Here's today's gevelsteen. The words mean "In Three Beanstalks" but I have no idea what this signifies:

Meanwhile, the adventures continue: At 8:00 this morning Rina and I are frantically rehanging curtains and cleaning. Actually, she's mostly off the hook on the cleaning because the new tenant understands that, since the previous occupant left only last night, there is literally no time to do a thorough job before he and a couple of muscular friends arrive at 9:30 to move him in.

I walk over to the Noord Markt and pick up a chicken for the trial-run posole that I'm making for Rina's and my supper. To my astonishment, I find beautiful fresh green garlic at three stalks for €1,0, somewhat less than the price at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco, which ratchets my appreciation of the Noord Markt upwards.

Here's a sign at the market entrance telling you that pickpockets are shopping, too:

The highlight of the day occurs just around the corner from Rina's on my return. I'd stopped at Vleeschhouwerij D.Reinhart to pick up some gelderse rookwurst, a sausage recommended by Johannes van Dam, Amsterdam's premier food critic. Vleeschhouwerij is an archaic word for "butcher." Literally, "flesh hacker." My Dutch study in the weeks before this trip has paid off because merchants this year are not usually feeling a need to switch into English on me. Everything goes swimmingly in Reinhart's until, at the end of the transaction, he mutters something I don't catch.

Emboldened by my recent successes, I tell him he needs to say that more slowly. He accommodates this request by carefully and very slowly pronouncing, "T-o-t ..... Z-i-e-n-s" (literally, "until we see each other again," the equivalent of "goodbye" and one of the first phrases that any student learns). I burst into laughter, and he kindly joins me.

That tears it. Tomorrow I'm wearing my damn hearing aids.