Verjaardag Spelevaren

We've all had quite the Euro experience this week. Sarah and I were able to pick up some Euro fashions, visit the Google Amsterdam office and enjoy some sun while people watching on patios. On Wednesday, we threw Francisco a Euro themed raclette birthday party and luckily, our friend Kristen was in the city for business and able to join us. We grilled our own dinners while eating cheese from Reypeneaur and listened to "very, cool, very modern" music selections. For his birthday, Francisco got an Ajax soccer jersey, a personalized Heineken bottle, a cheese guillotine and, his personal favourite, a t-shirt from The Spotted Ox Hostel.

Today, our Euro adventures continued. We packed a lunch, rented a boat at Boaty and spent the afternoon motoring through Amsterdam's canals. We arrived early as we needed to attend boat training...If only we knew the training would only last approximately 15 seconds. I believe our instructions were, "Watch out for other boats." When we asked a couple more questions, our instructor just told us to remember that our boat, a solar powered 4 person craft with a speed of 3KM an hour, was at the bottom of the food chain in boat priority. With that, we were left with a laminated instruction sheet and we were off.

Here, Francisco is photographed driving our boat

As you can clearly see in the photograph above, Francisco was our captain and Matt (The gif creator) was his trustworthy and very busy skip. As we ventured through the canals, we noticed that most boats contained all males or all females.

Kate Winslets

Leonardo DiCaprios

We also noticed that most boats were filled with people dancing. As the afternoon progressed, we fond ourselves out in the wider canals, which were much colder with the wind. It was here that we were absolutely forced to start a boat dance party and the music that successfully got us moving was Daft Punk's album Random Access Memories and, of course, Robin Thicke's single Blurred Lines. We learned that boating is much more fun when you're dancing.

Matt said it was a pleasure to serve as skip and Francisco mentioned that his only regret was not wearing a suit as captain. All in all, our boating experience was a gigantic success, considering we saw a boat filled with 50 year old men in pink wigs (which left from our dock on a sister vessel minutes before us) towed back 40 minutes into their trip.