A very good day

Benedikt and I met this morning to discuss the very motley chapter 2, with the result that I have some idea how to go forward on it (but it's looking unlikely that I'll meet my "October 31" deadline for finishing it. Oh well).

Then this afternoon I went out to the airport and successfully met up with leleth_faery and whynothing; when we got back to central station we agreed that though it was cold, it wasn't too cold to walk home instead of taking the bus, so I got to point out all the various neat and cool things on the route between central station and home. For dinner I'd picked up fresh oregano/garlic/chive tagliatelle and there was some leftover red sauce that we'd made on Sunday in the fridge, so I made that up, garnering compliments even though they'd come from 10 days in Italy. Afterwards leleth_faery suggested we go find something for dessert, so we headed towards the office where I was pretty sure we'd find some place that had good dessert, and, boy, was I right! We went to Minheer Nilssen, which has fantastic sandwiches for lunch (brie and serrano ham on brown bread all toasted in an oven), and tapas for supper (I once had quails' wings in plum sauce, divine), so I figured it would be a good candidate for good dessert. This is one of the places where the evening menu changes each day, and there were three dessert options -- creme catalana, stewed pear with amareno icecream, and almond tart with orange sorbet. That made our choice easy: we asked for three plates and one of each.

The stew pear was absolutely fantastic; it was in this fruity, spicy, winey sauce, which turned out to be wonderful drizzled over the almond tart; the combination of the orange sorbet with the almondy flavor of the tart was amazing, and the creme catalana had a perfect cover of caramelized sugar and was extremely smooth and not at all eggy (one of my main complaints about a lot of the creme brulee that I've had). Scrumptious! And all for only 18EUR.

As we were finishing up leleth_faery asked if we'd brought any of our games with us, which I'm glad she did because that totally wouldn't have entered my mind at all. So we came back home and played Attica (where I lived up to my expectations of being a very bad explainer of game rules by failing to mention one relatively crucial one...oh, well, we'll just have to try again tomorrow night). I'm hoping it turns out nice tomorrow (nice = no rain, rather than nice = not cold; we can deal with cold, but rain would be inconvenient) because the plan is to do a tour of the city via grocery stores. We'll start off by going through the Dappermarkt and environs, make our way up to Waterlooplein to the fleamarket, then up to Nieuwmarkt and Chinatown (in part so that leleth_faery can see the Waag, which I'm sure she'll appreciate just as much as I do), where we'll stop by the Red Light District since whynothing feels he can't really come to Amsterdam and not go there, head back down Spui to the flower market and then down Amstel to the art store where I bought my parchment so that leleth_faery can take a look at their supply of calligraphy nibs.

And if it does rain tomorrow, I'm thinking a canal boat tour and perhaps a stop at the Tropenmusem (musem of the tropics), which I've never yet been to myself, seem in order. They leave early Friday morning, so tomorrow is our only full day, but a day and a half visit is better than no visit at all! (After all, the last visit I had with leleth_faery was an hour's trip through the Madison farmer's market in June. You take what you can get!)

Joel went down to Paris for a workshop yesterday; I'm taking the train down Friday afternoon to meet up with him for the weekend. I really rather do like the "Oh, let's take the train to Paris for the weekend" advantage of living in Amsterdam. This is something which still falls under the header of "pretty darn cool".