We have another entry which is sort of outside the blog’s raison d’etre, a little travelogue about a recent trip I took to Amsterdam, Tilburg, and Copenhangen. It was fun to write about, so I did so. With that I present “A Cranky Travelogue, Part I : Amsterdam”. There’s a brief “what I am reading” note at the end.
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“Can I help you?” asks the waitress at the coffee shop, and I wonder how she knows to speak to me in English. Our plane had landed an hour or so ago and after dropping off our bags, we went in search of coffee, and picked the first place we found, a street over next to a canal and packed with tourists. My wife was taking care of something, so I was sent ahead to secure a spot and get a coffee.
“Two coffees, please” I respond, still curious as to how she knew I wasn’t Dutch. But then I take a look around and it’s obvious. The Dutch are very tall, and all look like they have been raised on a diet of the purest dairy products, and I look like a story that they use to warn children about the fate of not following said diet. “Children, drink your milk, or you will turn into a cave troll,” and they then show a picture of me, the Cave Troll, with a wild beard, hair that is already wind blown despite this being a nice, sunny day (one of two we will experience the entire trip). My wife joins me and the waitress returns with two thimbles of coffee. My entire time in The Netherlands and Denmark is plagued by not knowing what coffee to order. I’m certain that if I knew the correct phrase, I would be brought a big old mug of steaming joe, but I keep getting either Americanos or these little things, which always come with a cookie or a small square of chocolate. They are tasty, but tiny, and part of what I want out of my morning coffee is a volume of liquid, and I’m not getting it. We order two more.
I notice a couple of other things right away. Amsterdam is oddly quiet, even when its busy. Our hotel room is next to a local’s bar, which in New Orleans (where I live) would be akin to living next to an active helipad which also contained a music venue, here we barely notice it. It’s also the only place where the bartender and some of the patrons attempt to speak to me in Dutch, switching to English when he realizes I am staring at him like a Cave Troll. The other is that the Dutch have some sort of ongoing war against sidewalks, particularly in Amsterdam, where anything that slows down for too long with ends up with 5000 bikes chained to it. The sidewalks, already narrow, frequently are used as a combination of bike storage and planter. They look nice, in their own way, but are impractical for actual use. And, for the love of all that is good and holy, do not walk in the bike lane. Amsterdam has replaced asshole car culture with asshole bike culture, and no one will give a fuck if they run you over on the way to wherever it is they are going. Ironically, it’s easier to walk in the place where cars would go, but do not.
I also notice that there are a lot of businesses I do not understand. They look like shops of some kind or other, but I cannot determine what’s being sold in them, and they all have oddly nondescriptive names like “Lizard’s Teat”. There’s a lot of things in English, which makes sense, as Amsterdam is a tourist town for sure, and I am guessing that “Lizard’s Teat” sells something that tourists are after, but I’m uncertain as to what it is.
Dutch, to my hearing impaired ears, sounds enough like English, especially in passing, that I will begin to pay attention to it, and then realize my attempt at eavesdropping is in vain. It’s a constant source of personal amusement to me as we wander around, eat Stroopwafels, take a nap, go on a food tour where we try herring (excellent), fries with mayo (which is something The Netherlands takes a weird amount of pride in. They’re fine, but calm down), and cheese, which I assume is part of the secret diet they are all eating to tower above the Cave Trolls. The first night ends with an excellent dinner at a place called “Balthazars Keuken”, and I feel like a total slob when I use my fingers to pick up the green pea, ricotta and jalapeño tartlet and our neighbors at the next table use a knife and fork, and again, it’s no mystery when the waitress addresses me in English.
I’ve heard some of my fellow countrymen complain about service in The Netherlands, and I am here to tell them they are wrong. Everyone was polite, courteous, and helpful; what they are not is effusive. Nobody is working for tips, so nobody is obliged to try and be your friend; they’re here to serve you a meal and ensure that your experience eating said meal is a good one. They are not here to listen to you ramble on about whatever. Frankly, it rules, and while I am not one of those “Europe gets everything right” people, I am squarely in their corner on the “pay your servers an actual living wage” thing. It’s amazing, and it was refreshing to just occasionally give someone a little change because you genuinely thought they did something special as opposed the system we have here which results in a kind of irritating tax on food. Just pay people, it’s fine. Charge me more to eat. It’s fine.
