Athenaeum

Athenaeum is a very good bookstore in the heart of Amsterdam, and I’m rarely able to enter without buying more books than I need. Cairo has some OK bookstores, but not the sort that can give you an adrenaline rush and force hard choices about which books you want most. I just bought 4, none of them especially cheap.

Two other things I’d forgotten about Amsterdam:

*how careful you have to be not to be hit by either a streetcar or a cyclist

*how many very, very, very tall young women the Netherlands has; I’m 6’3 (191 cm) and quite a number of them tower over me; the Dutch passed the Americans for “world’s tallest nation” a decade or so ago, and I’ve heard various theories about this, ranging from milk consumption levels to even wilder speculations