Easter in Amsterdam 6

I'm writing this live in the sense, this blog has caught up with time, I have finally found a nice place to blog from, because I never before found somewhere suitable, East of Eden had a very slow connection, but Westers was very nice, great service, good Internet connection, but a poor perch for my poor nearly fleshless bottom, basically on a wooden chair, I'm sitting on the bones of my pelvis. Today decided to go for the whole hog, scootered all the way to Westers from Zeeburg CS around 7 kilometres took me nearly an hour, but an adventure never the less.


Amsterdam seems a mess, but is a heady mix of canals, bike herds, manic scooters, incredible trams and endless numbers of people trundling wheeled suitcases, it is possible there are more tourists here than inhabitants. But somehow this place seems to work, but you need eyes in the back of your head. Its manic but nice.

I finally arrived at Westers and discovered that all the tables inside had been stowed away and using my laptop outside, is none to easy, because it is hard to read the screen in sunlight.

Westers was being rearranging stuff blocking the street an installing a massive sound system for a street party on the Saturday. The situation was not fit for blogging, so I set off vaguely in the direction of home, tried another bar, would have been perfect, nice atmosphere, there were even two people playing chess with a clock, in the middle of the room, truly home so I asked the waitress did the place have wifi ? "No" she said :( Off I set again, all the while vaguely in the direction of home.

As I was leaving the centre of the 'Dam sort of the area of canals with the word gracht after their name. According to Wikipedia gracht is nearly untranslatable I disagree, ok there is not a exact translatable term in English, but an inner city canal with a road either side of it is very easy to understand. The way the 'Dam is laid out is very nice. The plural to gracht is grachten, this system makes the inner Amsterdam very easy to navigate, just head in the opposite direction to Centraal station, or the Dam square and you will bump into a gracht find one and you have found them all, learn the names Heren, Keizers, Prinzen, Lijnbaans and you will never need a map in inner Amsterdam.


The next place I tried was a coffee shop, but everybody had glassy eyes and the atmosphere was very smoky, so I carried on the homeward trundle.

Found another candidate, everything seemed to checkout, had a cup of tea and tried to get connected and yes I could see the connection on my laptop screen, but alas no password, so probably half the street was leaching the connection. Knowing that one IP can only be shared with 255 users I gave up on that one.

Finally I found a place, that seems fit for purpose, called the 'Lempicka bar', not that far away from where my caravan is sited only 4.3 km away.

Met this Dutch who guy reckoned he could get me on Dutch television, I turned the offer down, perhaps  he was serious but I doubt it.

A photograph of my scooter safely parked in the Lempicka bar.
 

Stayed till around 11 o'clock, then made for the caravan, just about made it the battery was beginning to die though. Now I know roughly what the range of the scooter is 17 km or nearly 10 miles. This knowledge will be important in future.