Amsterdam recap

We spent April 5th – 15th in Amsterdam

What we did

Museumkaart

• We preferred this over the iAmsterdam pass because we valued the flexibility of not being forced to do all of our museum visits over a short window –  Museaumkaart is valid for 30 days. Museaumkaart also covered a museum that Tony wanted to visit that iAmsterdam did not. You can’t purchase this card online without a valid Dutch address, but you’re able to purchase it at any museum that it’s valid for – we purchased ours at The Stedelijk
• Stedjelijk
  • Modern art museum, we had to kill 8 hours before our hotel room was ready so doing a museum was our best bet. Tony also had his first coffee in forever, and found that caffeine worked
• Van Gogh Museum
  • We tried booking tickets too late, but found out from a reddit thread that at 5pm local time the museum releases a few tickets for the following day; we tried this and it worked! 
• Leiden / Naturalis Biodiversity Center
  • Tony really wanted to visit this place because it had Trix, who is quite possibly the second most famous Tyrannosaurus Rex (after Sue, and yes, most T happen to have names). Trix is one of the most complete skeletons ever recovered, with around 80% of its bone mass being recovered. There was also a really cool exhibit called “Life” which was life sized models of nearly every animal imaginable. Tony found a few animals (webbed tree frog) that he liked and wanted to try designing origami models for. 

Amaze! 

• Amaze! Is an auditory visual exhibit experience. Tickets were hard to get and we thought it was just fine. It probably would have been a lot better if we were high.

Running

• We were here during Tony’s taper, so less running was done. His long run was a 13 mile loop around Amsterdam, and there was both a super nice park (with the olympic training center for crew) as well as a decent 4 lane track only about a mile away from where we stayed. Tony did his first running workout on a track since middle school there.

Artis Zoo

• Margaret thinks this is the best zoo she’s ever been to in her life
• The zoo was delightful, when we got in the brochure we were given had a series of sessions that zookeepers were doing throughout the day, so we routed based on this. We saw lemurs in an open exhibit just running all over the place, the lions hack away at their lunch – a giant meat popsicle, vultures glide up and down their enclosure (it was basically a runway), elephants catch apple snacks, and zebras itch themselves on a fence just 1 foot away. 
• Lunch was next door to the giraffe and zebra enclosure which was really nice. We had a slow lunch and saw the giraffes make slow loops around
• Other highlights – spending 5 minutes in an open enclosure looking for a 3 toed sloth and a porcupine, hanging out with the seals, seeing many giant tortoises stacked up against each other, and an open enclosure with a bunch of small monkeys.

Art store

• When randomly walking down the street, we chanced upon an art museum and spent maybe 45 minutes in there checking out what was inside. Tony was really excited by a cutting mat that was utterly gigantic (and only like 30 euros) and bought a sheet of really thin unryu in a really pretty royal blue color. Margaret bought a small watercolor notebook.

Keukenhof 

• This was a highly recommended tulip garden that was only open for a few weeks in April. They have a large outdoor space that had a beautiful selection of flowers (some not open yet unfortunately) but then we discovered a huge greenhouse-like building that contained so many different varieties of tulips in literally every shape imaginable. Here are some of Margaret’s favorites
• We recommend going to Keukenhof early if you can; the bus line when we returned was crazy. When we went in the morning we were able to get onto the first bus that arrived

Where we stayed

We stayed at Premier Suites Amsterdam in the southern part of Amsterdam, near Amsterdam Zuid station.. It was outside the city center but extremely close to multiple train lines with pretty easy access to the rest of Amsterdam. The room itself was great with a fair bit of space and its own kitchen. 

Next to the hotel was a gym called TrainMore that we had access to. While extremely small, it was really nice and had a lot of pretty specific equipment (a backrest designed for doing hip thrusts and a hex bar). It was constantly busy, full of large blond people working out.

We really liked being in a quieter part of town, near a green park to walk and run in. 

