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.