Holidays. Bike. Brussels. Amsterdam.
Yes, I’m still alive! Contrary to what a more-than-a-month-long silence on the blog front might suggest. I’ve just been busy, doing things that take lots of time but aren’t interesting enough to blog about. Like exams. And work. And visiting friends in Höchstädt, which, despite being interesting per se, does not make for much interesting blogging.
But now I’ve finally done something worthy of a nice lengthy update. And to make sure I didn’t leave anything out, I even took notes as I was doing it. On the back of a postcard-sized advertisement for the 22e Foire Internationale du Livre Ancien (or, if you prefer, since Brussels is officialy bilingual, the 22ste Internationale Beurs van het Oude Boeks). For the tourists, it’s also written in English: the 22nd International Antiquarian Book Fair. This has its pros (since I speak neither French nor Dutch), and also its cons (since it doesn’t leave much space for my scrawled notes). Nevertheless, here goes.
First, a small disclaimer. Belgium doesn’t exist. Therefore, the two days I think I spent in Brussels, I actually spent in a special pod beneath EuroDisney, and the memories I’m about to relate aren’t actual real memories, but fake ones implanted by the New World Order to make me think I actually visited Belgium.
The Netherlands do exist. Despite many offers of substances intended to produce the contrary effect, my memories of Amsterdam are real.
I left Germany on the 7:30am commuter bus to Luxembourg on the 23rd. From there, a nice “Belgian” InterCity express train (fake, of course, as opposed to a real German InterCityExpress train) went to Brussels. Since I’ve done the Saarbrücken-Luxembourg trip a few times now, and since it’s almost entirely Autobahn, and since it was 7:30am, I slept through that bit. In Brussels I found my youth hostel, and then went for a bit of a wander, using “looking for lunch” as a suitable excuse to get nice and lost in the cobblestoned lanes and discover the city.
One of my first observations in Brussels is that Belgium seems to be at the economical end of the kissing-as-greeting scale. In Saarbrücken, Lorraine, and most of the Rheinland, the custom is two kisses – right cheek, then left cheek. Switzerland go the whole hog with three – right, left, right. In Brussels it’s just the single peck. (This is more important than it seems. One kiss too many, and suddenly you’re invading someone’s personal space, and it gets awkward. One kiss too few, and you’re being rude.)
Having found a nice cafe that happily sold me a Sandwich with fromage and jambon (or kaas and ham, if you prefer), and a witbier (or a biere blanc, if you prefer), and seen the Grand Place (or the Grote Markt, if you prefer), I decided to find the Mont d’Art (Kunstberg), since near that was the Muziekinstrumentenmuseum (Musée des instruments de musique). (er, Musical Instrument Museum.) This was rather an amazing collection of all sorts of instruments, from traditional folk instruments to modern “art music” instruments to mechanical instruments to electronic instruments. I saw all manner of bagpipes, jew’s harps, flutes, pianos, harpsichords, spinets, a glass harmonica, barrel organs, self-playing violins, pocket violins, Adolphe Sax’s Saxophone (and various other things he invented that didn’t catch on to the same extent), many “serpents”, a theremin, a Ondes Martenot, pianolas, and much more. Visitors were given headphones that played some music featuring the instrument you were currently looking at, wherever you were in the exhibition. Unfortunately the text was all in both Dutch and French but not English, so I had to struggle to either make out some of the French meaning, or convert Dutch sufficiently into German for it to make sense. After a while I gave up and just listened to the music.
That evening I patronised a small jazz cafe that I had discovered on my earlier wandering-the-small-lanes-getting-lost adventure. This bar was sort of the same size and setup as Bennets Lane in Melbourne, for those of my loyal readers who are familiar with the establishment. There I drank some other Belgian beers (of course) while listening to a small swing quartet. ‘Twas muchly pleasant.
Of course it goes without saying that in all this wandering your humble narrator never wandered past a waffle stand without stopping and eating one. Yum.
