What Happens In Amsterdam...

Ah, Amsterdam! Because nothing says “family vacation” like a dildo shop next door to the hotel.

This weekend, my mom and I left the safety and rain of Nijmegen for the cultural treasures and rain of Amsterdam. I hate to admit it, but after ten months in the Netherlands, this was really my first time in Amsterdam proper.

A number of things surprised me about Amsterdam, but the most shocking was the number of people I saw wearing sweatpants.

You know: Amsterdam. City of canals and art and gays and ultra-progressive social policies like legalized prostitution and marijuana. And bleeding-edge fashion. Such as sweatpants. Regular, gray, straight-legged, American-style sweatpants.

We were also surprised by the sheer volume of artifacts just relating to the history of the city of Amsterdam. I acknowledge that the city is more than 400 years old, but seriously. There were a LOT of artifacts in a LOT of museums, all illustrating just three basic ideas:

• Guilds of men bearing crossbows policed the city and enjoyed having group portraits painted. Possibly more than they enjoyed actually firing their crossbows in defense of the city.
  
• Dutch trading companies made a tremendous amount of money building worldwide empires.
  
• The sanctioned flavor of Christianity changed every 50 years, but in the proud tradition of Dutch social tolerance, as long as you didn’t make a big fuss, you could pretty much worship however you wanted.
  

We visited many of Amsterdam’s signature museums, but we also hit some of its tiny specialty museums, of which there are also a shocking number.

Like the houseboat museum, which is a charming, houseboat-sized showcase of... (I know the suspense here is killing you) a houseboat.

We skipped the Bags & Purses Museum, as well as the Torture Museum. It’s debatable which of those would have actually been more torturous to visit.

Did I mention that it rained day and night?

I have to admit that my biggest concern about taking my mother to Amsterdam was not the pot or the Red Light District (though we partook of neither, in case you’re wondering).

It was the bicycles. She’s generally pretty alert, but if you haven’t spent the last ten months training yourself not to step into the path of speeding bicycles, the intermingling of bikes and pedestrian on the busy streets can be a little dicey.

Fortunately, the only true threat to my mother’s health and well being came when she dumped a sachet full of salt into her morning coffee. Needless to say, this was not a gentle introduction to the otherwise delightful Dutch buffet breakfast.

Me: Were those packets next to the coffee?

Her: No, but they were right next to the packets of brown sugar!

Me: Um...I think those were mustard seeds.

My mother, who has a long and storied culinary history of swapping salt in for sugar, tried to invoke the Vegas clause with respect to the salt incident.

But because what she actually proclaimed was, “What stays in Amsterdam, happens in Amsterdam.” said clause was null and void.

Sorry, Mom.

After Amsterdam, we ignored wretched weather forecasts (one of which actually used the term “wretched”) and took a train across the Flemish countryside to Bruges, a small Belgian city near the coast.

Lots of people had recommended Bruges as THE day trip to take from Nijmegen, but I was a little skeptical. How great could some obscure little Belgian city be?

As it turns out: really great!

In short, Bruges is a lovely, beautifully preserved medeival city with a strong but not overly commercialized tourist infrastructure. Plus: canals, museums, churches, restaurants, chocolate shops, cafes, and miles and miles of twisty little streets with gorgeous old (really old) houses. And a fully operational nunnery.

It’s a lot more interesting than it sounds.

I realize that this doesn’t really help my argument, but some people even call it “The Venice of Belgium.”

There’s not much going on in Bruges other than tourism associated with the places I mentioned above. Fortunately, we only experienced a few Disneyland moments.

Like one of the churches’ infinite-loop PA-system announcement inviting you in 7 languages to lay hands on its holy relic and thanking you in advance for your donation.

Or the bell towers, which really lay on the charm by chiming every 15 minutes. This is great, except that the first carillon tune we heard was “Stars & Stripes Forever.”

Nothing says “Medeival Capital of Europe” like John Philip Sousa!