What we ate

As the first stop in our trip, we had to figure out a lot with respect to how we wanted to handle food and cooking. Even normal routines like figuring out how the local grocery stores work caused us anxiety. We ended up stabilizing pretty quickly with the routine of cooking breakfast and dinner and eating lunch out. Some food thoughts

• We went to the grocery store Albert Heijn almost daily. The biggest quirk of the stores was that most stores did not accept Visa, unless they were next to a big train station. Otherwise, they only took Netherlands bank cards. It was very clean and all the food was neatly packaged.
• Tony ate so many chocolate croissants; they were also extremely cheap at 59 cents. We also ate many more expensive but delicious croissants, which Margaret really liked dipped in jam.
• The fried rice from AH was atrocious but the other packaged meals were good
• The peanut butter here was not sweet at all but had the texture of American peanut butter. The stores devoted 10x more shelf space to hagelslag, which are basically chocolate sprinkles, and 5x more space to different types of chocolate hazelnut spread.
• Margaret found a cheese shop that we went to, and got a lot of cheese that was really good. We became cheese people for 3 weeks. The one we really liked was a dutch goat cheese with salt crystals on it paired with pear jam.
• Our overall opinion of dutch food was that we weren’t the biggest fans of it; it was basically all sandwiches or fried food. The one thing that we did like was dutch apple pie which had streusel on top instead of a pie crust
• We did try bitterballen, which is fried dough with a bit of meat gravy in it, served with mustard. Margaret liked it, and Tony thought it was okay
• Real stroopwaffels are great, much better than the packaged airplane variety

Thoughts

Misc

• Coffee works if you have enough of it. The first day we arrived, the second cup of coffee saved Margaret from falling asleep in a museum
• Adjusting to time zones was harder than we thought with many nights where we just couldn’t fall asleep. Melatonin was a life saver, even in small amounts. We couldn’t tell if it was placebo or real, but we’ll never travel long distances without it again.
• More expensive cured meat is better. We normally buy the cheapest option, but even the second cheapest option was noticeably better. Also yummmm prosciutto.
• There were so many bikers, and accidentally walking into a bike lane was both extremely easy and potentially dangerous. Bikes vastly outnumbered cars, so much so that streets were often completely devoid of cars
• The Netherlands starts their day so late, cafes don’t open until 9AM, and the streets are empty before then

Overall 

We really liked how walkable Amsterdam was, how accessible everything was, and how much there was to do there. We didn’t like the food but we ended up cooking the majority of our meals. As most everyone spoke English, this was an easy place for us to ease into our travels. 

