To start the day, I Segway over to the Noordmarkt and pick up a few things. A piece of smoked chicken sausage that turns out to cost a lot more than I had thought from the signage and that I'm now dreading trying because either way, I lose. A piece of comté cheese that I later determine to be considerably inferior to the comté I get in SF...at about the same price. An experimental avocado because Rina has complained that she can't get a good one here and the ones I see, if a bit pricey, look like small Hass...and taste like it, too.

The other produce was simply unconvincing, but I cannot continue to live on cheese, fish, milk, wursts, yogurt, chocolate milk, bread, desserts, chocolate milk made from fresh milk and dry mix, eggs, and prepared chocolate milk that is somehow super-sterilized so it needs no refrigeration and can be packed in those squishy boxes that only recently have begun appearing in any number on San Francisco grocery shelves and which the most cursory examination reveals to be a recycling nightmare.

At 4:15 I set out for Edward's place on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal via the excellent liquor store/wine shop about 50 meters south of me on Spuistraat. €24 for a liter of Bushmill's. 'Bout like home, I think. Crossing the Dam (the square between the palace and the war memorial), I stop for a moment to watch a carriage pulled by a splendid pony of a sort we sure didn't see on West Texas ranches in the middle of the previous century. (And as an aside here, it just occurred to me that after about five years or so, the fact that they were born in the previous century is going to sink in for a generation of schoolchildren and make them feel old before their time.)

Note: In Dutch in Three Weeks I used the pseudonym Pieter, but now I'm calling him Edward. In all of these travelogs, only a couple of names have been changed.

But back to the pony. He's a pleasure to watch just standing there. He's better, though, when he's walking. But when he goes into what, damn me, I don't know whether is a canter or a trot or some pace I don't even know the name of, he is magnificent. In the first place, the pace itself would be a joy to watch in any horse. It's like watching a juggler. How does he do that? There doesn't seem to be a transition. I mean, one moment he's walking and the next moment he's in this other pace.

But I'm holding out on you. The best part is that he's got hairy lower legs, and this hair has been gorgeously coiffed so that it hangs down in smoothly increasing abundance from his knees to his ankles (OK, you know where I mean) and flares out over his hoofs and is cut perfectly straight parallel to the ground a half inch above his shoes.

This is a horse prancing in bell-bottoms. If I had hair like that I'd spend my life in a canter... ideally not attached to a carriage.

I'm making the trip to Edward's on foot because we're planning to go out to dinner at the New King, where there is no place to leave the Segway. To minimize walking I can head directly home from the restaurant. I can no longer maintain the insolent, slow swagger I cultivated on my previous visit, so now I have developed a window-shopper's stroll.

Anything to not walk like a victim, but the operant word here is slow. The up side is that the pace is ideal for photography. Take a few steps. Stop for a pic. Take a few steps. Stop for another pic.

Edward continues to astonish me. I ask him if he's read Geert Mak's superb history of Amsterdam, and he says he has. I ask him if Mak currently writes for any of the Amsterdam papers, and he says that Mak freelances now. Then he volunteers that he and Mak are in the same "year club" from their university days and are good friends. These "year clubs" are a Dutch institution of which I had not read. If I have it right, they always consist of ten people (all men? if so, are there women's year clubs?) in the same graduating class who somehow select each other and more or less bond for life.

I have been dreaming of the New King for three years, so I am quite ready to eat at five. Rafaël and Edward are horrified at the earliness. Finally, I bludgeon them out the door at six. The New King is almost empty when we enter at 6:15 and we get a corner table upstairs. They waste a lot of time mulling over the menu, but I already know what I want. That wonderful little shrimp-on-toast covered with sesame seeds for an appetizer and the babi pangang for a main course. Of course we'll share everything.

The toast is good without being quite so spectacular as I recall. They both order the wonton soup, which I taste. It's very good, but again not really stellar.

The main courses arrive: This omelette-like thing in an overpowering sweet sauce that Rafaël likes. A snow pea with chicken dish, and the babi pangang, which is a three-inch-thick slab of pork belly that must have been very slowly roasted at a low temperature to get it tender without breaking down any of the fat, and then finished under the broiler at very high heat for a short time so as to get a crispy exterior.

One order of this is about the size of an American football cut in half horizontally. It is sliced vertically into half-inch squares three inches tall and attractively presented atop about a flattened tennis ball's worth of baby bok choi. It is three-quarters fat marbled with streaks of meat.

I stifle my disgust at the sight of all that fat stacked up there and carefully rake two pieces onto my rice. Looking at it as little as possible, I spear a piece and gingerly bite off half.

It explodes in my mouth in a fireworks display of flavors and textures. It is deeply, gravely wrong that something this harmful should taste so good. Swept with alternating waves of self-loathing, greed, self-pity, and voracity, I rake a quarter of the platter onto my plate. As the meal progresses, I have a few more slices to make sure I get my full share.

The snow pea with chicken thing tastes very good and is actually nutritious.

While we eat, the restaurant fills completely and becomes a cacophonic, stifling madhouse. The bill for all this food and drink is €48.85. Edward and Rafaël say that €50 is enough. I point out that this means that I am leaving a tip of a princely €1.15. To shut me up, Edward, who owns a house that must be worth well over a million bucks, tosses €1 onto the tray. We fight our way out into the fresh air, passing a couple of employees with whom Rafaël exchanges friendly banter. He explains that he's a regular. Hmmmm. I need to reassess my attitude toward tips here. Maybe unlike our waiters they really are paid a living wage if the waiters still like him after he's been giving them one buck tips on fifty buck tabs.