Ultimate Europe Trip 2016 Day 4: We 'Frank'ly Needed the Rest
It's hard to imagine that we're already on our forth day of the trip, and our second full day in Amsterdam. So far the city has been incredible, far exceeding our expectations. Our plan for today was to take a day-trip to Brussels. However the tour we were going to do got cancelled due to a Belgium holiday and when we woke up at 6AM (after only a couple of hours of sleep after the red light tour) to make our 7AM train we realized that there was just no chance of us spending a full-day in Brussels on this little of sleep. So we woke up at 6AM, cancelled our train tickets, and went back to sleep.
We ended up waking up at 10AM to make breakfast in the hotel. We had a really lovely breakfast. Jenn had pancakes and I had an omelette and we both got a little bit of food from the buffet. I also had a cappuccino to try and bring some life back in me. We ended up walking around the general vicinity of our hotel and realized we were still zonked. We closed the blinds in our hotel room and didn't wake back up until 3PM.
Oh how glorious that felt. To finally catch up on some sleep after a couple of days of hit or miss sleep. We made our way out from our hotel and walked to the Anne Frank house. Having talked to several of people who've gone to Amsterdam everyone says its not worth the wait to go inside. We followed the advice and walked around the house and snapped some photos but otherwise stayed clear of what looked like a line of a couple of hundred people.
From the Anne Frank house we went back out in search of a Starbucks mug. We had a specific design to match our current set we were going for and came up empty handed again. Instead we decided to give into the new look for the location based Starbucks mugs and bought an awesome Amsterdam mug to add to our collection.
One of the last things on our Amsterdam list of things to see was Vondelpark. It's a giant park a little outside of the city. Well our escapade to find the Starbucks mug actually got us within a five minute walk of the park so we made our way from Starbucks and strolled through Vondelpark. I'm so glad we made it out there. After walking around the park for a little under a half-hour we plopped on a bench like an old married couple that we are and just sat and watched the hundreds if not thousands of people in the park enjoying the gorgeous day in Amsterdam. The park is exactly what you expect from a massive European park and the people of Amsterdam seem to use it to its fullest.
After sitting in the park for almost an hour and the sun just starting to go down we made the almost hour-long walk back to our hotel. When we checked in to our hotel they gave us a voucher for a free bottle of wine at there restaurant. That was an offer that we couldn't refuse so we went to the 5&33 restaurant for dinner. It was rather empty with only a couple of tables filled but we got a great spot and started off the meal with a nice bottle of Merlot.
5&33 is a mix of Italian and Mediterranean food. I don't usually mention bread when I do recaps of meals but the small bite sized bread with the meal was out of this world. We went through almost three full baskets of it. We stated out with Minestrone soup. We had it split and Jenn took the broth side so I was stuck with all the veggies. We then had a small plate of zucchini fritters which was like zucchini french fries. They were absolutely delicious although they could have used some sort of dipping sauce.
For our main course we shared the Tagliolini, with fresh truffle shaving, butter and parmesan cheese. It was the most rich pasta I've ever had but it was out of this world. Although we couldn't finish the giant sharable entree we did our best of clearing what we did serve out. It was so rich that it was hard to even think about eating anything else. Luckily given it was a quiet night the waiter took away our food and let us enjoy the bottle of wine and the evening.
That's exactly what we did. We didn't leave until every last drop of wine was drunk before retiring to our room. Although finishing the bottle of wine wasn't the best of ideas it made for a very relaxing and enjoyable end to another great day in Amsterdam.
