Amsterdam - I

September 3, 2015

Well here we are again in Europe for a month because it's still fun and it makes us feel alive. This time we chose Amsterdam because there are no hills here (in fact one fifth of the country is below sea level), because we found an apartment with an elevator, and because it is just one plane ride from Minnesota. We've been here before -- it was our first European destination in 1973 -- but never for long. We're due for a closer look.

Our apartment, with big sunny windows south and west, is in a newer 15-story hi-rise just outside the busy tourist center and aside the Heineken brewery .. two bedrooms, 1170 square feet, washer, dryer, dishwasher, big fridge, giant TV, fast internet .. all spotlessly clean. The trams below our windows are a bit noisy but oh so convenient. 

A reminder .. you can click on any photo in this blog to see it bigger. (Nearly all were taken with our iPhone 5s.) Click on any of the few red links to go to an informative website.

Our gentrifying neighborhood is full of young folks, probably up-and-coming professionals, few of them even half our age. It seems safe and, because there are so few cars on the street, quite quiet. That's perhaps because more than half of the locals silently ride a bike to work. Most of them apparently go right past our door and to this nearby intersection. Click and watch out for the tram!

People seem respectful and unpretentious, the shops are varied and interesting if a bit worn, Holland's biggest street market is nearby and a half a mile long but a bit tacky, and the coffee is beautiful but all espresso-based and (by American standards) in small cups. Here's a cappuccino and, always in a glass, a latte.

But it’s easy to live here because, as a tour guide told us, “we’re all born speaking two languages, Dutch and English.” And their English is even colloquial .. one waitress greeted us with “Hi there, you guys.” How lucky for us is that? 

We’re told that the Netherlands (nickname Holland) is the most densely populated country in Europe, has the most museums (over 1000) and also the tallest citizens. The average male is 6’1” and many women are also taller than me ("it's because we feed our children such good food," one woman told me). Even the mannequins in the street market are giant-size:

Since it was a colonial power in the 17th century, Holland has long welcomed people from all over the world; today it is home to some 180 nationalities. So at first glance, Amsterdam seems a modern, tolerant, vital city full of tall young people, some 34.9% of whom are "non-Western foreigners," whatever that means.

Unlike in Paris, our neighbors don’t seem at all fashion-focused or pretentious. There’s a supermarket and a fine Indian restaurant below us, dozens of other restaurants nearby (including McDonalds and Starbucks), and that huge street market down the block. The first day we had so much fun there .. flowers, fresh fruit, cheeses, veggies and greens, fish and meat, bakeries, street food, new and used clothing, shoes, housewares and, yes, tee-shirts and wooden tulips for the tourists.

Next morning in misty rain we made our first trek to the center. When we got on the tram three young people offered us their seats, but when we came home (dead tired) nobody did. Bummer. The main square was busy and there were long lines at Madam Tussauds and at the Amsterdam Dungeon (whatever that is). Can we skip those?? Since then, the tram has rarely been crowded because another one seems to arrive every 3-4 minutes.

Traveling independently requires some coping but that’s part of the fun: getting in from the airport, figuring out the transit system, locating ATMs, shopping for items with foreign names, reading maps and apps, watching the weather, avoiding the bike lanes, finding coffee, etc. As in all of our European visits we feel safe here, and the Dutch seem more pleasant and helpful than most. 

We sleep as late as we want and then go out for coffee, lunch and exploring. It seems we're always at a canal:

And sometimes looking in on people living in one of the 2500 houseboats, all connected to city water and sewer. Several were available as furnished vacation rentals for the month of September but all were located too far out. 

We're too old to be in a different hotel every night, so for the twelfth time we're renting a European apartment for an entire month or more. If we wish we can return home for a mid-afternoon nap or stay home on a rainy day, whatever. We can only pretend we belong here, of course. But we do get a pretty good feel for a place.

So far we do like it here and are glad we came to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam - II

September 8, 2015

The first week has been about half rainy. The locals know that’s normal so they just deal with it. Some cyclists hold an umbrella but that makes it hard to text. 