And hey, we had some great conversations with both servers and non-servers. The people at The Flying Dutchman, who made me a better Vieux Carré than I’ve had at some spots in New Orleans, talked about a number of things, particularly cocktail culture, which they love, and in general is not a thing in The Netherlands. The typical Dutch drink is a beer and a shot of Geneiver, which is something that’s often called a precursor to gin, but is more accurately an unaged whisky. They pour it into a tiny glass so that there’s a meniscus on top, and you lean down and take the first sip without raising the glass, called “headbutting”. I love this sort of thing, and we had a blast trying different Genevers, which vary between kind of hot and rye like to dangerously easy to headbutt. There was a great place with the it-rolls-right-off-my-English-only-tounge name of “Proeflokaal A.v. Wees” which did beer/Genever pairings that really helped me understand it all, and fed me snacks while I was doing it.
Less helpful was the “Bols Genever Experience” which was basically a self guided ad followed by a “free” drink (I mean you pay to get in, so calling it free is a stretch) during which the coolest thing was seeing a full collection of those little porcelain houses that you get if you fly first class on KLM. Bols, who repeat the name “Bols” roughly 50,000 times during the tour, were also trying way too hard to make Genever a thing, and at the end you don’t really taste Genever, you taste Genever in a cocktail, which, ok, it certainly can be used in one, and the one I had wasn’t bad, but I think if you’re at the Genever factory (or what passes for it, in this case— I never learned the location of the actual distillery, I just know it was in the place that now hosts “the experience”) it might be nice to taste some Genever as well. I guess the other thing I learned was the origin of the idiomatic expression “Dutch Courage”, which I last heard as a song title in 1988. Yeesh.
My other big tourist disappointment was the canal tour. I’m sure there are good canal tours, and my wife, who is the person who plans all things, said this one had gotten good reviews, but it was… odd. There was an audio guide which was hilariously off by like half a block each time– “do you see the house on the left?” it would ask, when we were under a bridge and could in fact, not see the house on the left, leaving the captain of the boat to point out the attraction you had heard about a little bit ago. The boat was crowded and smelled weird, and I was grateful when someone cracked a window, despite the rain. I think we would have done better with one of the smaller things where you bring a picnic. On the plus side, it wasn’t like it took a lot of time, and to be fair, you do see a lot of canals. But you see a lot of canals walking.
And if you’re doing it right, you’re doing a lot of walking. Nearly everything we did, barring one fancy meal, was done on foot. We walked to the modern art museum, which was doing a lovely Maria Abramović retrospective, featuring a performance by “someone trained in the Abramović method”, which means I got to see someone sit on a profoundly uncomfortable looking bike seat suspended from a wall. Abramović is one of those artists that gets dismissed a lot for the nature of her work, and this put a lot of it in perspective, and showed off some of her more conventional visual art, which I found delightful. We walked to the ferry to go to the Straat museum, one of my favorites, featuring gigantic canvases painted by street artists, and we walked in and out of small pubs for lunches.
Amsterdam is a beautiful place, and I am glad to have been in it for the time I was. There are a million little stories, even in the weirdest places, like a wizard of oz themed burger bar, which was packed with Americans taking pictures of wizard of oz standees that had been affixed to the walls. Or the place that served really, really good leeks. Or watching one of my fellow countrymen being profoundly confused by the lettering on bathroom doors (D and H) and eventually breaking down and asking the waiter which one to use.
And when it came to an end, I boarded a train and headed onwards to Tilburg, which I will write about soon.
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During the trip, I read parts one and two of “The Indian Lake Trilogy” by Stephen Graham Jones and hoo boy these are excellent. Graham Jones is one of the better writers working in ‘genre fiction’ today, and a damn fine writer, period. He handles ambiguity, shifting understanding and perspective, and unreliable narration with aplomb, and the books reward a kind of close reading you usually can cast aside with horror. The canyon deep level of slasher lore is a big bonus for people like me, who have seen way too many of them. I’m wrapping up part three now, and I recommend them strongly.
The Lithole 