Day 11, 12 and 13

Sorry for the lack of more consistent updates. As much as I would like to, I always tend to fall asleep even before I feel like blogging. Anyway, for the past 3 days it has been more of the daily errands and less exciting things have happened. A quick recap..

Day 11

The day started with us waking up very late, I woke up at 11am, and slacked abit before going over to Seb's place, our 'tour de amsterdam' didn't really work out so much because it turned out to be something much more exciting, something that really made my day 11...because.......

I AM GOING TO MANCHESTER! YES MANCHESTER!! MANCHESTER UNITED... MANCHESTER UNITED!!!

Hohohoho. What had seemed like a distant dream of ever visitng Old Trafford in my lifetime has suddenly materialised in a short 2 hour discussion.

It started with a discussion at the dining table of what was going to happen in the up-coming weekends. We discussed of the possibilites of going somewhere like Denmark to find Andrew, or touring neighbouring countries like France or Germany, but fate would have it, or rather Ryanair will have it that we shall go to Manchester!

Thanks to this online promotion by Ryanair, we will be flying from Brussels (capital of Belgium, Belgium to Amsterdam is like Singapore to Malaysia, but slightly further of course) to Manchester for a really real steal of 20 Euros. Its a return ticket. Yes, all tax included air tickets to Manchester and back to Brussels for less than S$40. The funnier thing is that the train tickets from Amsterdam is actually 3 times more expensive than this air tickets. Indeed, it seems that flying in Europe can possibly be cheaper than travelling by train!

All I know is that I can now picture myself standing in front of Old Trafford, hopefully be able to get a ticket to watch ManU vs Blackburn, then take alot of pictures inside, see the players and Sir Alex Ferguson, pluck the grass from OT and keep it as souvenir.. gaaa this is too much to take!

However, the trip there is littered with alot of unknowns, from taking the train at Amsterdam, to changing trains twice in Brussels, to boarding the plane to Manchester, to finding the hostel in Manchester, to taking the bus from Manchester to London where we will spend another 3 days, then back to Manchester, back to Brussels and back to Amsterdam. The problems that could arise from what I just mentioned in this paragraph could be as difficult as the Journey to the West! I hope that everything will go smoothly, like how it has been so far!

Later that afternoon, we did go cycling to find other markets in the vicinity, and managed to find the biggest marketplace in Amsterdam. It is similiar in terms of variety of goods sold, but there are just more stalls and prices are actually slightly higher.

More pictures of frozen lakes and picturesque parks near the marketplace.





Dinner was a change of the usual drumsticks we had from previous days. Tried a dark sauce chicken fillet with potatoes and ginger pieces. Turned out very nicely, but the chicken fillet here is still too expensive and in my opinion is inferior to the drumstick. Still, I think people here don't have the habit of chewing on bones or don't like getting their fingers dirty, which is why fillets are so popular.

We continued to slack late into the night, and are busy in transitting into the European lifestyle of drinking wine, having candles on our dining table and listening to jazz music as we feast. Hahahah it really gives the wrong impression that we are still students doing our exchange here in Amsterdam. I was too tired to go home and decided that I should sleep over.



Day 12

Woke up for a quick breakfast of bread and some breadspread we bought the previous day. Didn't really like it because it was wholemeal bread which is something I absolutely loathe. (pardon the pun) We left the hostel to venture into more parts of Amsterdam. We reached the beautiful town where we had the pretty decent pancake during the introduction week and it was still bring and sunny in the morning.





The Heineken brewery which we will visit again for the Heineken experience, a 1.5 hour tour of how the beer is brewed, with 2 drinks and costs 20 euros.







Cycling further down, we went past a majestic looking museum, which turns out to be the national museum of Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, biggest in the Netherlands.



By the time we cycled to another area, which brought us to the Hard Rock Cafe Amsterdam, it was starting to rain and snow! I still had some life in the fingers to snap some very interesting photos of people playing with really big chess pieces, and the heavy snow/rain in action.









The icy rain that melted and left this tingling, chilly sensation when it fell off my hair. Brrrrr..



The ground covered with ice, though melted almost as quickly as it fell.

We still continued to cycle into one of the biggest park in Amsterdam, the Vondelpark, in search of the UK embassy which Bev needed to find so she could get her visa done to visit Manchester. I was feeling lifeless, not only in the fingers but in the legs as well. It was a while later we left the park having found where the embassy was, and it was literally raining the kind of ice-kachang snow on our way back to the hostel! Another of those once-in-a-lifetime experience. The whole place was scenic with really observable ice/snow everywhere, yet it was a tad too cold to be able to appreciate its beauty.

I made it back to my hostel all wet and cold. Nothing like a cup of hot coffee, myojo with egg to restore life into me. Took a nice 2 hour nap to catch manu beat west ham 1-0. Watching a soccer match in the afternoon is also something that was never possible in Singapore considering the time difference. Just the thought of possibly watching the next match live at the stadium has got me all pumped up!

Dinner at Seb's place was a bigger thing with 2 new friends we made. Nat and Greg from Hongkong joined us for a dinner of my favourite eggs in dark sauce and ketchup, boiled chicken and cabbage. Simple but still took me half an hour to get it up! Haha.

Left their place early to get even more sleep. Shit its been alot of eat, sleep, eat, sleep for this past week now that I realised. Oh well it must be the cold weather. *excuses*



Day 13

Day started quite late as usual, since it was another late night sleep. Woke up to travel to Dapenmarket where we shopped for Bak Kut Teh porkribs! It was yet another day where we found some cheap and nice porkribs which is substantiable food source in the long run! There was also yet another nice mini-supermarket we found which sold considerably cheaper stuff than the rest of the shops we've been to so far. So another day of discovery!

Went for an x-ray for Tuberculosis test which is mandatory for our residence permit. The whole process of this residence permit is really quite draggy, after this x-ray, we'd have to wait for 2 months before we get our residence permit, which would have been like 3 months into our 5 months stay! Cost almost S$400 somemore. Ouch.

Dinner was bak kut teh which took around 1.5 hours to cook. But it was good! The first soup and the first taste of pork we've had since arriving 2 weeks ago. Really got that '家的感觉'! Haha. Seb also came back from a difficult trip of getting the laser printer which will save us a considerable amount of money!