Others just pedal harder, straight-backed, from their too-low seats. Only small children wear a helmet. They all ride fast and just inches from one another in 1100 miles of narrow bike lanes, but their biggest hazard is tourists on rental bikes who ride slowly and erratically and don’t know the rules.

Yesterday there was a serious downpour just as we headed out for the nearby Rijksmuseum so we ducked instead into the little pub at the corner above for lunch. Very local place, noisy and cheap, but Elsa had the first dish she’d like to order again - strips of oozy warm brie on a slab of wheat toast, all covered with pears, honey and walnuts. Yum. 

The three major museums are a short walk away on a broad green "museum square." The castle-like Rijksmuseum is far away at the far right of this panorama below. (It really helps to click on this one.)

In front of the Reijksmuseum is the "I amsterdam" sculpture which has become the city's iconic selfie locale:

We bought “museum cards” which will admit us to 100s of museums all over Holland. They paid for themselves in five days. Compared to our many stays in Paris, Amsterdam is less expensive. Coffee starts at €2, a small Heinekens (a perfect 25cl or 8.5 ounce size for me) at €2.50, and house wine at €3. In Paris all were €4 or €5. Milk at the grocery (and much else) is way cheaper than in Nisswa. In part this is because the dollar is stronger than we’ve seen it in years. But if we had a  car, we'd still pay over $6 for gas though much less for diesel.

One weekend to mark the opening of a new exhibit at the Van Gogh Museum (it's the round building near the sidewalk in the panorama photo above) they surrounded it with 100,000 fresh-cut sunflowers.!

Then they let everyone take some home. The next day all were gone and they were re-sodding the big lawn. We enjoyed ours for a week. 

The modern art museum (the Stedelijk) looks like a bathtub at the left of the panorama photo above. Its sloping lawn is the roof of a supermarket.

Amsterdam's fourth major museum, of course, is the Anne Frank House (where the wait can be up to three hours); it's two tram rides away. Our museum cards admit us to them all.

We love Classical music of course. At a somber old church in nearby Utrecht Sunday we heard a serious Norwegian early music ensemble present a program exploring the idea of “melancholy.” With lights low they played continuously with no applause, the singer and the lead violinist at times wandering mournfully through the audience. Who knew Norwegians could be so soulful? Melancholy, yes. But Soulful? Then before a Sunday morning concert at the famous Concertgebouw music hall down the street, where there are some 900 concerts a year, our tickets included free coffee. Nice idea, huh?

One great TV station shows Classical music all the time. In just one evening the Los Angeles Philharmonic did “Rhapsody in Blue” with jazz pianist Herbie Hancock. Then a Dutch group sang Gregorian chant and a mass by Josquin des Prez (1450-1521) from totally incomprehensible 15th-century notation. Extraordinary. 

Then came a riveting ballet from Berlin full of blood and sex and Sophocles and Monteverdi. Then some short “light classic” excerpts that Americans might not consider very "light" .. a Fauré piano quartet movement and a Dutch chamber choir, then the flashy Wuja Lang playing frenzied Ligeti. The next night gave us the Ravel piano concerto, a Verdi opera, and a soprano/harp recital of Elizabethan airs. This station's only commercials are for upcoming classical concerts nationwide. Does such programming, obviously state-subsidized, merely reflect Dutch culture .. or help shape it??

We also get several English-language news channels including CNN, two BBCs, Russian TV and Al Jazeera, which again seems the best. All of them are focused right now on Syrians trying to reach Europe and asking whether they are "refugees" seeking asylum here (and therefore eligible for certain protections and assistance) or are they merely "migrants" seeking a more prosperous life? It is unbelievable to see thousands of people risking everything to start a new life in Europe. What to do with them, whether to accept them, how to help them, how it will end? Some 3100 refugees arrived in Holland just this weekend and 25,000 so far this year. A half-million more are currently on the move toward Germany and Sweden. 