The following day I decided to address a deficiency in my appreciation of the Beer-Waffles-Chocolate Belgian trio, and so I made my way at 10am to the Grote Markt (Grand Place) to visit the Musée du Cacao et du Chocolat (Museum van cacao en chocolade). Here we were introduced to the process by which the ingredients of chocolate are extracted from the cocoa bean, the history of the discovery of chocolate and its introduction to Europe, the chocolate traditions in Europe, as well as a live demonstration of how pralines are made, an exhibition of busts carved out of solid chocolate and clothes and hats made from chocolate sheets, and an extensive collection of crockery for the serving of chocolate – a “chocolate service” in the sense of “tea service”.
Of course, a visit to the capital city of a monarchy necessitates a visit to the royal palace. As additional incentive, the guidebook I had dangled the carrot of an archaeological dig beneath the palace to expose the medieval castle and palace that had stood on the same place before the current palace. So I duly trudged up the hill to the hill and followed the red carpet (for the tourists) through the rooms on exhibition. After I had asked the waiter in the Parc de Bruxelles (Warandepark) “ou est le Ancien Palais” in my best broken French, I somehow managed to extract from his reply that he figured it was probably “sur le Place Royale”, but he didn’t know exactly where. (Amazing how much context can help.) And he also suggested I should ask one of the palace guards. So I thanked him, and feeling rather proud of my foreign-language abilities, tried my best “ou est” on the palace guard, who managed to completely burst my bubble with a long stream of French that I couldn’t decipher at all. Luckily he spoke almost perfect English and kindly pointed me in the right direction.
Following my underground explorations, I also visited the toy museum, and the comic book museum. The toy museum, although being packed with kindergarten classes, made for a rather pleasant change in that visitors were allowed to touch and play with many of the exhibits! And the comic book museum was very impressive, exhibiting the history of Belgian comics, the production of comic books in general, the flourishing of Belgian comics under Nazi occupation (during which of course American comics were unavailable), and the evolution into both animated comics and the various modern styles.
After dinner I caught the train out to the Atomium, since I had been advised by a friend that this was spectacular at night. This advice turned out to be rather misleading, since one can enter the Atomium and actually climb up into into the spheres, but only until 6pm; and although the newly-polished spheres reflected the setting sun rather beautifully, since the Atomium is more or less surrounded by parkland, once the sun has set there’s not much for them to reflect. Nevertheless, a rather cool structure, with an interesting history – it was built for the International Exhibition in 1958, and intended to be dismantled afterwards, but the Belgian people liked it so much that they left it up, and in fact most recently restored (IE, polished) it. Interestingly, it’s described everywhere as a “single molecule of an iron crystal”, which would send a certain high school chemistry teacher of mine into spasming fits, since iron does not form molecules! The term I think they’re looking for is a “unit cell”… but I guess that doesn’t sound as catchy in advertisements.
The following morning, I checked out of my nice Hostelling International hostel and caught the InterCity train to Amsterdam. At 2pm I arrived at my not-Hostelling International hostel in Amsterdam – dingy, dirty, ten bunk beds to a room, one small toilet, one small shower. Crawling with British backpackers, since (as a nice English guy in the Brussels hostel explained to me) Monday was the last bank holiday in England until Christmas. What better to do on your long weekend than go to Amsterdam and get stoned? Well, I guess.
Having arrived in Amsterdam, I noticed an advertisement at the hostel front desk for a free 3-hour walking tour, leaving the main station at 3pm. I promptly dumped my bags in the locker and joined this tour, which turned out to be the smartest thing I did all weekend – not only because it was a very nice, informative, entertaining tour (I can recommend it to anyone, and tentatively also their equivalents in Berlin and Munich), but also because I met a few other Aussie backpackers with whom I promptly exchanged phone numbers and promised to meet up again later that weekend.
