Day 10 Walking in Nijmegen, Touring Floriade Day

Day 10 Walking in Nijmegen, Touring Floriade Day

We woke up in Nijmegen which is not a tourist city, for a change.  Most of us went on the walking tour of the city and our local guide was formerly a doctor.  He spoke with a very refined accent and I could see him playing the part of Freud or someone like that. 

We toured the older part of the city and it was very interesting.  It has beautiful buildings, interesting streets and wonderful churches.  Each of these cities that we have toured are similar in some ways but very different in other ways.  It’s always pretty obvious that the local guides love their cities.

We disbanded in the square where the old city meets the new city and had about an hour before we had to be back on the ship.  I asked a lady pushing a baby carriage if there was a yarn or wool shop in the city and after thinking for a couple of moments remembered one in the ‘mall’.  I suppose it really is a mall because it is a collection of stores, but the front door to the mall is right on the main street and it really looks like a shop itself.  I went to Popoos and found that it is mainly a hobby shop with all kinds of things for sale but one small corner did contain yarn.  Of course, I bought some – nothing fancy but it is such a deep shade of purple that it appears to be black. 

I then went back to the ship and found that everyone else had returned but no one had done much shopping.  However, needless to mention but I will anyway, Sue found an Apple store and of course, bought something there.

We had lunch and left about 1:30 for Venlo to visit the Floriade, the horticultural expo that is held once every ten years.  Naturally, when we got there, it started raining and raining the entire time and this event is 90% outdoors.  The Floriade is a fairly large expo that contained buildings from many countries with displays of goods (think souvenirs) from their country (Sue and I bought olive forks which Linda later told us were actually brain pickers!!), artistic displays such as sculpture (think concrete sofas and trees wrapped in knitting), greenhouses with beautiful displays (fabulous orchids and thousands of other plants), an amphitheater (where a dance show was given – hopefully it will be up on facebook at some point), and many other activities.  We walked and walked (in the rain) and then boarded a gondola to travel up and over the whole place and it was a nice birds’ eye view.  After a very long day, we were able to get back on the buses and go back to the ship.  During that bus ride I was able to finish knitting the scarf I had begun while in Bruges – now to knit the shroom cap and I sure do hope I have enough yarn.

We set sail soon after arriving back at the ship heading through canals and many locks to Amsterdam.   Again, there was no internet service!!!!

Dinner was a very exciting time for me.  We decided that we should visit the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam on the next day, if we could get tickets.  (We were very disappointed not to be able to get tickets to Anne Frank’s house.)  I used my phone and got on the internet and found we could get tickets so I started that process.  Part way through I had to go get my credit card so I could pay for them.  I went to the reception desk to ask if I could email them to the ship and have them print them out for us – they said yes, of course. After filling out lots of information, the tickets showed up on my computer but the tickets were not emailed to me, I had to print them out from a page on the internet.  I found out the reception desk could not do that after I got up and went to talk to them again!!  I was upset that I may have just wasted 140 Euro (for 10 tickets).  About that time someone noticed a beautiful, bright double rainbow outside the window as we were sailing along.  We kept trying to get photos of it, but decided the inside of the ship was not the place to take those photos so I got up and went to the top of the ship.  On the way out, I heard a lady on the other side of the ship talking about how beautiful the double rainbow was so I realize that it was a full double rainbow.  I got to the sun deck and took photos but the rainbow was so large, I couldn’t get a really good photo of it.  It truly is the brightest rainbow I’ve ever seen.  The clouds between the parts of the double rainbow were much darker that the other clouds in the sky – it was really beautiful.  I stood in the rain making photos and I adjusted my camera to make a ‘panorama’ shot of it so that shot may look pretty good.  Hopefully.  Then I went back to dinner and tried copy and paste to get the tickets on an email to send to the ship.  I thought I got it so I got up and went back to ask them to check, but the bar codes on the tickets had not come through.  Bummer.  Every time I would return to the table, I would gobble up the previous course in between fooling with the ticket problem.  That obsessive nature of mine does cause me problems some times.  Anyway I tried a different method of copy and paste and this method seemed much better.  After dinner was over I sent the email but couldn’t get my 3G to work.  Turns out we were about 25 feet down between the concrete barriers of a lock!!!  After exiting the lock, the email went out and through some strange process the ship was able to ‘replicate their hard drive from the home office’ or something and they were able to print them out.  The bar codes for the ten tickets appear to be legible.  Hallelujah!!!

It was now after 10 p.m. and my feet and legs were killing me – the Floriade really did me in!!!!  I got to bed as soon as possible and found out that I couldn’t go to sleep!!  I was certainly tired enough, but sleep just would not come. I’d have thought that OJ and vodka would have helped me sleep but not.  I think I finally got to sleep about 11:30 and then I woke up at 5 a.m. and knew I would not be getting back to sleep so I got up and dressed.  This is a story for the next day.