The transit system isn’t as extensive or as user-friendly as Paris, but we use it as much as possible and pay for it so cleverly. You buy a credit-card-like transit pass and load money on it as needed. Every time you take a tram or bus (or a train to another city) you scan your pass when you board and again when your ride is over. The system figures out how far you went, charges you the appropriate fare, and tells you how much money is left. With that card, a tram ride costs €1.25 instead of the full fare of €2.90. Still, we'll spend a great deal more for transit here than in Paris, where a €70 monthly pass gives you unlimited travel. 

It's most convenient that the trams in both directions stop right at the door of our building. But we're still learning not to stand in the bike lanes between the sidewalks and the tram doors.

Just when we had found a coffee place we liked, it closed the next day to become a pub. But friendly Nina, from Croatia, will be tending her same coffee machine next week at the bistro across the street. Her thoughts on living in Holland are interesting and not entirely favorable. But she'd never consider moving back to Croatia .. or to America “because of all the earthquakes.” She said it costs at least €500k to buy a small one-bedroom apartment in her neighborhood. Rentals in our building are about €1700 per month. 

Since then we’ve switched to another coffee café where two guys from New Zealand and England create the most beautiful patterns in the foam: trees, hearts, swans. Like Nina, they also imagine they'll live in Holland well into the future. Their café roasts their own beans and grinds them just as they prepare your cup .. not too shabby. They say the Dutch traditionally haven’t appreciated great coffee, but their place is always packed.

When you travel independently and not on package tours, you sometimes have to adjust. One morning we set out to visit a certain neighborhood but the tram didn’t stop where it should have (or more likely we just missed it). So we got off at the next stop, the main “Dam” square (originally the site of a dam on the Amstel river, hence "Amsteldam" which became "Amsterdam"). We decided to visit the New Church there (“new,” that is, from 1408). Whoops, closed on Tuesdays. So with our museum passes we explored the Royal Palace instead and then the acclaimed Old Church in the Red Light district, where we recharged with hot chocolate and three-inch-thick apple pie (which seems the favorite Dutch dessert) in its sacristy-cum-coffee shop. Like other historic churches here, it has a wood-vaulted ceiling (the biggest in Holland), not stone, and almost no decoration because the Dutch Reformed destroyed statues and paintings and even many stained-glass windows when they took over all Catholic churches by 1588. (Maybe that explains why even our apartment is so plain?) 

For years they buried the most important merchants/burghers under the stones of the floor (10,000 of them, the "stinking rich") until they couldn't stand the smell any more.

Today Holland is some 35% Catholic, 25% Protestant and 40% unchurched. Many old churches are now seen as museums and used for concerts and exhibitions, as here in Delft:

Then we went on to our original destination, the idyllic courtyard in a historic convent (the Begijnhof), where we discovered a small stained glass window in the little English Reformed Church which shows the Pilgrims praying at the departure of the Mayflower. Finally we did the hi-tech Amsterdam Museum next door. As it turned out, our improvised day was far more interesting than our original plan. 

The city is gradually unfolding .. daily we discover more things to see and where they are. In the Jewish quarter yesterday the Portuguese Synagogue, aglow with late afternoon sunshine, offered a moment of peaceful reflection though tempered by nearby museums of the Resistance (Resistance Museum) and of the Holocaust (Hollandsche Schouwburg), which claimed the lives of 110,000 Dutch Jews.

Americans forget that World War II began in Europe in September of 1939. Already in May of 1940, Germany invaded officially neutral Holland, leaving only Russia and England pleading for quick American help to defend the continent. The little Dutch army resisted so valiantly that the Germans, in a brutal show of strength, mercilessly bombed Rotterdam. They threatened to do the same to Amsterdam, so Holland surrendered in five days. Thereafter the epicenter of both the Deportation and the Resistance was Amsterdam. Heavy stuff. Nonetheless, the majority of cars we see here are Mercedes, BMW, Audi and VW, all German makes.

