Woohoo, it’s a city trip end of the year, since we “received” or forced an invitation by my good friend Emiel and his lovely family. With our journey to Emmeloord at hand, we decided to celebrate New Year with our friends and take the opportunity to see a little bit of this wonderful metropolis Amsterdam when we’re here.

We started really early, that means getting up around 04:00 in Austria, caring for our pets before we leave, drinking a quick sip / cup of tea and enjoying a toasted brioche with jam before we’re out for the airport. As usual we parked the car in Schwechat and took the train to the airport. Dreamily we wandered around the airport to find our gate, where we had plenty of time left before boarding. While I took a nap during the flight itself, Juli already took some nice impressions from above the clouds. The sun decided to join us on our way north. Schiphol was exactly as I remembered it, a large airport but well organized. We managed to grab our luggage and head to our B&B within 90 minutes, taking the Sprint (fast train) and two stations by tram to arrive at the “amsterdam4u“. We were not just welcomed, but very nicely introduced to our room, our vicinity and even a brief history of Amsterdam. To be honest, it wasn’t even brief – but – hey that was a perfect start into a slightly cloudy day on December 27th given by our host Wouter, the rooms are comfy and clean – even a small kitchen included, really nice. We decided to make good use of the weather, take a refreshment at the De Bakkerswinkel in midst of the center of the city. The baked stuff is good, a great variety gives you several great options and then they had those tasty, self-made jams. I mean really tasty – raspberry just juicy & fruity, a ginger that’s enjoyable for more than three teaspoons – actually so good you could eat the whole glass and a passion fruit jam that obviously must have taken kilograms of passion fruit to manufacture this excellent exotic jam – oh wow – oh great – oh mhmmmm!!!! From there we continued our tradition on enjoying and spending time at the local zoo. We did this in Vienna, Dublin, London and Basel before, this Amsterdam zoo is called Artis. Since we “decided” to stumble into the city without much planning, we also continued “clueless” through the zoo – but I have to say it just worked out fine. The local zoo is lovely, a great variety of animals, starting at the size of microbes in Micropia – a great Insectopium, a reptile & bird house, giant aquarium, large cats and many other features we throughly enjoyed.  We ended our journey in before mentioned Micropia, a dedicated museum showing details on viral, bacterial and fungal counterparts in the everyday microverse by using a lot of easy to understand visualisations and even more magnification. On our way back we decided to savor a pho at a vietnamese restaurant. After filling our bellies we took a final stroll through the center and found our way back to our stay. What a wonderful first day, great impressions, incredible food – that’s just a great start into a city trip end of 2018.