Day 4: The Last Full Day

Sam Skelton
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

Day 4, we took the subway into town and wandered into an alleyway that gave me the crepes. Strawberry and Nutella crepes, to be exact — and they were incredible. Afterwards, Patrick and I attended the RIJKS museum, which had an incredible model boat room and more paintings than my college art history textbook. It was a fantastic museum and we spent hours inside it, but I can’t remember much besides boats and Rembrandt paintings. Afterwards, we walked to a pub and got beer and fries served in a paper cone. One key thing that differs from the US is Europe’s choice of condiments: rather than serving fries with ketchup, they serve fries with mayonnaise. I don’t know whose idea it was to pair fries with mayonnaise, but I don’t agree with them. However, if someone had introduced ketchup with fries after all these years, I’m not sure how I would feel pairing potatoes with sugar-packed tomato sauce. We talked with the waitress and asked her for suggestions in Berlin.

“The Berghein. You probably won’t get in, but try anyway. It’s the best bar in Berlin. Try to be edgy, but make sure it doesn’t look like you’re trying to be edgy. Don’t talk in line, either. It also helps if you’re wearing chains.”

Halfway through our conversation, a group of four drunken adults wobbled into the bar. There were only three seats beside us, so I offered to move over. The group suddenly became best friends with Patrick and I, thinking we were the nicest people on the planet for offering to scoot. Three of them were Scottish, and it was almost impossible to understand them through their thick, slurring accents, although I could comprehend at least one of every three sentences. One of the sentences was along the lines of, “Ye prolly cun’t even ‘stand what aye’m sayin’ every ‘ew sent’ances. eh?” They were a riot, so we spent a while hanging out with them in the park. We compared cultures and discovered that we all enjoyed fries (though there was a debate on terminology), beer, and The Beatles. The Englishman was a musician, which I remember distinctly because he talked about sampling a fart as the “drop” for one of his tunes. There was about a fifteen-year age gap between our groups, but they were my favorite people I’d met in Amsterdam.

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Sam Skelton

When I was a child, I secretly ate dog biscuits.

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