Amsterdam - III

Sept. 15

A standard farewell at home is “watch out for the deer.” Here it’s “watch out for bikes.” They’re everywhere, inches from each other and from us, silent and menacing. It will be a miracle if we don’t get hit or at least witness a smashup. 

The cab driver from the airport said everyone owns two bikes; they keep a good one inside and ride a shabby one in case it’s stolen .. and they are (he blamed the Moroccans). We’ve seen every imaginable kind of bike, even some with a circular battery and electric motor in the front hub. You charge it at home, and it regenerates more charge when you coast. Pretty cool. One guy said it helps him ride 25mph with ease, but his friend kidded him, saying electric bikes "are only for old guys like him." Even a wheelchair had the same hubs. 

Mom or dad often has one kid in front and one behind. Guys may have their gal atop the rear fender. One dad lets his son stand upright behind him, and another fellow pulled a wheeled suitcase like a trailer. 

All European elevators are small, but ours is doubly long so as to accept a bike or two. There are four bikes parked in the hallway on our floor for the other two apartments. Some cargo bikes have a greatly extended front “basket.” One came by with eight blond tots in it. But one woman in our building got cargo bike into our elevator anyway .. it was a new model which separated into two parts.

There are parking ramps here just for bikes. One at the Delft train station must hold thousands. Closer to home, on a canal near a busy square, there’s an immense barge offering paid reserved parking only for bikes. Uffda. The city looks rather unkempt with bikes everywhere.

Surprisingly, our cab from the airport was a Tesla. Since then we've seen dozens more of them plus a great many other electric cars not sold in America. 

One cab firm is actually called the Electric Taxi Company. It's government policy greatly to encourage electric cars and soon to permit only electric boats on the canals. There are auto charging stations all over, and they look free. Serious environmentalism here.

But we never understood how to tell which cabs are occupied, nor did we see many taxi stands. Rick Steves may be right; he finds cabs unnecessary in compact Amsterdam. Still, in the evening, of the few cars on the quiet street below our windows, nearly all are cabs.

Street food is big here. Tried a raw herring sandwich in Haarlem. After you order one, they do at least cut off the head and tail and gut and fillet the 7-inch herring. Actually it was pretty edible, especially the pickles and onions.

Got a much tastier one later at our nearby street market. We’ve also had french fries served in a cone with mayonnaise and a certainly-not-Dutch focaccia pita stuffed with hummus, garlic tapenade, olives and red peppers. Yum. And bitterballen (deep-fried croquettes), little waffle sandwiches stuffed with syrup, beef tartare, thick-as-pudding pea soup, and thin pancakes a foot across and laden with apples, bacon and eggs or whatever, like crepes.

And poffertjes, fluffy little pancake bits drenched in butter and powdered sugar. While waiting for some at the street market we met lovely Anneke, age 97, and shared with her our first order of 10. 

Because the Dutch were world-wide traders for so long, especially in the East Indies, all sorts of cuisine are available here. My favorite is that Indian restaurant just below us; we smell their curry every time we come and go. There's also food from Thailand, Japan, Korea, Greece, Turkey, Argentina, Suriname, Morocco, Spain, Iran and, from Indonesia, this elaborate rijsttafel (rice table) with 29 separate little dishes.

How about some smoked salmon on scrambled eggs for lunch, or some bakery goodies, or that thick apple pie, as dense as fruit cake?

It was so unexpectedly sunny one morning that we impulsively took a canal cruise and luckily choose the perfect one .. only three of us and Bo, our guide/pilot, for 75 minutes in a small open electric boat.

Bo was born in the Red Light district and grew up boating and skating the canals, so she knows them better than the streets. She's a proud alternative to the long impersonal tourist boats holding dozens; she says they can’t get into the smaller canals, are covered, are piloted by people who don’t live in or know the city, and play only a recorded tourist narrative. Ours was very much a private tour. 

