Week Notes - Week 38

A trip to Amsterdam and what else I've been up to over the last seven days.

Declan Byrd

This week Becka and I went on a trip to Amsterdam. We took the Eurostar from London St Pancras to Amsterdam Centraal which took just over 4 hours. There are a lot of bikes at Amsterdam Centraal station and apparently they are building an underground bike storage because they need more space to store their bikes.

We stayed at Conscious Hotel Vondelpark which was a great location for our trip. We were able to walk to all of the places we wanted to visit, but also had the option of taking the number 17 tram which stopped not far from the hotel and terminated at the train station.

Some of the highlights of the trip were:

Declan and Becka wearing matching red and black checked shirts in the reflection of Mungo Thomson's Time.
Becka really embraced her time in Amsterdam as shown by her use of the Dutch angle.

The food and drink were also very good. Some of the places we stopped for food and drink at were:

  • Coffee District Willemsparkweg - a little shop on a street corner that sells coffee and pastries that we found on our walk from our hotel to Museumplein.
  • Maru - a Japanese restaurant that was a short walk from our hotel. The food was so nice here we visited twice during our stay.
  • Mr Gyoza - an intimate dining experience with very fancy cocktails and some adventurously flavoured gyozas. The staff would talk you through every detail of the dish you ordered or the cocktail they were preparing.
  • Foodhallen - the options here really appealed to me and I wished I was capable of eating more than I could. I tried my first bitterballen here from De Ballenbar.
  • Van Stapele Koekmakerij - they only sell one type of cookie and are open from 10am until they sell out. Becka had pre-ordered some from their website to collect and we arrived just after 10am - there was already a queue to get into the shop. They were very nice cookies and I can see why people were queueing for them.
  • La Perla Pizza - a short walk from Anne Frank's house, the pizza here was really good.
  • Craft & Draft - there were 40 beers on tap here and it was very close to the hotel. I wasn't able to try them all or get the chance to participate in their beer tour which ends with a free t-shirt.

We arrived back in the UK on Friday, sad that our trip had come to an end. I spent most of the weekend compiling this week's notes.

Declan wearing a red and black checked shirt over a black t-shirt with black jeans and white trainers, holding his camera, and stood in front of some railings on a bridge over the canal. To the right of Declan is a plant with lime green leaves which blend into the leaves of the trees which line either side of the canal in the background.
Becka took this nice photo of me by the canal.

What has changed on this site:

  • Due to Netlify graph being unstable I have removed the now playing widget from the home template. The widget was logging errors to the console which affected the lighthouse score for this site.
  • I added some photos that I took while on the canal tour.

What I've been reading:

What I've been watching: