Amsterdam

In the last week of July our daughter went on a Drijver elite prep hockey goalie training camp in Amsterdam organised by Sportways. This year the camp was at Xenios. It is amazing how many hockey clubs there are in Amsterdam alone. Xenios has about 1300 members, 5 water fields and they completed the building of a new large club house just before summer. Their first teams are not playing in the highest division but 2 levels below and still they are bigger than Dragons in Belgium. After dropping her off we went to the Botanical garden. We parked the car outside the center and walked along the canals to the garden. Luckily there are a lot of trees that give shade because it was a hot day. The Botanical garden is small but well done with some nice greenhouses. Old fashioned ones, still made of bricks and looking almost like a regular house, so much more charming than the modern ones consisting almost only of glass. After visiting the garden we had a late lunch in de hortus café. We had to wait a bit because they were short staffed but the pasta was actually quite good. Better than the typical ‘museum’ fare and they had Duvel 666 which was ideal for the hot weather : not too strong and refreshing. After lunch we walked around in the park across the street and then headed back to our car. We stopped at a grocery store to buy some vlaai and then drove back for a barbecue with the in laws to finish off a relaxing summer weekend.