After the tour, I decided to pass up the 20€ one-beer-and-one-tequila-at-each-pub pub crawl, and just went for a wander around town. This, unfortunately, didn’t leave me with a particularly positive impression of Amsterdam – in fact, the central district is not so much a city, more a theme park of sex and drugs for tourists. For good measure, I visited the “erotic museum”, which was rather a disappointment, but at least I tried somehow to engage with that side of Amsterdam. (On Monday morning I did consider that simply asking one of the “women” for her prices wouldn’t really have done any harm, and might have satisfied some curiosity, but by that point it was too late.) Of course, photos of the women is strictly banned, and the women give you a very stern evil eye if you even walk past them carrying a camera in view. Once the camera is in the bag, however, their attitude changes completely. Rather amusing. The official Guide to Amsterdam has a section written by the police, warning (among the usual things like pickpockets and don’t-fall-in-the-canals) that “if you visit one of the women, we would like to remind you that they are not always women”. Indeed. In fact I did see a few where I had my doubts… although according to our tour guide there is a “blue light” district alongside the red light district where women-that-are-not-women advertise themselves as such; I did not however encounter this district. One final remark on the women: every so often you see one of their little rooms empty, with the red and UV lights turned off, and a small sign on the glass or above the door saying “kammer verhuur” (“room for let”) which suggests to me that the people doing the best out of all this must be the owners of these rooms, who get to charge the women extraordinary amounts to rent the space, but don’t have to put their bodies on the line in quite the same way to earn the money.
On Saturday I decided I had seen about as much of that side of Amsterdam as I needed to, so I set out to find the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum. Having purchased tickets for these in advance at the tourist bureau, I waltzed right past the long ticket queues with a big grin on my face and was let in straight away. The Rijksmuseum unfortunately is currently being renovated, so only a small part of it was open to the public, but I’m not entirely certain I could have lasted three or four times as much museum as was still open, and I think that the exhibitions they had selected to show was somewhat distilled Rijksmuseum, the best without all the filler, so to speak. The Van Gogh Museum presented a huge collection of Van Gogh art, in chronological order, so one could see his initial progress (since he was self-taught), the effects of various influences on his art at different periods, and the progress of his mental illness until his suicide. Very interesting. The Van Gogh Museum also had a decent collection of lithographs and traditional Japanese art, both of which were large influences on Van Gogh.
My wandering to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh museum had taken me through some more pleasant parts of Amsterdam, so I was a little more positively disposed towards the town than I had been the previous night. I ate a rather late lunch in a park near the museums, and headed back to town to inspect some of the Uit Markt festival, the annual festival marking the official launching Amsterdam’s cultural season. The festival of free concerts, exhibitions and theatre had been opened the previous night, and would conclude with the Koniglijk Concertgebouw Orkest performing Mahler’s first Symphony (and thus the official opening of the cultural season). In a place near my hostel there was a stage featuring near-continuous jazz bands, and not too far from that was Het Bethanienklooster, with another stage (and one-hour queues), and a Sousterrain (cellar) containing a “jazz lounge”. In this context, “jazz lounge” consists of a bar, a dance floor, a DJ spinning groovy tunes, candelabras with candles, and bean bags.
Having established that my new friends from Perth (with funny Perth accents) were still “shagged out” from the previous night’s pub crawl and wanted to postpone seeing the Anne Frank Huis (and also any tentative jazz lounge-ing) until the following day, I thought I’d try my luck in the queue for the stage in the Bethanienklooster, where I got to chatting to a group of girls from Germany (Freiberg in fact, right near Crimmitschau where I was at the start of the month for a family gathering) who were enjoying their last real holidays before they had to get stuck into their Abitur. The band we ended up seeing after an hour of waiting was rather disappointing to say the least, and they turfed us out right afterwards so the people who had spent that hour waiting outside could get a turn, so the girls suggested they wanted to see something on the main stage at the Koniglijk Paleis (that is, the former town hall) and would I like to come. Well, I had no better plans, and considering I met them in the queue for a jazz band their tastes couldn’t be too awful, so I figured why not. Being half an hour early, we got to see probably a hundred thousand Dutch people in the square enjoying Sing-A-Long Musicals, where a hyperactive Master of Ceremonies presented one Dutch musicals star after another singing the Big Hits of musicals – Memory from Cats, Tomorrow from Annie, half of The Wiz, etc – of course, all in Dutch. With surtitles so you could sing along. In Dutch. This little exercise left me with severe trouble keeping a straight face (particularly as the surtitles finished “tomorrow’s only a day away” with “ander daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag” – although I might have remembered one or two “a”s too few). But finally the musicals stars finished the grand finale from The Wiz and all traipsed offstage, and the wild, arm-waving, loud-singing Dutch people transformed into nice orderly queueing people waiting their turn to leave, and we managed to find some decent seats. The band we had come to see turned out to be the Blue Man Group, who were very entertaining. After all that entertainment I wandered back to my hostel. Thus the first day of Amsterdam.
