TOASTIES

hellooooooo, chappies. we are in amsterdam! yes we are! since we last wrote to you, we have taken over the world, and are now being pelted with rose petals and other such adoring stuff by our fans and loyal subjects. ah HA! didn't know that did you? w'll, that's because you are not on the continent with us, and everywhere esle hasn't got the news yet. anyway STOP THAT, IT'S SILLY! we haven't really taken over the world at all. sorry.

since we last wrote to you... we went to visit the big statue of marx and engels at alexanderplatz, and got our photos with them. i got to sit on marx's knee, and also hop in engels' coat! hilarious!... michelle and charlie took us to the black girls coalition, which is basically an apartment where you go on a monday night, ring the bell, and get a huge plate of vegan food for 2EUR!!! very exciting, very grungy, very berlin. the transDJ also played cool music... david bowie, scissor sisters, buzzcocks... stuff... we wne to haagen dazs (or some variation on the spelling) and ate ourselves almost sick with icecream... visited the pergamon museum, which contains the second highest number of stolen artifacts of any western museum (after the british museum)... or so our walking tour guide said - we don't know how factual that is. it has a HUGE alter/temple thing (basically they lifted the entire building and rebuilt it in the museum), along with the walls of an egyptian temple and roadway, all in brightly coloured glazed tiles, and a mosque which was a present from some king or another. it made me very uncomfortable, being up close and personal to stolen heritage... they were impressive, but depressing too. i much preferred the exhibition of islamic art - calligraphy, tiles, miniature portraits, ornaments, carpets and textiles etc. very cool. more colour, less things made of stone... charlie made us a DELICIOUS meal of cannelloni, for which i have the recipe, and which i intent to feed to other people... mmmmmmmmm, yummy!... we said goodbye to michelle and charlie, which was strange, because we haven't seen them for a year, and probably won't see them again for another 2 years... and then we came to amsterdam!!!

amsterdam is really lovely - buildings are pretty and not to tall, plenty of parks, lots of cats (so cute!), a great vegetarian restaurant/cafe, CANALS (guys, don't bother with venice, just come here... the coffee's better). we went to the van gogh museums yesterday, which was (apart from being a bit of a rip off at 10EUR each) good. i never really like landscapes, because they're usually just BORING, but this guy - he could paint! he makes the picture come alive! ... while we were there we also looked that the temp exhibition of egon schiele (who we'd already popped in on in vienna), which included some fantastically WANKY performance art, in which people pretended to be his models, and wrote him letters from their point of view, or in which they "ättempted to create a dialogue witht he work of egon scheile" and other such performance-art-speak... *shudder* it was great!......... went to de bolhoed, a vegetarian cafe, for lunch, which was DELICIOUS (and amazingly it was recommended by lonely planet)... walked around... i am reading 'Middlemarch' by George Eliot, which is actually pissingly funny in parts. OK, maybe i exaggerate.

now, off to find either more art, a likely looking coffeeshop, a nice cafe... what to do, what to do? we are hopping on the train tomorrow to roermond to see peter! that is exciting! maybe there will be more windmills!!! and cheese! and even hendrika!!!

take care bozos.

xxx rachel and dan xxx