Eating in a box

Our cruise finished where it began, back in Amsterdam. We had one extra day in Amsterdam before we head to Belgium for our friends' wedding. The Amsterdam flag is the triple X which is part of it's coat of arms, I had originally thought the triple X marked the red light district.  I was further mistaken to think the locals were really proud of the red light district as I started seeing the triple X everywhere but was able to get a clarification from a tour guide. Well now that is out of the way.... Something I highly recommend if you take the cruise we were on is to take the Anne Frank House tour. Unfortunately no pictures allowed, so I got one of a statue of Anne Frank outside the house. The tour lets you bypass buying tickets a month ahead online and standing in a crazy 4 hour line. We basically shuffled in before the museum opened and got to see the whole thing. You can't go to Amsterdam without taking a picture of a windmill. I was only able to snap this pict...

I was invited to join NHK World's Global Lunchbox project on Japanese TV. I filmed a submission and sent into photos. The episode apparently aired 9/14 but I was unable to view it so I have no idea whether they used any of my video. They did feature me in the gallery with a shortened version of my video on making this bento here . Eating in a box goes global :)

Our last port of call before returning to home port, Copenhagen Denmark. I'm not sure whether to classify this as our last stop or the stop before last. I saw this sign on while we were walking down the street.... 'Nuff said yarr. The big attraction we decided to hit was Tivoli Garden. This amusement park/regular park is very popular destination (especially with the beautiful summer weather) it has a lot more green space sitting area for people to lounge on unlike the amusement parks in America. This is the second oldest amusement parks in the world (built in 1843). In fact Walt Disney modeled his Disney world parks after the Tivoli park. This is a shot of the Asian themed area of the park. There were lots of green spaces and where park go-ers can sit and listen to music (a couple of open air theaters). This is a shot of the Mrs. Peacock herding her babies. Denmark is the home of my favorite toy Lego! Lego seems to distribute all of its models all over th...

We're rounding the corner home with Stockholm Sweden . We entered the port through the Swedish archipeligos, which was a beautiful site. The Stockholm archipelagos are made up of about 30,000 small islands some of them no bigger than a car poking out of the water some large enough for several houses. We arrived around 6am and it was a very quiet glide through the islands. This shot was from our balcony. Once in port there were water taxis to take you to various points of interest including an amusement park, the ABBA museum (which I'm a little bummed we missed), and historical district. Since these are the things we missed I only have this picture of a family of fearless barnacle geese to show you. We opted to spend our time with the Vasa Museum. Above is the remains of one of two famous 17th Century warships to herald the greatness of the power of Sweden sea power. Her name: Vasa. Unfortunately, she sunk within 25 mins of launching out of port. #epicfail #headsw...

We've passed the half the point quite a few points to hit on the way back and we start with Helsinki, Finland. Helsinki is a nice clean modern city we chose to just walk the city and wandered into the city center. This is St. Luther's cathedral it's situated at right at the town square next to the Parliament building. We did a little shopping here to replenish some clothing, the weather was amazing and the people were very friendly and helpful. I realize this is a rare sunny season for the area so it'd be interesting to see what winter looks like here. We did swing by the tourist center and they suggested going Zetor for lunch, it featured a "rustic country" cuisine. There were tractors, wooden benches and rusted signs everywhere. They really did it up with the ambiance. It would have fit right in back home in Texas. The printed the menu in multiple languages and presented like a newspaper. I saw, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Ge...

By request I'm posting the pictures of the rest of the Faberge eggs I was able to capture from the Celebrity Constellation exhibit. I don't know enough about the history of these eggs so I'll just be posting the pictures. From the egg talk this last egg is one of the first ones produced by Theo Faberge. He was a wood worker by trade and it was the first time the Faberge eggs featured wood as a material to produce the egg. The inside is hollow and meant to hold something of value. The wood on the inside apparently will take on a darker purple shade as the egg ages. It was a cool exhibit.