It rained so hard this morning it woke me up. But it slowed enough to a drizzle that I went on a walk and got just a teeeeeeensy bit soaked. Also, Amsterdam is full of bikes. 40% of traffic is bicycle traffic. For real.
This was the church visiting day - Maren and I walked all over the place -as Grandpa would say, to heck and back - and somehow found a few gorgeous holy places.
First was Begijnhof, this amazingly peaceful courtyard surrounded by old apartment/rowhouses in the middle of a warren of tiny streets. The place was a non-convent, in which women who were not nuns (but it appears still sort of holy) lived and worked. It's still rented out to 93 women today.
Then we went to the Church in the Attic, which was phenomenal - it was illegal to practice Catholicism for a time, so a merchant built a church in the top two floors of his house. So you enter what appears to be a simple house, see a couple rooms, and then walk up a couple flights of stairs and -voila! - you're in a church! There's a ton of restoration work going on here, so we got to see a restoring artist flaking gold leaf onto the altar. Pretty sweet.
And on our way to Koffiehuis van den Volksbond, we stopped in at St. Nicolas Kerke, and marveled at the stained blue glass dome. Breathtaking.
And then group dinner at the koffiehuis was so, so good. Belgian chocolate to die for after grilled goat cheese salad and the best risotto I've ever eaten in my life. Yum. Yum. Yum. Yum.
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