The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

On average the Dutch eat over 19 kilograms of cheese per person per year!

The Alkmaar Cheese Market is the oldest and largest cheese market in the Netherlands and has been operating with the same rules, behaviors and dress code, every Friday, since 1593 (431 years ago), except during WWII. However, there has been a cheese scale in use in Alkmaar since 1365 (659 years ago). 

So, we went for a visit today when it opened at 10am on Friday, just like it has for the last few hundred years.

I asked ChatGPT to create a vivid oil painting of our adventures, as described by the blog entries here. The result is:

And so far, it’s been a wet summer in the Netherlands, which means all plants are flourishing in addition to the snails and slugs.

Today we visited the nearby town of Szentendre just to experience a small town and see their transport museum.

We rode the 2nd oldest subway, rode a 4 person bike around Margaret island, and saw more fascinating architecture.

We had a great day of walking around Budapest, earning us about 20,000 steps for the day.

It’s a beautiful city to walk around! The Hungarian language is tough though, but thankfully we can get by in English and saying “thank you” in Hungarian.

Walking distance from our place, is a former summer estate from the 1600’s called Elswout. It’s now a dog friendly (on leash) garden area and wedding venue. It’s a very relaxing area to walk around, so I’m sure we’ll visit again.

I enjoyed a few of the street musicians and just walking around in some cool sunshine.

The Royal Irish Automobile Club looks to be just a parking garage, but has some history; see https://www.riac.ie/

New city for us means a lot of walking around and learning a new subway system. We went through a couple of nice parks and a museum, in addition to just meandering the city.

We met up with an old colleague from Microsoft who’s living in Yokohama, which was a 45 minute train ride away, but on the same subway lines that we’ve been taking around Tokyo all week.

From his apartment, we could see Mt. Fuji, a baseball game, and the waterfront of Yokohama. walking to a Raman place for lunch, we saw a parade which consisted of about 4 different high school bands and cheerleaders. We never figured out what it was for.

We visited the fish market today and my day started with tomago on a stick (basically a scrambled egg), then had a sampling of sake, and finally decided to grab lunch.

Most places to eat are very small, a few are standing only. They almost all have lines, but while squeezing down one narrow passageway, we saw stairs going up, so we ventured up.

We met a Chinese woman and her family up the stairs and they explained that they were in line for a special little restaurant, but we needed to talk to the lady downstairs first. While she was explaining that, a few others were brought upstairs and put in line behind us. So instead of asking, we just waited.

We were in line for Tsukiji Unitora Nakadori, which apparently gets great reviews and we each had 6 pieces of really tasty sashimi.