Day 5: Holland

Like I said, for now this will be out of order.  Just some background to make it a little bit less confusing.  Day 1-3 were in Istanbul.  Day 4 my friend Allert met me at the Airport.  He lives in Northern Netherlands and was one of my good friends from this past BGU semester.

Holland day 5:

Allert and I went to his parentss to help clean the attic but were not needed so off we went.  First stop: Giethoorn. Whoo. This place was nice.  It's like a really nice and isolated Dutch town. Easy to find the entrance but from there the car must stop. We rented a boat and went on our way down to the lake. Allert steered us down the river and I sat there looking pretty (it was really difficult for me). He had to maneuver around lots of other people who too had no idea what they were doing. There were a few girls that no clue how to steer the boat and they tended to crash, naturally, into us and others. We first arrived onto a lake. It was very nice and calm and a big difference from the craziness of Amsterdam and Istanbul. After a little bit of floating we started towards the rest but we wanted go make sure that we were using the most of our one hour with the boat so we just floated a little bit more. There was even an ice cream boat that people could buy from. The second half was the nicer part this is where we got to look at the Dutch houses. Expecting rushed pace?  Way wrong. The traffic of boats finally caught up to us but it made the experience even better since we were able to take a longer look at the beautiful houses. I'll somehow include a picture in whatever this will be. I will say that at one point I definitely thought that this place looked like one of those Dutch village replications and then I realized that it was the real thing not just a fake version!

We then stopped at Dwingeloo on the way back. A simple village apparently touristy Allert says. I really don't know what tourists would want with this place. Walked around. Almost got run over by bicyclists (a few times). Ate some lollies and mandarins. Back to Drachten, where Allert lives. Around 8/8:30, we decided that we should probably eat so went to a Vietnamese restaurant. This was the first time that I had eaten Vietnamese since I was in Vietnam six months ago.  I wanted the real authentic food- mostly I wanted Pho.  The place was insanely empty- there was the cook, waitress, and two Chinese friends of the owners. I talked to them for a while at first simply wanting to know if they had pho. Guess what. No pho. You can only imagine how disappointed I was. They can make it but they usually don't get enough business to sell it because they have to make a large vat of it. They were all very nice people and helped me by recommending what I should order. That's kind of what I do now. I just ask people and then get what they suggest. We started off with a bowl of soup (not pho). It had pineapple and tomato good but not pho. then fried roll and circular fried something. That was my favorite part. Then for the main course chicken, veges, and sauce. It was very good, not the best, definitely not at good as the ones from their homeland. It also started raining halfway through dinner so we scooted our little table under the awning and ate quietly with the peaceful sound of raindrops falling in the background.  The waitress came outside asking us if we wanted to go inside and we looked at her and shrugged.  We were comfortable and didn’t want to move.