K guys. Vivy has gone to NY and back, and blogged a bit about her trip, and I'm still not done yet with my Amsterdam story. She runs her own company. Has a husband and 2 kids. Hundreds of handbags and shoes (tak relevant, tapi it still scores points in my book). And yet she still updates her blog regularly. How the heck.
Scoreboard: Vivy 10, 000 – Fatin 1 (for trying).
Huh. . . . . That's probably the ratio of the money in our bank accounts.
.......... Anyway. I'm back with more travel tales yang dah basi. Yay!
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Day 2
The second day was a bit more structured and organised than the first. We'd bought tickets for a tour to the windmills, a clogs factory, and a cheese factory. The tour started at 2pm, so in the morning we made a short trip to a market there called the Albert Cuyp Market.
It's quite funny how I'd grown rather fond of markets ever since I came to London. Granted, the markets that I go to bear very little resemblance to the pasar tani's back in KL, but still. Not many people my age would be excited about the prospect of going to a market. Haha.
The Albert Cuyp Market is the largest street market in Holland. It's super long and it sort of felt like a combination of pasar tani and Petaling Street. It had sooo many stalls selling so many different things – flowers, fabrics, bags, shoes, clothes, table cloths, beauty products, food, raw ingredients, spices. Everything!
We walked quite far at the market, but I don't think we even covered half of it! We didn't get to spend a long time there 'cause we had to make our way to the meeting point for the tour at noon.
It didn't take long for us to realise that a lot of the people on the tour were elderlies. Some were couples with babies and there were a few young adults like us. We were probably the youngest adults there who travelled on our own, much to our tour guide's surprise. She was like, "Are you two travelling on your own? How can your parents let you go out by yourselves?? How old are you?" She almost fell over when we told her our age. "I thought you were 14!"
Zaanse Schaans
The first stop of our tour, about an hour away from central Amsterdam, was Zaanse Schans. The windmills place. It's so beautiful and super a-dor-a-ble. It looked like a small village for children, I swear. Like a make-believe little town. It was quite hard for me to take the place seriously and wrap my head around the fact that people actually work there. Because look:
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| That's our tour guide with the red umbrella hahaha she had her arm up like that the whole day |
I mean, doesn't it look like a place where the villagers wear the same outfits everyday and walk around with little wooden baskets and drive around in little red cars?! Cute!
Clogs & Cheese
After the windmills we got on the bus again and drove off to a small cottage where they showed us how the wooden shoes are made. They literally start with a wooden block. Then they just use machines on the blocks to make holes for the feet to go in and smoothen the surface. Easy peasy.
Of course they're not at all fashionable, but hey, that's not what they're made for. The shoes are practical for farmers because they protect their feet in case they get stomped on by cows or horses. The hooves won't lenyek the farmers' feet as long as they wear clogs.
And after 22 years of living, I finally realised that Cinderella was wearing clogs when she fed the chickens. (Ah-ha moment.)
The clogs factory was situated in a small neighbourhood with the cutest houses I have ever seen. All of them had steep pointy roofs and planked walls and were painted either green or black. No other colour. The tour guide said something about this... they got the colour from the plants, or somewhere or other, for some reason I can't remember. Hahaaa sorry guys.
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| The kind of house that I'd been drawing my whole |
As we were walking through the neighbourhood, we reached this one part where the path went under a house (or something like that). The path was sooo small; to one side was a wall and the other was a river. It was pretty cute until we came face to face with a car that wanted to pass through. That was when cute became a problem.
Oh tiny places, how you amuse me to no end.
This is probably my favourite part: To get to the cheese factory from the little neighbourhood, we went on a boat. So. Cool.
At the cheese factory, we heard a woman talk about how cheese was made. Ok, get this: to make cheese, you put an enzyme in milk to make it curdle. Then the curds (the solid part) are separated from the whey (the liquid) and is 'cooked' to make cheese, while the whey is usually discarded. But the lady said that whey is good to drink because it prevents wrinkles. Someone in the group asked her, "Does it work?" She answered, "I guess so, I drink it everyday." Then she asked us how old did she look.
She's 52 years old, guys. Fifty two. I literally thought she was 40 and I was afraid to say it out loud because I didn't want to offend her. So I said 37. When she told us her real age, my mouth just dropped and I couldn't hide my surprise. I was sat in the front row with my mouth open for quite a while.
Whey, sumpah tak lek doh. (Hahahahahahaha I'm sorry I couldn't resist.) I want to look that young when I turn 52! I'm gonna need some of that whey!!
By the whey (last pun, I promise), did you know that smoked cheese and pesto cheese actually taste nice? Smoked cheese actually tastes like sausages that has a cheese filling. We were pleasantly surprised, so we bought both of them.
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| Literally the only time when it's relevant for us to say 'Cheese' for a photo |
It was a 6-hour tour so we were knackered by the time we got back. We had a fantastic day though, and great weather too! Holland's countryside is absolutely picturesque and the entire drive outside Amsterdam was accompanied by goooorgeous views.
I'm so glad that Najwa found the tour when she did (thanks Wa). The tour guide was so friendly and sweet too; she kept on coming to us to ask if we're okay – this was before she found out that we're in our 20's hahaha. When we arrived in Amsterdam that night and were saying our goodbyes, she hugged us and said, "Girls, please go straight back to your hotel, okay? Don't go around the city at this time, it's dark and it's not safe for you girls. Take care."
And that's another thing I love about travelling: meeting people with kind hearts.
