It is the sixth day of our trip, and Amanda attended her ISBI conference downtown all day. We are about a mile and half away from the convention center, so we tried to minimize the amount of trips back and forth. The plan was for us to meet her at the conference center at lunch (meaning lunch for Seth) and we meet again at the end of the day. We took breakfast together downstairs and off Amanda left for the conference in the morning.
Originally I planned that I would take the kids down to the park by Euromast, find some local fritter for all of us to eat for lunch, and meet up Amanda at the conference center. However, immediately after our breakfast, Seth decided it was his fuss/nap time, and went on to take a 2 and half hour nap in the bedroom upstairs. I'd hoped that he would wake up after 45min to an hour, but Andrew ended up watching many of his favorite cartoon shows like Dora, Thomas the tank engine, The claymation car show, Wanderpets and Ni-hao (or whatever it's called with a Chinese girl, and a tiger and a monkey and a koala). By the time he woke up we only had 40 min to meet up with Amanda.
Amanda said it's about 20 min walk but I'm sure it's quite a bit longer with a stroller in a bumpy sandy road. I am so tired of the sand. Our meeting (sand and I) didn't go so hot as you recall that Andrew busted his lip and nose from it our first day in Amsterdam. As you know, Netherlands as we know now were mostly under the ocean, soils are non-existent unless it was intentionally prepared. If you pay close attention, there are sands everywhere. This is especially evident when there is a construction around and there are sand piles and spills everywhere.
Anyway, we got to the convention center and met up with Amanda. We couldn't find any convenient kid-friendly place to eat, so we grabbed some junk chinese food and ate at the park. Amanda went back to the conference, while Andrew wanted to stay in a park and play. There was a small animal farm attached to this park (in a middle of the city) so Andrew and Seth both had a blast.
I wanted to leave sooner than later because we had a trip planned to Delft, but Andrew would (and to some extent Seth also) have nothing with it. We ended up staying there until shortly after 3 and I was supposed to meet Amanda at 6 again. So swiftly we strolled to the Central station, bought tickets to Delft for that day, to Den Haag for Saturday and to Schipol airport for Sunday (which we later returned for a refund). Rotterdam station is a pain because there are no elevators. So I am not sure what they do for those that are wheelchair bound. I suppose, to Dutch in Rotterdam, if one cannot ride a bike then s/he shouldn't be outside to begin with. This is evident with how the city is structured throughout.
Delft is famous for Delftwares and that's what I mostly wanted to see. Andrew quickly fell asleep shortly after we left the park (conveniently) and Seth on the train. I walked about a mile or so to the Royal Delft Porcelain Factory, where I was too late to be admitted for the tour, but since I figured going in there with kids were going to be problematic anyway, I did not mind. We ended up surveying the Delftware souvenir shop, which was all I wanted to do anyway. We bought some souvenirs for ourselves, our neighbor downstairs who watched our cat as well as to Kiyo and Hiroko who brought toys for Andrew ans Seth to Amsterdam (we will ship it one day). Some Delftwares were in the price range of tens of thousands of Euros.
We strolled back through downtown, walked by a market that had just closed half hour before, and rode a train back to Rotterdam to meet up with Amanda. Delft was a really nice town. If I ever went back to Netherlands for a conference, I would stay in either Delft or Den Haag.
After meeting with Amanda we again walked back to our hotel. We sat down at Turkish Pizza place to order an Italian pizza for dinner. There are tones of Turkish and Chinese/Indonesian restaurants there but other than those and pubs, we didn't really see many other places to eat. Dutch eat junk foods.
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