| Submitted by: Mark R. Leeper United States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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As we were walking we passed a candy concession. Evelyn said I would probably like to stop at one. I said not so much for me, but I might want to get chocolates for my group. 'Belgium is the place to get chocolate,' I was told. 'Isn't Holland known for its chocolate?' Evelyn asked Jo. Jo said that it was Belgium that was known for its chocolate. I was the only one in our group who had ever heard of 'Dutch chocolate' but I swear the stuff really exists. Maybe it is just a flavor.
For dinner we tried an Indonesian place. I had Indonesian only once before but I found I like it a lot (to nobody's surprise). I think what I had was called chai chai. It was cuttlefish in a sauce with a mound of rice, some pickled vegetables, and about a teaspoon of a sweet peanut concoction. There were two sauces on the table looking much like Chinese counterparts. One looked like a soy sauce and one looked like a hot pepper sauce. That was sort of what they tasted like but each also had a sweet flavor, giving them a really unique taste.
After dinner we walked with Dale and Jo back to the hotel and after a short rest went out walking the streets of Amsterdam. If I had to put my finger on the feel of this city it would be Greenwich Village with canals. My town has a bunch of people who live in their houses almost all of the time and are not tremendously intellectual. Greenwich Village has far more people living much of their loves outside in the streets and interacting with each other. It also seems to be a more diverse community than my home town. Amsterdam seems like that to me. There are a lot of open cafes like you'd have in Greenwich Village. There seem to be a lot of young people in Amsterdam and they are getting into *** and drugs and you see a lot of public service signs recommending devices for safe sex. You might see that in Greenwich Village but you wouldn't see it in my home town.
Actually it is amazing to see how much this town has adapted to a large foreign population. You see more billboards in English than in Dutch. And one gets the impression that if you want to say something that will be read, you put it in English. There are not many people who read Dutch and not English, and there are a whole lot of people who read English and not Dutch. The streets are full of them. If you overhear a conversation in the street anywhere near the commercial district, it is usually in English.
So while the city is mostly an old city of people with their own unusual way of doing things, much of what you see as a tourist could be out of London.
Much of what made this city what it is is related to water. The city grew out of a dam on the Amstel River. The dam was there to stop the river from flooding the lowlands. As the city grew, it needed a good cheap way of moving things around. They could build and maintain roads but with all the water available they decided a more effective method would be to dig canals. Once it is dug and flooded there is very little maintenance needed for a canal. They dug so much canal that the city is now 900 islands. The canals made things easier if you had access to them. But there was not enough frontage on the canals to serve all the people who needed it. If you had just a few people with canal access the canals lose much of their purpose. What you need is to give a lot of people just a little bit of access to the canals. Narrow houses were the answer, but how do you get the people to want narrow houses? Governments have only two ways to get people to do things contrary to their nature. You can use force, but that is expensive. Or you can use taxes. That not only does not cost money, it makes money. So they started taxing frontage on the canal. Homes went tall and narrow. Most go four stories high but are narrow enough to have very little frontage. Narrow houses have narrow stairways. Ever try getting a bed up a narrow stairway? Particularly since the rooms have high ceilings to make them a little roomier so the stairs are steep. Rather than force all furniture up a narrow stair they tried a different approach. At the top of the roof a girder juts out. From it hangs a good strong hook. On the hook you can put a pulley. Then you put in very big windows. Large objects are hoisted up to the top floors and pulled in windows. I bet there aren't a whole lot of double beds in Amsterdam.
We walked around the city. There are a lot of street performers. Mostly you find mimes and magicians. We watched a street mime for a while. We went into bookstores, but the price of books is very high. We eventually decided it was getting too dark and went back to the hotel. Having had two nights of sleep deprivation (about half an hour of sleep on one and a few hours on the plane) I was really tired. I tried to bring my log up to date but I kept drifting off to sleep and had to pull myself back. At 10 PM I fell asleep and slept till 7 AM. Nine hours is unusual for me but it was about what I was hoping for. I woke up with absolutely no jet lag. I think Jo thought I was nuts to keep myself up all night before flying. She says she never gets jet lag flying east. Both she and Dale looked pretty bleary-eyed at breakfast. I was crisply awake and had absolutely no lag.
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Breakfast was Cholesterol City. A hardboiled egg, a ham and cheese sandwich, bread and butter, and coffee with cream.
Dale did not want to do much walking on his knee and the rest of us thought it would be cruel for anyone else to walk on his knee, so it was decided he would spend the morning resting and the rest of us would head out for the most famous house in Amsterdam, the Anne Frank House. I would explain to you what this house is and why it has become revered, but if you don't already know, shame on you.
You come in through the front door, pay, and go off to the left where there are two flights of narrow stairs. You are not yet into the hiding place. There is a ten-minute tape that you watch telling a little of the history of the place with earphones on the wall for people who want to hear the tape translated into obscure foreign languages like Dutch.
