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 | Comments (0)

Amsterdam in the Fall

Ah, Amsterdam, or for the more sensitive among us, Amsterdarnitall.

We spent Monday night in a bit of a tizzy preparing to leave: when I came home from work it was to find that the fish tank had sprung a leak and the fish were narrowly clinging to life in half an inch of water, which inserted an element of panic into events. (Fortunately, we live in a house full of holes, so the water itself had drained into the basement through a crack in the floor instead of ruining everything we own.)

So four o'clock came even earlier than it seems like it might. That was when the taxi arrived to take us to the airport for the first leg of our flight. The flight itself was very pleasant. We spent some frequent flyer miles and flew business class, which is to be recommended for long flights, especially when you have had two hours of sleep the night before. Then an unpleasant but blessedly short train ride from the airport, and we were in Amsterdam.

We like Amsterdam, especially with the indoor smoking ban (especially because we are here for a beer festival and with some friends who intended to do a great deal of drinking in bars). Unfortunately, there is no outdoor smoking ban, because the sidewalks are basically one huge ashtray. It's as if people think that because you are allowed to do anything you want here, you must do it.

We spent our first day, before our friends arrived, walking around the city being tourists. And behold! Photos!

Here's an amusing take on pigeon control. We have discussions about bird control on buildings all the time at work. I have never seen anybody suggest just netting the entire front of the building.

Technorati Tags: architecture, amsterdam

In the category of weird and unexplained, this is what we encountered as we walked from the train station to the cottage we rented for the week. It's the large formal square opposite the palace, in which on one side there was a carnival set up with rides and games and so forth, and on the other, a little after 9am, there were several soldiers in dress uniforms lined up. Every now and then the marching band would play some music, but for the most part they stood in total silence, staring into the middle of the square. There was no obvious reason for this.

We had arrived in Amsterdam well before we expected to, so we took a brief detour through the flower market. You would think I had not just spent a weekend planting bulbs and cursing at myself for buying too many, because I saw all those cheap bulbs and started drooling.

And finally to the little cottage. Instead of staying in a hotel we rented a cottage in a back garden this time. It's a nice little place, very compact, with a small kitchen, a loft to sleep in, and nice big windows with a view into the garden. Our first act on arrival was to take a good solid nap, even though that is generally not recommended for dealing with jet lag.

And when I say the cottage is compact, I mean compact. The bathroom is a model of efficiency, because the toilet is in the shower:

There were many other ways for them to decide to arrange that bathroom, and they chose the weirdest one.

On Wednesday, we set off on a walking tour along the Keizersgracht, which is one of the ring canals around the center of the city. We were following a guide, so there were a few way points to see along the way, but the more interesting things were just the sights along the canal. Like these houses, which show some of the signs of the soil problems of building on a waterlogged river delta.

(I think it kind of looks like the middle ones are sinking.) (Which they are, but not quite that dramatically.)

We both liked this door knocker:

The canals are very pictureque, but I admit that I am curious at the utter lack of a water taxi system in the city. It seems so obvious as a use of the canals, and yet it simply does not exist.

Another sign of the subsidence in the soils: the curbstones are notched to keep them in line. Everywhere a line of stones forms an edge, they are notched together so that the stones don't slide out of place.

One of the delights of visiting Europe is checking out all the little vehicles. These three-wheeled trucks are used for deliveries and trades all over the city, often with a large man stuffed behind the wheel.

And something I think America in general does very poorly: an example of a city growing and changing over time. We have here houses from multiple centuries, including this one, alongside one another and not pretending to be something other than what they are. In America, we're so afraid of letting go of our little piece of history they we are willing to make a city full of fake versions of historical buildings. This is why our neighborhoods look contrived.

Then we arrived at the Central Station. Something new there: a bike parking garage by the water. And it was packed full. And the railings along the canals were all still packed with bikes, as well. This is the sort of thing that can only happen when you are dealing with a city with no off-street parking at all.

We next turned down into the Red-Light district to visit the Oude Kerk (Old Church). This church is literally surrounded by houses of prostitution, women in windows with the red lights on above them. It's sort of disconcerting.

But the inside is lovely. It's undergoing a renovation, but we were still able to see this plaque to Sweelinck, who was organist here in the 16th century, and composed a lot of organ music.

The church has two organs. This main one is behind the screen erected to keep people out of the construction zone. If that screen looks really nice, it's because they hired an artist to design it; the renovation process looks to take four or five years, so it was worth spending some money on a nice screen.

As you can see, the church's roof is wooden. This reduced the weight and has helped it stay up over time. Stone roofs in France often caved in, even with lots of buttressing. In the soft soils of Amsterdam, buttresses were just not possible.

This is the smaller organ, off to the side of the nave where two side chapels join the main space. It's much smaller and cuter than the main organ.

Then it was off to meet up with our friends at a book store. And a lengthy walk between various bars trying different beers as a lead-up to tomorrow's festival. We began the drinking at Wynand Fockink, a little tasting room for flavoured genever. And we ended the evening there, when jet lag kicked in.

# Posted by ayse on 10/24/08 at 2:15 AM | Comments (0)