botanical gardens and leprechauns...

i love st. patrick's day. first of, there are no expectations for this holiday. all you have to do is wear green. second of all, i taught preschool for 3 years, and there is nothing more fun than "leprechauns" dyeing the milk and making messes. in amsterdam, it doesn't seem to be as big a holiday, but we'll get to that later. 

first, de hortus, or the hortus botanical gardens. 

here's ryan with turner's oak. no, really. it belongs to turner:

and this is where your wine corks come from, ladies and gentlemen...

ryan and the massive greenhouse. 

the bee hives. now, i have been reading a lot about raising your own chickens, and bees, and possibly dairy goats, and think it might be cool. except i'm a little afraid of being stung. anyway, it's col that the botanical garden goes to such lengths to ensure that their plants will be pollinated. 

the sign says you can buy honey from these bees in the gift shop, but the sign's a liar, because the woman in the gift shop said she only has it for about a month each year, and each day it sells out by the end of the day. whatever, sign of lies. 

i like this bridge. 

a tulip tree!

i also like this archway. 

inside the palm house:

this is a century plant, aka 100 years old!

morel palm, because the trunk looks like morel mushrooms. and guess what? it does. 

ginormous roots of doom

this is called bonsai love. ryan was not impressed, because "they're not real."

it's really rare for us to see cactus and california flora, so we had to check this out. 

that's an old man cactus. no, really. 

here's the thing about butterfly houses. i always think they'll be a good idea in theory, but in practice, it's really creepy when they are flying all over you and landing on you, and you keep thinking, "don't touch them, they'll die if you touch them", but really, all you want to do is the bat them the hell off, but this is a national museum, you can't do THAT!  and.... anyway. i remembered that AFTER we went in. 

these are see-through. 

really. 

the rock garden. 

the semi-circular garden. i don't know why they call it that. 

ryan is being pensive with nature. 

afterward, we walked by the statue of the dockworker, which commemorates the strike of 1941, which marked the first major protest by the dutch to protest the nazi treatment of the jews.

you guys should know that i do keep facts like this in my mental backpack, so i do whip them out on ryan, repeatedly. he bears it, but only up to a certain point: 

and then he is all done, thank you. 

we tried to go to one of the irish pubs we'd seen around dam square, in the touristy part of town, but they were packed, and i mean PACKED by 7:00. so we went to a random corner bistro. 

you get ice in the glass when you order hard cider. and magner's is irish. appropriate. 

this is tortilla chips and salsa. which is not really irish, but this was not an irish bar. 

i got french onion, which as you can see, is not. i get it, universe. i will hold off on french onion soup until i am IN FRANCE. sheeeeeesh...

and a salad. this one had about 3/4 cup of green olives, 1/2 cup of cheese, 3 endive spears, 3 cucumbers, and a bunch of parsley mixed with frisee. it was-- something. it truly was. 

ryan got a burger with irish bacon, which usually looks like ham. 

and we didn't have any trouble from leprechauns this year. but i did order this drink, just to be safe:

GNOME BEER! (except. i kind of hate it.)