For Emma's
birthday we decided to pay a visit to our friends Rachael & Christian (that I met four years ago in Finland). After work we hopped on Thalys (Belgian high-speed train) and we were Amsterdam bound- in 1st class s'il vous plait (read:
free everything on board)! We were off to a good start!
Few hours of train ride later, Christian and Rachael picked us up at the Centraal station, and the pre-party started as soon as we got to their place. Thanks to the work trip to Norway the previous week, I was able to bring them some local liquid souvenir: the infamous Aquavit! After surviving the tasting of the Nordic devil, we headed to downtown and popped the birthday champagne by the canal! By then the party was fully on and we got ourselves involved in some serious bar hoppin’…
The following day, Christian offered us a private tour on his boat, Suomi 07, on the canals. It was a
great ride until we had a collision with one of those massive tourist boats (that
don’t slow down for the crossroads but just keep honking)! It wasn’t really
that bad, we just freaked out for a minute and the Japs were having fun taking photos of it…
Other than
that our weekend was pretty calm- we went around the town and enjoyed the first
(so they said) warm spring day chilling on the terrace, on the canals and everywhere we could. We also went to De Bierkoning
(the beer kingdom) to bring back some Dutch specialties!
On Sunday we took a ferry across to Amsterdam North to
grab some Dutch brunch and plan our next
trip to Greece. Later in
the afternoon, it was time to head back to Paris but it didn’t feel so bad knowing
the next time we’d see each other would be at the Athens airport in
just couple of weeks!