She said the locals don’t like the city being defined by the Anne Frank house, just as people in Salzburg ridiculed the #1 American tourist attraction there, the Sound Of Music Tour. (They called it the "Sound of Fiction" Tour.) In the winter Bo hangs out in the same village on the Mediterranean coast of Spain where we spent the winter of 2007; she and us may be the only people in Amsterdam who’ve ever heard of it. The last two winters have been so mild, however, that she's planning to give boat tours through this coming winter. Global warming, anyone?

One weekend Holland celebrated “open door days” when people could enter interesting buildings normally closed to the public. In Paris that meant we visited major government ministries like the Defense Department or even the Elysees Palace where President Sarkozy lived, plus elegant foreign embassies. Here the places were more modest though more numerous: schools, offices, churches and private homes, often with some architectural interest. At the Old Church, where admission normally costs €7.50, various artists were performing non-stop on the great organ so I went to listen. 

But what did I see there? A shockingly incongruous display of world-wide-award-winning Gay Pride photos intended to shed a more humane light on the travails of the GLTB world. OMG.

On the way there, the tram made a wrong turn (oh oh) as a stern voice issued an incomprehensible Dutch explanation. Many blocks in the wrong direction, the driver stopped, shooed everyone off and ignored my questions. He must be the only person here who can't understand English. In a panic and leaving my shoulder bag behind (luckily it contained only an umbrella), I finally found a Metro station and for the only time rode the homely new Metro to the main square, discovering there a noisy festival of (get this) fancy little circus calliope wagons!!! Dozens of them. Everywhere. Much hooting and tooting, drinking and dancing. Nonstop. That’s why my tram was re-routed .. it couldn’t get through all this revelry. 

And in front of the Royal Palace there was a singing group in folk costumes noisily introduced by an outrageous gent wearing a frilly skirt and an enormous platinum-colored afro wig. OMG again.

Well, that’s the “advantage” of visiting a place long-term. You do experience the real thing, including the unexpected.

Amsterdam - IV

September 29, 2015

We’re wrapping up our stay in Amsterdam and flying home tomorrow. We’ve just enjoyed a great ten-day visit from our friends Kay and Dan from Ann Arbor, exploring Delft to the south, several quaint villages to the north, sights all over the city plus an orchestra concert at the Concertgebouw and a ballet at the Opera House.

Here's cheese in Edam:

Tourists and pleasure sailing in Vollendam:

And the bleak old fishing village of Marken:

We’ve also reclaimed our stools at our favorite coffee bar and visited six more museums (four for the second time). Without our museum cards, we would have spent €510 on museum visits this month.

We've toured grand homes and gardens from Holland's 17th-century Golden Age:

We've taken a few flower pix with our iPhone:

In the square below us we watched guys do astonishing tricks with soccer balls in the “European freestyle football championship”: 
  

Click here for some very fancy footwork!

We even saw a few friendly bikini-clad ladies in dim windows in the Red Light district and some interesting food items at the market:

But mostly we enjoyed watching people, boats and canals:

We haven't seen all that much diversity, nor any pot-smoking or disgusting sexual exhibitionism (drat). But neither have we seen any obese or homeless or obviously needy people or slummy neighborhoods. Only a few quiet political protests, this one against the current military takeover in Egypt:

So .. if you're still with me .. we can say that we did enjoy living for a month in a prosperous and liberal welfare-state society where public systems work and the culture seems supportive of the common good. One survey rates Holland's children the happiest in all of Europe. Indeed, they have much to be happy about, and not just that their moms take them everywhere on their bikes.

If you’re contemplating a long stay in Europe, consider Amsterdam. It’s easy to live here because so many speak English so well, because public transportation is a snap, and because there’s lots to see and do, some of it world-class. And at reasonable prices, especially now when the dollar is strong. You may have heard that anything goes here in super-tolerant Holland, but there’s also a Dutch phrase that says “just act normal, that’s crazy enough.” So you’ll be safe here, largely uncrowded and unstressed, and you’ll find the people friendlier and more helpful than most any place we can think of. Go for it!

We will leave in high spirits with great memories. Thanks for letting us share it with you.