A bike fall, saving bar of chocolate & a funny sign, in no particular order

Because we come home from work past midnight, the mornings our only time to procure any food items for our house. And so this morning, we decided to hop on our bikes and do a few grocery shopping before being picked up for work. It's rainy and slick out, however, which results in slow traffic of cars as well as bicycles on the narrow and busy Amsterdam streets. After leaving the Natuurwinkel, there was a big truck stopped in the middle of the street, which caused a dense traffic of bicycles, going both directions, on the even narrower, remaining portion of the street not taken up by the said truck. As I weaved my way through, a car appeared to my right -- to dodge the car, I tried to ride onto the pavement... but being wet and slippery, my bike skidded down.

My first bike fall! I have not fallen off a bicycle since I was a kid. Luckily, my fall onto the pavement was somewhat broken by a slightly chubby pedestrian -- unluckily for her, but she was concerned and nice and, while shocked that a girl had literally flown into her, she seemed fine. The scrape tore the top of my boots, made a hole in my favorite leggings, and gave me a good knee scrape.

It's an Amsterdam war wound.

My pink bicycle survived with just a slight bend in the handles, which David fixed up. And I didn't scrape anything other than my knee, which was lucky. It may have helped that I was wearing my long, Canadian Goose down coat, which makes me look like a Michelin Woman but keeps me very warm and, evidently, well-cushioned.

Now, onto a random yet important note about our days here in Holland: we have discovered a food item vital to our surviving long work days. We have discovered Vivani Feine Bitter GrunTee. It is organic dark chocolate with green tea. They have been on sale at the Natuurwinkel and we have bought bars and bars of them, keeping them in our cupboard as if they were bars of gold.

I am not a huge chocolate eater, but this bar of chocolate is addictive. David consumes bars of chocolate over a rehearsal period, as they are easy to carry, easy to eat, and provide a lot of energy.

And yet another random tid bit. There was a sign in the theater foyer last night, which gave me a chuckle:

I must say that the toilets in the Beatrix Theater are immaculately clean, lovely to use. And we have discovered why... they get deep cleaned!