Day 3
Day 3 was mostly spent at the tournament, we had a great time. See my tournament report for more info. After the rounds it was already 9 PM so we walked back to the hotel and grabbed some shawarma at this Turkish place called “Baraka”. It was delicious! Mark and I got a dürüm, and my friend Noel grabbed a kapsalon. Kapsalon is like, the Turkish version of poutine. It looked amazing. The dürüm is a kind of pita wrap with the shawarma in it. Sooooo good! I could have eaten two lol. We ate back at the hotel, talked a bit and then went to bed to get ready for the next day’s deck check at 8 AM!
Day 4
Woke up early for deck check, waited outside in the Uber for Noel who lost his glasses lol. Got to the venue and I proceeded to biff it on stream and then get stomped out by round 11. I drew against my opponent in overtime then dropped from the tournament. I feel a bit bad about it and should have given him the win. Ah well. After the tourney, we came back to the hotel and cracked all of Noel’s prizing, which was like 4 boxes. Mark opened him a nice CSR which was cool, that’s like +400 dollars! Then we went to bed.
Day 5
Noel left at like 7:45 AM, hopping on a train back to Amsterdam then onto his flight. I woke up around 9 and the other two guys were still asleep so I took a walk to a Tabac & Gift store, bought some local cigarettes and walked to a small café nearby called “Koffee & Ik”. It was amazing. I got a flat white and an avocado toast. I’ll show them to you in the gallery below 🙂
After that, Ryan woke up around 10:30 when I got back and he wanted to show me this windmill nearby. We took a 5 minute walk over there and through a small park. The windmill had a small farm near it with chickens, sheep, and pigs! There was even a big ol rabbit. It was really cool! A sign nearby said “Atelier Open” and I am pretty sure “atelier” means shop so we walked in. Turns out we went into the wrong door and ended up in someone’s wood carving shop. We apologized and the guy was super friendly. I think he was actually glad to have visitors to check out his stuff to be honest. It was actually kind of awesome because we chatted for a bit and he showed off his wood work. He had this beautiful hand carved chess set he had spent 5 years working on and a gorgeous chessboard made of wood veneer. I wish I had the 20k Euros to buy it, but alas, I’d have to transport it back. I feel like the hotel here should purchase it for their lobby.
We got back around 11 AM and hung out for a little bit. After about half an hour, I looked out the window and saw Oliebollenkram was open!!! We’d been looking at it for like 5 days already and it was so awesome. Mark was still asleep, so we went outside to eat some and it was omg so good. If you’re ever in Utrecht, I highly recommend it. It’s right outside The Anthony hotel. They close February 1st for winter and reopen sometime in April.
Mark stayed asleep until 3 PM. I wanted to go to DomUnder but we never made it over there because of that. It’s actually really unfortunate. He told me I should have woken him up but I said, if he wanted to sleep he should sleep. I don’t know… It was relatively contentious because I felt like I missed out on a really cool experience because of it. He said, “If you want to, wake me up” and I said, “Do you want me to wake you up?” And he said, well, if you want to. The whole semantic point was that I don’t want people to do stuff they don’t want to. That said, I’ll be waking him up in 30 minutes so we’re not late leaving the hotel today lmao.
After that, we did take an Uber to the Domkerk, which is a huge and beautiful church. Walked around and got some pics of it and DomTower. Then we found a really nice street food place and ate some of the most amazing food I’ve ever tasted in my life. It was like, an Asian fusion street food place. The portions weren’t huge but the food was phenomenal. The drinks were insane too. Shortly thereafter we went to a pool hall and played for like 4 hours lol it was awesome. I wish I was better at pool lol. Ryan is really good. After that, we got back to the hotel via Uber and all went to bed (I actually don’t know the time).
Today
Today we’re checking out and heading to Germany! I still need to find us a hotel but we have a couple hours on the train anyway. I’m not really worried about it.
