My mother is going to love us even more today because we took a million pictures and some video at Rembrandt's House Museum today (and, yes we bought a few postcards,too).

We started the day with a quick walk through the Red Light District. Rick Steves warned us to keep our cameras in our bags in this neighborhood (due to reports of unhappy bouncers taking your camera) and I think we and our readers are happy we complied. There were several women in residence in their glass cubbies that early in the morning. What is surprising is how the neighborhood also has "regular life" right next to the sex businesses. There is a sculpture of a hand groping a breast in the cobble stones in front of the big church, for example. There is a daycare and other regular businesses just a few doors down from some prostitute shops. Mark said he'd had enough and we moved on.

We wandered through a farmers market, a flea market and a hippie park (Rembrandtplain). Mark quickly said he'd had enough and we moved on. (kidding...a little). We did have fun going through a huge selection of 45 rpm records and laughing at the goofy band names and wrapper art. We found we were extremely good at guessing the records' year of publication by the art design. (The records were from the 70s and 80s). We also had a wonderful plate of fries from a food truck.

We took more pictures of bridges and canals. The weather was lovely with blue skies and plenty of breeze all day.

Rembrandt's House has been restored with similar items to what he had. They knew what he had because everything was inventoried at the time he went bankrupt. It's a huge four story house. The bottom floor is where the family spent their time, the first floor is for visitors, the second level was Rembrandt's studio, and the top floor was the studio for his pupils. There were demonstrations of making etchings and mixing your own oil paints. Very interesting! The final section of the house was a gallery of original etchings and the temporary exhibit was about a painting that has just recently been validated as a real Rembrandt through new technologies that are better at revealing what is underneath the paint.

We went to the Jewish Historical Museum nearby and spent more time there than we expected because they have extensive video archives that are easy to access and understand how the relate to the exhibits. At each "station" they had a topic along with video of personal recollections and archival film footage. The museum is also housed in old synagogues and there was a small Marc Chagall exhibit, too.

We returned to our sandwich shop for a repeat of last night's dinner and we also found a supermarket and bought bottled water, chips, pancakes and stroopwafels (syrup waffle cookies) for a lot cheaper than we've been paying in tourist places.

Tonight's weird t.v.: UK Olympic trials for track and field (I am a fan of sprinter Adam Gemili), a BBC Show called "Flog It" (which, btw, is not at all what it sounds like to us - think antiques roadshow where they actually auction the items), and while I'm typing this, Mark is watching a Dutch game show (something we enjoy doing in foreign countries). I will let him try to explain it below.

Wow, this show is oddly fascinating... Like when we watched the bizarre game show in Cina. The show is called Ik Hou van Holland... It is super Holland-y, with a set filled with windmills, tulips and cows. It is set up much like family feud, with 4 players on either side with a crowd behind each team... One team/crowd is bedecked in orange, the other in red, white and blue. The game consists of a bunch of mini games, such as hangman, taboo, name that tune, hot potato (with an exploding gift box), a family feud style (like name 20 types contraceptive), and wheel of fortune. I'm always impressed when I can enjoy a game show when I have very little understanding of the language.

Well, that's all for this eve. Hope all is going well back home. We love to read your comments and messages.