Rotterdam recap

We spent April 15th – 18th in Rotterdam

What we did

Rotterdam Marathon

• When Margaret and I were discussing when to leave our jobs, I got the idea of sequencing that into running a marathon near the beginning of our travels. My original marathon plan was to wait until I felt good about running sub 3, but running a marathon as a part of quitting our jobs felt too good to pass up. I was deciding between Paris and Rotterdam, and ultimately selected Rotterdam because
  • Timing wise it logistically worked out better to run in mid april rather than early april
  • Rotterdam’s course was slightly more friendly, but both are great and have great crowd support and views based on the internet
• We booked the hotel attached to the convention center, and we actually didn’t know this at the time of booking. Hoka was the main sponsor; we saw so many hoka employees fully geared up throughout our time there 
• The hotel was attached to the convention center, Tony won a pair of compression socks during check-in, which ended up coming in handy later
• We had booked a pasta buffet the night before the race, and ate a lot of pasta to carb load
• Tony packed 6 gels for the race. The race plan was to take one gel every 30 minutes. 
• Based on how training went, Tony was hoping for something in the 3:05-3:10 range. Tony was unable to find either pacer, so just winged it at the start, taking care not to go out too hard – the first bit is like the only hill in the entire course which is up and down a bridge
• Set off trying to average 7:0x pace
• Noticed around mile 4 that my calf was feeling tight, this had never happened in any of the runs that I’d done before
• During this time Tony’s pace was really even, going through the halfway point at 1:32:49 (7:05/minute) average with mile times for the first 13 of
  • 7:03, 7:03, 7:05, 7:08, 7:02, 7:05, 7:05, 7:04, 7:05, 7:07, 7:08, 7:05, 7:02
• Probably because of that my form started compensating for that, and slowly but surely different parts of my body started to feel tight – quads first, and then hamstrings, and then my whole legs. The next 5 miles felt progressively harder
  • 7:11 7:08 7:11 7:15 7:17 
• At mile 18/19, Tony stopped to stretch, but by this point it was too late, his entire body (chest, lats, arms) started cramping and it was he couldn’t open his stride without cramping
  • 8:07 8:51 
• What was really interesting was that it wasn’t pain in the traditional sense, Tony’s legs didn’t feel dead and his lungs were fine, it was just so much cramping. I took a bottle of water from some nice bystander and walked a fair bit to try and walk it off.
  • 10:26 13:04
• Tony thought about stopping here, but the crowd was phenomenal. Shout out to this group of lads that were all clearly drunk on heineken that were all shouting when they saw Tony walking. They were the best hype squad and Tony didn’t walk after this point. Tony probably saw Margaret somewhere here but Margaret didn’t see Tony walk 🙂
  • 11:11 9:51
• Tony doesn’t remember much about the end, other than getting dropped by literally everyone. After crossing the finish line so many people were just collapsed on the ground. Tony kept on walking because he knew if he sat down he may have never gotten up again. Final finishing time: 3:29:40.
  • 9:05 3:07
• While we did not partake, the rest of the city started to party HARD immediately after the race ended. Margaret walked out to pick up food and passed through two huge crowds of drunk party goers dancing and mingling outside bars. The smashed cans, crushed solo cups, drunk people, and general smell of beer really took me back to college times.
• Tony pretty much could not walk Sunday afternoon, or Monday for that matter. Everything hurt, even the upper body perhaps from the cramping. Margaret was a champ and picked up so much Ubereats while Tony was bedridden. We watched all of “The Glory” and Tony lived in the compression socks that he had just won. 
• [Margaret] While Tony ran, I grabbed a cup of Dunkin vanilla latte and then walked to the SW corner of Kralingse Bos park to cheer him on. The walk took me through a more residential part of Rotterdam, which only further convinced me that it could be a very nice and peaceful city to live in. I saw the elite runners and then waited anxiously for Tony to show up. By tracking his progress on Find my, I could tell he had slowed off his goal pace. He didn’t see me the first time (despite me yelling his name) but he did see me when he exited the park. At that point, he was running slowly and was clearly in pain. I’m very proud of him for finishing.

Rotterdam Markthal and city center

• Day after the marathon, went on a short walk around city center, mostly through the food hall Markthal. 
• Wonderful selection of every type of food, dutch, asian, indian, mediterranean. Settled on very authentic jian bing and soymilk and then some pistachio baklava. 
• Margaret walked around the city center with some Beijing friends the first day and really loved how connected, modern, and livable the city felt. 

Where we stayed

We stayed at the Postillion Hotel & Convention Centre WTC Rotterdam, which was connected to the race expo and very close to the race start and finish. It had a serviceable bed (two twins squeezed together, where we kept losing things through the crack) with a TV (which we used to binge The Glory part 2 on Netflix during Tony’s recovery). It was a 15 minute walk from the Rotterdam train station and was overall a very convenient hotel.

What we ate

We neither had the time nor means to cook in Rotterdam, so we relied on take out. None of the food stuck out but none of it was bad either. We still fell back on good old Albert Heijn for breakfast and snack goodies. 

Thoughts

• Rotterdam felt like a fresh, modern, well-connected, and livable city. It was not touristy and had the right balance of energy and calm.
• Eating out for every meal is both very expensive (Rotterdam ended up being much more pricey per day than Amsterdam) and very uncomfortable.