From there you go through the doorway behind the bookcase. The Annex itself which was the hiding place is not much to look at. That's not the point. You want to see it, to feel the claustrophobia that you'd have if you had been imprisoned there, then you come out into sections of the factory where the Frank family could not go.
Now the film was actually shot in the Anne Frank house, but it showed it as having a view of the canal. Wrongo! That is the factory side, now an exhibition room. The view the Frank family had was basically a back yard. The factory has been turned into a word-and-picture exhibition telling in more detail the story of the Frank family hiding from the Nazis and their eventual capture. It did not go into detail about how the Franks died, though that is now known also. It then tells how the diary came to be published. Finally, at least for this room, you see some fifty or so different editions of the book. Go down a floor and they have a display of the history of anti-semitism and a bookstall. One more floor down and it tells about the work of the Anne Frank Foundation, which was instituted to combat bigotry of all sorts. They included problems with anti-Muslim bigotry which seems to get very little coverage in the United States, where I think we tend to forget how large and diverse Islam really is. To judge the actions of a Malaysian Muslim based on what Muslims are doing in the Middle East is much like judging the actions of a Presbyterian from Oregon based on the actions of Christian Phalangists in Lebanon and the Irish Republican Army. But not surprisingly the AFF seems to concentrate largely on anti-Jewish discrimination and I cannot fault that, certainly.
The Anne Frank House done, we walked back to our hotel to get Dale, who'd been resting his leg. Walking the streets of Amsterdam is something of a problem. The sidewalks are about two-and-a-half feet wide and very often blocked by obstacles and mined with canine digestive calling cards. On the other side of the street there are parked cars and if you walk on either side you have to dodge into and out of the automobile lane which is about one car wide and used for both cars and bicyclists. You spend a lot of time endangering your life. The main streets are a little better but the side streets are tough to walk down. As we walked back I again noted the funny billboard planted all over the city. I don't know how many people realize how funny it is. It is for Tivoli cigarettes. The caption is 'Some girls have more fun.' It shows a stunning woman in an Afghan rebel outfit smoking a cigarette and in front of her we see the shoulder of some luscious Afghan hunk with two leather straps over his shoulder. The woman looks oh-so-sophisticated. The ad does not tell you smoking causes lung cancer. But then any Western woman who goes to Afghanistan, puts on a rebel uniform and then lights up a cigarette and tries to look sophisticated is not going to die of lung cancer. Do not attempt this trick at home, boys and girls. And really do not attempt it in Afghanistan.
We got Dale (that took a while, since he'd fallen asleep) and before going to the Van Gogh museum we went to a cafe for lunch. None of us really knew what to order so we all ordered fairly unexciting things like cheese sandwiches. We tried to look cool sitting around this tiny table in an outdoor cafe but let's face it, we had 'AMERCIAN NERDS' written in 45-point type all over us.
After we mellowed around the cafe for a while we headed out for the Van Gogh Museum. It took a fair amount of searching to find it. While I was walking I suggested that someone ought to open a concession selling dried apricots outside the Van Gogh Museum. Nobody understood why so I had to explain it was a visual pun. I am not always really popular, even with my friends. It turned out we had lingered a bit too long at the cafe. There were big mobs and nobody selling dried apricots.
In the Van Gogh Museum they have four floors. You start at the fourth floor and work your way to the first floor. On the fourth floor they have the art of Van Gogh's contemporaries; on the third floor they have Van Gogh sketches; on the second floor they have Van Gogh paintings; on the first floor they have torn everything up without bothering to warn you or give you a discount on the admission. Extrapolating from the upper floors I think they eventually intend to put in Van Gogh movies on the first floor.
One of the nice touches of the museum is if you worry about how you look--and people who go to the Van Gogh Museum worry about how they look, I can tell you--you can see yourself in many of the paintings. This is because they have helpfully put sheets of very nicely reflective glass over many of the paintings and had the main light coming in from a central atrium. By moving around you generally can see pretty much the whole painting and you constantly have the reassurance of knowing if someone is sneaking up behind you, which given the crowd that comes here seems possible. I give the architects the second Hermitage Award for designing an art museum that is perfect for just about everything with the possible exception of viewing the art.
I cannot claim to be a real expert on art. I sort of like Van Gogh. He has an interesting style. But he rarely succeeds in interesting me in his subject matter. He does flowers and trees and people sitting around posing. If he shows a field of people working, that is a little better but not much. The one piece that looked abstract in the museum turned out to be 'Roots and Tree Trunks.' Give me Goya. Give me Bosch and Brueghel. The sketches of Heinrich Kley are imaginative and fascinating while Van Gogh's are merely reproducing what the eye sees in a reasonably articulate manner. |
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