Jet lag usually prompts me to blog and a 12 hour time change is about as bad as it gets. I'll start with something easy: favorite bars. [Combining a bicycle tour with children who do not often want to bicycle made this a necessary category.] Note: these are just bars. If I get around to it, I'll write about restaurants that might also have bars later.
1) In de Karkol We had a couple of hours in Maastricht before dinner and the children did not want to leave the boat. This was the day Jancie did not want to leave the boat at all, so we bicycled as a triplet. Deciding we had spent enough time in the ship's lounge, we stepped into town looking for somewhere with a quiet bar where we could sit without children. The door was so well hidden, we walked around the corner looking for another entrance.
Once inside, we were greeted by loud music, old ladies dancing, and almost no room. This place was coronavirus heaven. A large bald man who might have been a bouncer yelled something at me in Dutch. I started wondering if we had wandered into a private club. "Beer?" I replied. "Bier!" he yelled. And the other bartender started pouring tiny glasses of beer. We drank like six of them and ended up with a €16,40 bar tab.
Nico with a 0.18 L of Brand Beer
Did they have a different glass for every bottled beer?
2) Het Elfde Gebod This bar was near our Amsterdam hotel and the "16 beers on tap/100 bottled beers" painted on the window caught my interest. It was about 9 PM on a Tuesday and there were a couple of falling down drunk people standing (sort of) at the bar. The large bartender had politely cut them off and they were half-heartedly arguing while half-heartedly leaving. The bartender had what sounded a lot like a fake American accent. When I asked about it, he said he was from New York, but had lived in Amsterdam 25 years.
3) Brouwerij 'T IJ Though actually next to a windmill and not inside a windmill, this seemed like an acceptable way to get the kids to sit in a brewery with me. It's a couple of km from where we were staying, but we were already at NEMO, which was about halfway there.
The food menu is limited. €10 gets you a platter with cheese, eggs, bread, sweet pickles, and peanuts. The walls are adorned with old Dutch beer bottles.
All the beer names are in Dutch
4) I don't know if Brouwerij de Prael is worth mentioning. It was mostly interesting because the two or three servers that came near our table seemed a little off. I thought it was a language thing, which in itself was strange because up until that point everyone in Amsterdam had spoken flawless English.
One of the employees kept directing us to the beer menu. I was going to order one of the one or two beer names that looked familiar, then I noticed the translation board. (It was Dutch to German, which is not entirely helpful to me, but still much easier to understand than Dutch.) The same employee did not want me looking at the translation board and kept pointing me back to the Dutch menu.
Dutch to German translation
Fries, cheese, pickles...maybe 10 Euro?
I can't remember what these were
Hidden under the clamp on the clipboard on the English side of the menu
Eventually we spotted the above disclaimer on the menu. The uncomfortableness of interacting with the staff was sort of transformed into a feel good story, I guess.
5) Brouwerij Bosch (Maastricht) came up in my google search looking for breweries while we had time to kill waiting for the boat to catch us. I was surprised when we walked into the tasting room and the old man told us they made two beers, light and dark and we should drink the dark first. This was the only English I heard him speak. Both beers were in bottles. All the literature was in Dutch. Later, upon reviewing their website, I ascertained that they no longer make beer at this facility, but are transitioning it into a craft beer brewery. I see no timeline for when this is happening. Anyway, it's a 350 year old brewery and they give tours.
