Saturday, May 9, 2009. Dinner was eaten at 8 p.m. in a peaceful, untrafficked neighborhood in a nicely lit small room with windows overlooking the water of quiet canal. The Franco-Danish restaurant is called Kanallen. On the walls are realistic paintings of lower NYC food sites: Yonah Shimmel's Knish, Katz's Deli. The service and the cooking were very good. At our table, between the four of us, we consumed:
Champagne; Pinot Noir;
Smoky scotch; Chardonnay;
Lobster Salad; White Asparagus and Baby Shrimp with Hollandaise sauce; Spring Lamb; Poussin (baby chicken) with mushrooms, fresh sweet peas and a rich, thick, smooth gravy that had the luxurious feel and taste of a fine french sauce; and for dessert, Rhubarb Three Ways..in a buttery tart the size of six stacked half-dollar coins...sweet poached rhubarb stalks supporting an egg-shaped scoop of white-chocolate gelato...and a cold and sweet shot of rhubarb consomme.
Afterward, at 10:00 p.m., Wes and Roland went to Tivoli Gardens, the famous amusement park across the plaza from our hotel. Wes particularly liked the tulip gardens.
Sunday, May 10, 2009, 10:30 a.m. We boarded a city bus for a twenty minute ride to an unusual complex of beige-brown-buff-golden brick buildings: low profile housing surrounding a church. We arrived in time to enter the church with hundreds of others who were there to witness the christening of a dozen and a half teenagers. In Sam's opinion this church is one of the most spectacular modern churches in the world. It is an early 20th-Century interpretation of gothic cathedral architecture. The materials are bricks of a light color that glow in a golden way when the light hits them through the tall clear glass windows. It makes an ooh/aah impression on a person like seeing the "great and powerful OZ" did to Dorothy. And there was music. An organ. A choir who sang once from the rear, (above the front entrance), and once from the altar (about 250 feet in front of us). Lots of Danish hymns. (Sam enjoyed them. He conducted. Tapped his foot. As if they were all his favorites). It was a great experience. Thank you, Sam. Beside the church is a large meadow with lush grass, little white and yellow flowers a bench and three trees. I laid in the grass. Sam sat on the bench. Wes and Roland milled about snapping pictures. Around 1 p.m. we borded the bus.
For lunch we returned to yesterday's lunch area. Instead of a restaurant we ate from one of many outdoor food vendors. We bought long grilled sausages. They were tasty.
Wes arranged for a 4 p.m. check-out from the hotel. We packed up and spent an hour in the hotel's cafe goofing off and listening to bits of Obama's speech from yesterday's Correspondent's Dinner in D.C.
Now we are on a train from 6:53 p.m. until 6:14 p.m. tomorrow (Monday) morning. We have sleeper cars. They are pretty funny in their compactness. You have to slide this over to use that and lift this up to pull that down, etc. Roland will be top bunk. Wes in the middle and me on the bottom. Sam has a room to himself. I have asked him to bring a sardine-can key in the morning to our room and open our tin so we can slide out. The train stops in, I think, Cologne at 6:13 a.m. where we have 60 seconds to get off before it takes off at 6:14 a.m. That is a challenge for an "escargot" like me.
Our eventual destination is Bruges in Belgium where, Monday, May 11 Wes and I will celebrate 25 years since the day we met.
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