Or the street musicians, who added lots of old world atmophere except when playing an accordian rendition of “My Way.”

The weather wasn’t wretched, after all, except for a driving rain that started the minute we stepped off the train.

After that, the clouds parted and coughed up some nice light for the 700 photos we took.

No trip to Belgium (or the Netherlands, for that matter) is complete without an order of friets.

Though I took pity on my mother and didn’t make her eat them with a big, delicious glop of mayonaise on top.

The Elusive Pontje

I'm embarassed to say that it's taken me ten months to learn the first commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not underestimate the impeding power of water.  

John recently escaped the pressing gloom of fall in Nijmegen with a strategically planned work trip to Argentina.  By work trip, I mean two weeks of spending all day out on the sunny pampas and all evening eating Argentinean steak and drinking Malbec.  

I'm thinking that I should change the focus of my job search to pursue something with lots of "work trips." 

Luckily for me, the planets and the vagaries of the airline industry aligned in such a way that my mother was able to come and visit during the same two weeks.  

After arriving early on Saturday morning, she's been gamely battling jet lag, joining me on my circuit of favorite Dutch thrift stores, and surrendering to the roulette wheel of my cooking skills.  

Fortunately for me, I have a mother who is perfectly happy knitting while I mutter to myself and try to write cover letters and blog entries.  So: so far, so good! 

Today brought an unexpected day of sunshine, so we set off on foot toward the nature reserve just south of where we live.  We walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.  And then we walked some more.  

We logged most of our kilometers after deciding to strike out for Persingen, whose claim to fame is that with 89 residents, it's the smallest town in the Netherlands.   

Let me pause here to point out that until you've seen the smallest town in the Netherlands, you really haven't lived. 

By "deciding to strike out for Persingen", what I mean is that I said something like, "why don't we head over to Persingen?" in a tone of voice that suggested that a) I knew how to get there, and b) walking there would be a reasonable undertaking for the afternoon. 

In one sense, it's easy to navigate in the Netherlands because everything is so flat and you can see exactly where you want to go.  For example, the tiny red church in the middle of Persingen: 

In another sense, it's impossible to navigate because you can see where you want to go, but there are all of these goddamned — ahem, I mean lovely! — moats and canals and rivers and streams between you and your destination:

(And even when there aren't sanctioned bodies of water, chances are good that you will get stuck in swampy, marshy fields if you try to strike out on your own.)

First, we spent a fair amount of time walking away from Persingen in order to cross two large, water-filled ditches in order to head back toward Persingen.  

We then found what seemed to be a direct path across the polder to Persingen, only to be stopped by the second commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not pretend that thou doesn't understand what verboden toegang means.    

In the interest of not angering Dutch farmers (or their livestock), we set off in the other direction to try to find another, less forbidden path.  

Now we were walking away from Persingen again, with no immediate options for a more direct route.  But then we started to see hand-lettered signs directing us to a "Pontje".  I had absolutely no idea what a pontje was, but it sounded a lot more fun and promising than verboden toegang, so we went with it.  

We hiked along a winding, muddy path next along a marshy pond (could that be the pontje?), past a guy picking berries (could that be the pontje?) and then over a small wooden bridge (could that be the pontje?).  But the path kept going and going until lo and behold, shining in the afternoon sunlight, stood The Pontje: a small ferry to get us across the Meertje and on our way back toward Persingen.  

By ferry, I mean a metal boat shaped like a cage, with a hand-operated crank that one can use to coax the hulking contraption along its cable.  

Verboden toegang notwithstanding, I really do love the Dutch.  

The only catch was this: after our triumphant (and necessarily brief) tour of Persingen, we headed west along the Meertje and back toward Nijmegen, trying to outrun some ominous fog bearing down on us from the east.  

But now we were on the wrong side of the Meertje with no pontje in sight.  So we walked and walked and walked until we returned to civilization. 

And by civilization, I mean the closest bridge.