On the second day, I had planned a few small independent photography galleries, as well as the Pianola Museum, all of which had pressed brochures into my hand as I was wandering through the market that accompanied the UIT Markt. The two photography galleries were very cool; their somewhat postmodern, abstract focus was a nice balance to all the Rembrandt and Van Gogh I had seen the previous day. Also, finding the galleries took me through other nicer parts of Amsterdam, so that by now I wasn’t feeling at all negative towards the place, rather just a little amused at all the prostitutes, and the “coffeeshops” (ahem) and the blokes on the street who would approach you asking “cocaine? ecstasy?”. So I had lunch and then a coffee in a nice cafe on a tree-lined canal among 17th century canal houses, and wandered a bit to find the Pianola Museum. Unfortunately this mission ended in disaster: although the pianola museum advertises its opening times as Zondag 2pm-5pm, at 2:30pm on Sunday the doors were most definitely closed, the lights were off, and both ringing the doorbell and phoning the number on the pamphlet achieved nothing. So, rather dispirited, I decided to head back to the Uit Markt and at least enjoy that. On the way to cheer myself up a little I bought some souvenir handmade Edam from a cheese shop guarded by a lithe black cat. Most food shops and cafes in Amsterdam have a cat: they’re there to hunt the rats and mice that live in the damp cellars on account of the canals and the high water table (like most of the Netherlands, Amsterdam is below sea level).
My total lack of Dutch notwithstanding, I was drawn to the Amsterdam Marionettentheater who were offering De Toverfluit (the Magic Flute), since Mozart’s 250 years old and all (though you wouldn’t really know it in Amsterdam, since Rembrandt is 400 years old this year). Performances in the Uit Markt festival seemed to be limited to strictly 25 minutes, so we just got the first 25 minutes of de Toverfluit (along with the suggestion to return later in the year when we could pay to see the whole thing); although this was story-wise a little odd, it was still a very entertaining performance. After that I got in touch with the Perth friends again, and we decided to head down to the Anne Frank Huis. (Late in the afternoon, since the pre-booked-to-avoid-queues tickets were only valid after 5pm.) Seeing the house in which the Franks and another family hid for years was rather a moving experience, and it was very well presented: with videos of interviews with Otto Frank (the only one who survived the war) and various of his staff, photos of the original furnishings (Otto requested that it remained unfurnished after his death), Anne Frank’s original diaries (one diary and two school notebooks), et cetera. Quite a sobering experience. Of course, at the exit you could buy the Extra Special Edition Hardcover Only Available At The Anne Frank House Museum In Amsterdam Edition Of Anne Frank’s Diary for 45€. I didn’t.
Following this, we went back to the stage in front of the Paleis to see the Concertgebouw Orchestra play Mahler, where I was tapped on the shoulder with a “I thought it was you!” by none other than BA., who sends his greetings to everyone who is probably wondering why they haven’t heard from him for ages. He and his boyfriend went back home to Utrecht right after the concert, since he was recovering from illness, so my Perth friends and I went to a pub for a few drinks and a chat to wind down. The following morning I checked out of the hotel and caught my InterCityExpressInternational back home. (Home, where I am quite relieved to pay less than half as much for groceries and bread and basic things than I was paying in Amsterdam. Eek!)
In brief numbers:
Number of waffles eaten: uncountable
Number of comics seen: similarly uncountable
Number of languages inadequately spoken: 2
Number of chocolatiers spotted: approximately one per street corner
Number of Hercule Poirots spotted: none.
Number of musical instruments seen: several hundred
Number of countries visited: 3, not counting Germany (Luxembourg to Brussels via France. Not sure why.)
Number of museums: around ten (I’m not usually a museums kind of traveller, but they were too tempting!)
Photos, of course, as always, are here.
Two other pieces of news bear mentioning, before I finish this up and go to bed.
On the day before I left to go travelling, I bought myself a secondhand bike I had found through Findling (the local variety of Trading Post, if you like). Here it is, in all its glory:
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The other piece of news is that while I was away, my bed sprouted a new railing and a new ladder that is almost more stairs than ladder. Again, the illustration:
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Okay, I think that’s all for now… that took rather longer to write than I had expected! High time for bed, methinks. G’nite all!
