2nd of September

Den Haag Day!  We hopped on an early train with the (absurd) goal of hitting the Rijksmuseum, Escher Museum and a nifty Panorama before heading to spend the rest of the day in Delft.  Yes, we literally thought we could accomplish all this.  What ACTUALLY ended up happening is hitting the Rijksmuseum, having to take short catnaps in the last stretch of rooms (there weren't even that many) and stumbling out, feeling very much so like not visiting any other museums that day, not that they had that much time left to be open anyway.  Most of the problem probably stemmed from being awakened the previous night at 4:30am by a constant cacophony of clatterupstairs-knockknockknock-doorslungopen-doorslamshut-trompdownstairs.  Eventually, we ended up wandering around the city, looking at the outside of churches since they were all closed, and traversing the streets.  We even went into a huge department store housed in a really lovely interesting looking old building, though the store inside was pretty basic, though pretty high class- though maybe not for European standards.  Five stories though!  We went up all the escalators, walked around, and went back down again.  Its a nice enough place, Den Haag, but it suffers from a bit of an inferiority complex methinks because Amsterdam outshines it so much in popularity.  I did notice it seemed pretty metropolitan and cosmopolitan, in some ways more than its neighbor to the north. 

Finally, we headed back to Amsterdam, and finally crashed like we'd have liked to earlier when we were in the wrong city to do so.  Waking up late, having forgotten to set an alarm, we got the brilliant idea of going and getting fries and a belgian waffle for dinner.  Stupid idea.  Not because there was somehow a better option open at, like, 11pm, or because fries and flemish mayonnaise are nasty, because they are not, but because there was no way to distinguish the size of the portion we were ordering at the stand. We got the largest, as we were splitting it, and ended up having to throw a third of it away.  It was enormous.  When trying to sleep that night, it was impossible, because we had giant piles of fries and mayonnaise in our stomachs.