Previous entry:
Amsterdam in the Fall

Next Entry:
How Many Friends Do YOU Have?

Home:
One Truth For All

Archives

• May 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005
• November 2005
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• July 2005
• June 2005
• May 2005
• April 2005
• March 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• September 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• May 2004
• April 2004
• March 2004
• February 2004
• January 2004
• December 1969

October 27, 2008

Cold and Damp in the Netherlands

Before reading this post, go stand in the shower with the cold water on for a minute or two. Don't take your clothes off. Now settle down and try to get comfortable. That is what Amsterdam has been like for the last couple of days.

Autumn is not a great season for visiting countries along the North Sea, at least not if one likes warmth. In general I do fine with cold weather, but it's also been raining and I have been soaking wet, which makes for misery.

In the last day the feeling of the city has shifted: we changed to Winter Time, and a lot of tourists cleared out on Sunday afternoon. The leaves have not really started to turn yet, though.

Technorati Tags: amsterdam, autumn, travel

But let's go back a bit. On Friday we met friends at the Bokbierfest, then took a ferry across the water to another bar for a couple more drinks. On the way back, we saw this: one of those tiny little delivery trucks drove right onto a pedestrian/bicycle ferry.

In order to be able to go on the ferry, a truck must be able to get from one side of the ferry to the next (it doesn't turn around while crossing, so you enter on one end and exit on the other). That corridor back there with the motorcycle is wide enough for a tiny little truck, but not much else.

(Apologies for the fuzziness; it was very dark and we were on a boat, after all.)

Little cars being sort of an obsession for Noel, our Saturday morning excursion to the Oude Zoud, a shopping district in the South, had this as its highlight. Later research tells us this car is so small you don't need a driver's license to drive it in the Netherlands.

Once the touristy things were done, we went back to the festival. It's a simple concept: 7 Euros gets you a 0.2L glass, and 2 Euros gets you a token. You buy a glass and a bunch of tokens and go around tasting various beers, one token apiece. If you are strategic, you can use a group of friends to taste a lot of beers for a little money. If you are me, you just try a few and drink the entire glass.

The festival was held at the Beurs van Berlage, which you may be able to guess from its name is the old stock exchange (beurs = bourse). It's a nice building, somewhere in between Arts and Crafts and Art Deco. An architecture book in the cottage we're staying at claims it as Art Nouveau, but it is definitely not that.

Earlier on in the day, the main hall is nicely clear and you can get to various beers quite easily. Later it fills up with more casual drinkers and becomes intolerable, so we mostly limited our visits to the earlier hours.

Off to the side there is a smaller space that used to be used as a non-smoking room before Amsterdam went non-smoking indoors. There's seating there, and because there are not so many dispensers it tends to be less crowded. We colonized a set of benches as a group. Here you can see the decorative motifs: the frieze is mosaic, while the pattern in the brick is done with coloured bricks.

Sunday was largely spent walking around getting really damp, although in the evening the rain finally stopped. As we were walking from dinner (at a reasonably authentic Mexican restaurant) to a pub, we passed this sandwich shop. The sign does not immediately bring to mind bread for me.

We ended up last night at the Arendsnest bar (Heron's Nest), where they had a very impressive collection of beers on tap. It was full of people known to our friends from previous festivals, which is generally a good sign about the selection.

I should say now that I'm not much of a beer drinker. I like it, but I doubt I would have gone way out of my way to go to the festival if it were not that friends were going to be there.

Some other odds and ends from the past few days:

This is what the curbs look like out of the ground. They're not very deep compared to the curbs often used in other places, because too much weight concentrated at one place in this kind of soil would mean sunken curbs everywhere. That's also why they're as wide as they are. In soft delta sand you need to spread the weight over a wider area.

And yesterday we came across this bollard dug up and thrown to the side. I don't know what happened there, but you can see that they are not set too far into the ground. Which might explain why so many of them have such significant leans; a tap from a car bumper and a shallow bollard will tip over. I suppose that's better than destroying the car, but it seems kind of ineffective given the kinds of speeds cars can get to on these tiny streets.

And in the odd storefronts category, we have the toothbrush shop, complete with motorized ferris wheel with little toothbrushes sitting in it.

And an eyeglasses museum (and apparently store, as there were prices on most items in the window).

It's a funny little city, Amsterdam.

Posted by ayse on 10/27/08 at 2:54 AM