Amsterdam

Or as one guy in my lab calls it, Hamsterdam.

It was another group trip to a big city in Europe and I definitely liked it better than the first time I visited this city. Part of this was probably because we were visiting with an ex-local and stayed at a friends apartment. Very lucky.
We started off the second day by picking up our bicycles from the train station. Traveling around by bicycle was definitely the best way to see the city. We went to the new public library and had breakfast in their fancy cafeteria on a roof top terrace. The building was very modern and clean, here's a look up the centre of the building, the lights are at the end of each escalator.

Modern lighting in the museum.

Of course, the city was similar, more canals, decent weather with a fair amount of rain.

I left the group for a bit to wander around and of course ended up in the red light district. It wasn't that active at around 6pm but there were lots of people walking around and it is the fun part of the city where the streets are narrow and medieval. I took this picture of cygnets on the canal.

I can't remember if I took this picture last time of a very narrow house, but it's from the days when they paid by the feet of house front. So a narrow house could be very deep but not have to pay more tax.

We went to the Rijksmuseum, we even got a tour from a young curator who was friends with our host. That was very interesting.
Finally, in Amsterdam I was reunited with my lemon quark, which I fell in love with while visiting Fokke. Everyone agreed it was fantastic and that we had often been fooled in Switzerland, thinking the yellow banana quark might actually be lemon.

Our trip went very well except for the EasyJet pain at the end, the flight was delayed and we barely made it back to Geneva for the last train to Lausanne. Otherwise we would have had to find a place to sleep in Geneva after midnight. Yeah, not that fun.