payment in the form of debit card, and having none, I decided to explore the town via finding a washroom.

A creatively windy path along the river.

I got to the city centre easily and was willing to pay for something at McDonald's to use their washroom. I was just surprised that it was still open and it was free to go to. Also in downtown: The Hudson's Bay Company, all the way in Leiden!

 By this time it was already pretty chilly on this cloudy day so I bought a warm tea and walked around town with it.

So many nice places to go into and have a sit...if only they were open, which they were not.

I had an idea to listen to an audio walking tour of Leiden while walking around. I tried to find some on YouTube, but there were videos of people filming themselves walking around the city rather than a tour of its history and such, which is more what I was looking for.

I went to one of my go-to places to check out some quick history of the town, wikitravel.org There, I found that there are over 80 mural poems across the city on the side of its buildings! I had came across one earlier and took had taken a picture. I tried to go on the website for a route with an itinerary of these poems, but no luck.

 

 

 

One of the poems in the city.

Another poem.

  I even found plaques around town that indicated a website that I could go to that promised audio guides of the city describing various features. But the website looked like it had been taken down long ago.

A plaque promising an audio guide on the website. If only the website still existed!

Finally, I downloaded an app that I could use to discover the history, people and places of the town. But once I did, I thought, who would want an app for this? The point is to wander around and complement the wanderings (with audio), not to look down at the phone and trip over a cobblestone while my eyes are on a screen.

I wonder if this is what the archaeology of tourism looks like: a digital graveyard of websites taken down, broken links, and real-life indicators that point nowhere.

While I was busy looking at my phone after taking a picture of a poem on the wall, just above the phone were two webbed feet.

Like this.

I had never seen feet like that, silver, scaly with thick digits. It turned out to be some sort of bird that wasn't scared of me at all and was expecting something of me

It turned out to be this fellow. Looks indignant. Found out it's a Eurasian coot. "Extremely territorial."

Cute herb/vegetable garden with cards.

Oh, and this is the birthplace of Rembrandt.

GDPR

 

This is a GDPR privacy notice from slate.com that I had never seen before my computer connected to the Internet stepped foot into the EU. I really appreciate the options and, although annoying, lets me choose which ad companies follow me. Funny, Facebook did not pop up with any of this message when I went to it...

City of Cyclists and Joggers

 I was intending to post last time I visited Amsterdam in August 2020, but life got in the way and now, 1.5 years later and still in a pandemic lockdown, I'm here again.

A note on travelling during covid - especially when you're in a more locked-down country, travelling exposes you to a world that is not the same. The plane was full. People were privileged enough to wear N-95 masks on the plane, but everyone of all sorts were going here, there, everywhere - families, backpackers, etc.

The plane ride this time around, I was unable to doze off completely so when I finally got into the city centre, bleary-eyed and jet-lagged, dawn just starting to peak through the blanket of dark, I stepped onto the street and almost got run over by a train of bicycles. That woke me with a jolt. I always forget that bicycles rule the cities in The Netherlands.

After taking a nap, I saw that it was sunny outside so my first inclination was to go to my favourite place from last time I visited: Westerpark. Past a shopping street, across a roadway is a long park that runs along the river and then widens out again, going for kilometers onwards. In it, there are kindergartens, shops, cinemas, restaurants, playgrounds and more fields. Of course these were all closed due to the lockdown. I noticed many more people out and running than last time, it looks like during a lockdown and after two years of pandemic people had taken up jogging. It reminded me of somebody who says to concentrate on what you can do (in a lockdown, as well as in life in general) instead of what you can't or can no longer do. In Canada during a pandemic, do winter hiking. At 3-6 degrees in sunny weather in Amsterdam, go jogging if you're able to.

A Little Free Library...in the middle of the park!

 

Gnarly tree branches on a tree with a great big trunk.

A cow in a field, with a Pontsteiger hotel across the IJ river.

 

The way the faint sun interacts with the buildings, along with the temperature, really make it feel like springtime in winter.

Springtime-like sunlight

After that, the day was pretty much spent napping and then going shopping for groceries. No ingredients too out of the ordinary, I thought. However, I was surprised to find the eggs on a store shelf, and when placing groceries away, I was tempted to put them in the fridge before I remembered that they don't have to go in there. The salad that we had was crunchy and fresh-tasting even though it had been in a bag, it must be from somewhere near here instead of transported from thousands of kilometers away. Also, I couldn't stop eating the small new potatoes. They were sweet and waxy, not bland and chalky, and the skin was alright to eat as well without having that acidic taste. After dinner, when I was watching a movie, instead of going to grab the chips, I grabbed a few baked potatoes out of the fridge and munched on those instead. Such tiny details, but they were things that jolted me awake, not unlike the bikes.