The morning started with a walk through the Rijksmuseum. It is a very large museum with a wide variety of art. It is also one of the most popular museums in Amsterdam which unfortunately meant that it looked somewhat like a flea market inside.

Some of the highlights for me was this aircraft designed as a fighter plane in world war one, an old piano, which is much smaller than the ones we’re used to and it was pretty cool to see a Van Gogh painting.

The next two pictures are items that fascinated me. The white lines on the cabinet stands out from a mile away so it caught my eye across the hall. The other picture is a room of a dollhouse from the 1600s. The amount of detail they put into everything in that time – their ornaments, crockery, paintings and even their dollhouses is crazy. Completely opposite to the new minimalist trend.

One piece found in the library brought me back home – a medal from the Dutch East India trading company to Ysbrandt Godsdke for building the Castle on the Cape of Good Hope in the 1600s. The castle can still be seen in Cape Town for those non-South Africans reading 🙂

As we came out of the museum there was a trio (Violin, Accordion and a Tuba) playing some amazing Vivaldi music. Their repertoire did not end there and they continued to play a few other well-known pieces. Not something we see often anywhere else! Street musicians are common in Europe, but not this level – they could have sold tickets with their quality!

We spent the rest of our afternoon at the Albert Cuyp Market where we had hotdogs, fresh stroopwafel and cocktails. It was probably the cocktails that then made us start our bad life choices…

Unfortunately the bad life choices wasn’t the addictive cake, but rather the decision to go find out what a coffeeshop entails. We headed back to the centre of the town and started looking for what looked like a decent coffeeshop. In the first one we ordered some brownies to share and the waitress explained to us that edibles takes much longer to kick in, so we should start with a quarter, wait 60 – 90 minutes and then decide if we want to take another quarter. It might have been a smart idea to take down the time of the first quarter…

About 90 minutes later each of us had about half a brownie in our system, and getting impatient we decided to go to a different coffeeshop.

At the next coffeeshop they had a lot of fancy brownies: Red velvet (shown below), chocolate bar, and brownie with caramel. The problem? They were really good. If there wasn’t weed in them I could probably eat a whole box. We ordered one of each (thus, 3) to share between 5 of us, putting us each on a total of about one brownie per person (some had more than others).

It wasn’t long after that while sitting in the Febo having some food that it hit. It was my first time trying anything like this, and I had no idea what to expect. Definitely not that! The best way I can find to describe it is to link it to those 3D pictures where you have to cross your eyes and stare at the picture and a 3D picture emerges. I felt like I was inside of that picture. I could only concentrate on one thing at a time and the rest blurred out – visually and audibly. Time also moved SO slow. Every time I’d look at my watch believing hours have passed, it would show that it was 1 or maybe 2 minutes.

Personally, I didn’t enjoy the experience but at least we somehow got home safe, I didn’t get super paranoid and it eventually passed.

I took this picture somewhere and strangely I think it summarised how I felt and how the rest of my evening / morning was. Everything is a blur with this tunnel vision effect.