Monday June 22, Last day in Amsterdam

Our last day started out a bit soggy with an early morning jog. It was fine when we started, but about halfway through, it decided to rain. Oh well - nothing much we could do about it since we were at about the farthest point in the jog!

You see though, the job served a purpose... we went back to the pancake restaurant for breakfast one more time. Josh had been talking about it every day since we went the first time. It did not disappoint the second time around. This time we had the Poffertjes (of course) and for the sweet we had banana with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and for the savory - bacon, cheese, and onion. It was sooo good! We found that it is impossible to finish the sweet pancake, just too much, the savory was easy though.

Pancake Goodness!

Aside from pancakes and hitting every bakery imaginable our main outing was to NEMO, the Netherlands hands-on science center and man, was it cool! The exterior almost looks like a huge ship sinking and you can climb up to the roof for fantastic views of the city. There are chairs up there and a lot of people just hanging out and enjoying the intermittent sunshine.

Inside there are three floors packed with stuff to do. Now that Josh has had more science he new a lot more about the things he was looking at. He could explain how the gears worked and a lot of the light wave things as well. Some of the favorites included a water exhibit on how to dam a water flow to make it work more efficiently - don't know who liked that more - Jeff or Josh... There was also a huge machine that had balls of different weight, size, and color. You had to fill orders at various stations and use a variety of mechanisms to determine the correct balls to put in the shoot.

There was a super-cool demo called the chain reaction and it was basically a life-sife version of the game mouse trap. It is basically a demonstration of potential and kinetic energy. You started the reaction with a tiny domino and launch an air-rocket at the end. Luckily the guy was explaining everything in Dutch and English, so we got to enjoy the whole demo. Actually, everything was in Dutch and English and very well explained.

We never got to the 3rd floor which was the teen floor. Although when Jeff and I wandered up there while we were looking for Josh we saw that the main exhibit was on the teen brain and hormones, but that wasn't all. Being that this is the Netherlands and they don't suffer from the same sorts of inhibitions that we do, there was a whole exhibit on sex! Complete with wood manikins posed in every sort of sexual act you can imagine. That would have been a doozy to explain to Josh!

That took up most of the afternoon, other than that it was time to pack, eat up the rest of the food at the apartment and get some sleep for another early morning day of travel!