Busy weekend

Our weekend was very busy, which is a bit unusual for us. For me it started with an outing with Marike. We had a nice lunch at the restaurant de Waag and then did some shopping at the Nieuwmarkt and a Chinese store in the neighborhood. I always enjoy spending time with Marike. Mostly we speak Dutch, at least to start. If I slip into too much English, she switches too, so I try to stick to Dutch. My accent is terrible, and my vocabulary and grammar aren’t so good either, but she seems to understand me, so that’s good. It seems to me that I do better if I don’t think about it too much. I’ve never really been able to translate from English to Dutch. My Dutch just sort of is there – or it’s not.

On Sunday we had dinner at Anouk’s parents’ home in Amstelveen. That was incredible, and it gets its own blog entry soon. We took the light rail/subway to get there, and that was a first for us.

By the time dinner was over and we got back to city center, it was time to go watch the Super Bowl. I had investigated places we could do this, and the closest was the Globe Hotel sports bar in the red-light district. (Regular buses and trams don’t run that late – or early – so we were walking home.) Actually, the hotel is in a quiet corner of the district, so we didn’t even see any of the prostitutes in the windows, but we have seen them before. The crowd for the game seemed to be English and Dutch and maybe a few Americans, but not of the tourist sort. If there were any Cardinal fans, they were drowned out by the very boisterous Steelers contingent. It was odd to see the Super Bowl without commercials. I hadn’t been able to decide who I wanted to win, so I wasn’t disappointed that Arizona lost although I’m sure my mom was. It was a good game, and I stayed mostly awake for it.

Amidst all the other activity, John managed to edit and post another video on YouTube. Here it is:

YouTube video link