Day 4

We were both awake before 9 a.m. and out of the room by 10.

I let Hattie decide what we were doing for breakfast, and she decided on pancakes, so off we went.

Our first choice was so busy that there was a queue waiting outside in the cold, so we went on to the next one.

We both went for savoury ones— mine with cheese and ham, Hattie’s had cheese and bacon.

When it came out, it looked good.

By the end, though— we were both glad to have finished them— they were nice, but just too much and ever so slightly tasted burned.

Oh well, at least we’ve tried Dutch pancakes now.

We had an hour or so to kill, so we decided to do some souvenir shopping.

I agonised for ages on what to get Joss, and I’m not convinced I’ve done well— hoping that the agonising bit will make up for the final product.

We dropped all that off at the hotel and went for a drink. 

The sports bar we had chosen was more of a restaurant, so we felt obliged to eat something even though we weren’t really hungry.

We had the Dutch croquets again along with some chicken tenders.

I ate more than my half, but Hattie hardly touched hers— she wasn’t feeling 100%.

After that, we tried our second form of transport and caught the 54 tube on the metro.

Tap on, tap off— very convenient. We even had a seat for the 10-stop journey, so all was well.

We followed the other fans, and it was very soon apparent where we were going.

It was a shame we weren’t hungry enough to eat here.

We had to find the pick-up point first for the tickets and the goody bag— a scarf each and a notebook each— nice.

We then went into the club shop and were actually charged for everything we bought— outrageous!!

We had 30 minutes before we were let in, so we had a beer.

Finishing that gave me the opportunity to use this beauty.

Yes, an outside urinal.

It was so invigorating— flapping around in the breeze. Actually, flapping is doing some heavy lifting there as it was -4 degrees, so I could feel myself getting physically further away from the urinal, mid-flow.

Hattie had no idea I was going to do this, as she thought I was just putting the plastic glass in the bin, and she was absolutely disgusted.

Not even me finding her a stall selling pins could get that look off her face like I’d done something appalling.

I still say I feel more Dutch now.

We then went through security, and it was as though God was smiling on Hattie, as there were covered escalators to get up to our floor.

Then it got even better as the bar had a touch screen ordering service where as well as ordering something now, you could pre-order for half-time without having to talk to anyone.

The only minor disappointment was that Ajax don’t have personalised glasses like PSV - booo.

The seats we had were plush, and we had a great vantage point.

The game itself was slightly more skilful than yesterday, but it was far too easy for Ajax, running out 4-0 winners.

The more impressive thing was watching this lad do keepy-uppies - he was getting a euro for each one and they had to stop him in the end because the game needed to start with him over 2600 euros to the good

We stayed until the end and followed the crowd back to the train station. Once there, we found that there were so many options that when we decided to go via the metro again, we walked straight to the platform and straight onto an empty tube where there were seats available - yippee.

Once back in the centre of Amsterdam, we dropped our purchases off and went out to McDonald’s - I couldn’t deny her for the whole weekend.

The food was nice, but the spices disagreed with Hattie, so we decided to call it a night - it’s been a great day!!