We deserved a break that day!

Having lived in Amsterdam for several years, I wanted to show Dave, my colleague, some of the sights and a few of my favorite eating establishments. We were midway through a twenty day, seven country intensive shoot schedule and were in definite need of a break.

The first restaurant we visited was a British place with awesome hamburgers, but it's not the kind of place you would take your mother-in-law. Let's just say that their beer and burger budget far outweighs their decor budget.

Service was kind of slow that night, even though there were few customers. Right next to us, however, was a large table with about a dozen fun loving, heavy drinking patrons. Actually, some were fun loving and some were barely conscious! The waiter had no trouble keeping their glasses full and plates cleared, but we for some reason were not noticed. Maybe it was because they were having a party and they were all employees of the restaurant. It pays to know the waiter.

Later I took Dave to get some shoarma. Shoarma is a pita filled with lamb meat topped with various scrumptious condiments like my favoriteœ creamy garlic sauce. It was a beautiful summer day so we ate outside looking out over a canal and 16th century houses. Suddenly an older gentleman sat next to Dave and proceeded to become his best friend, invited him to a party, and wanted to buy him lunch. He even tried to fix Dave up with a lady sitting across from us. Problem is she was about 50 and Dave is only 24. Poor Dave was trying to be as polite as he could in spite of the fact that he could only understand about 20 percent of the gentleman's English/Dutch hybrid language. And me, all I could do was to keep from convulsing in laughter.

Next time, I think we'll do McDonalds.