September 12
Lisa's plane touches down just after 8 in the morning, and the plan is for her to take the train to Centraal Station and meet me at our hotel in Jordaan, after I check out of where I've been staying and walk over. I get her SMS that she's landed and I get my stuff together and start walking. Probably I should have taken a cab. My bag is heavy, even on rollers, and I'm hot and sweaty and more than a little irritated by the time I arrive. But I make it, we check in, she cleans up and has a little bit of rest. We're renting a room from some guys who run an antique store and have several rooms around Jordaan. Our space is a downstairs room near the corner of Singelgracht and a cute little canal called Blauwburgwal. A private entrance, a tiny patio, a little fridge. Perfect.
Next, food, though it is halfway between lunch and dinnertime. I had some Jordaan restaurant recommendations from Samir, so I walk us over to Cafe t' Small, a few blocks from our room. There is a floating platform on the canal edge, across the cobbled path from the restaurant, and we settle in. They serve "toasti" sandwiches and salads, and Lisa orders a salad with goat cheese and toasted nuts. When it comes, we are surprised at how good it is. The food and time to talk help us both to feel much better.
Today is mostly about Lisa getting her bearings and adjusting to the time zone. We walk around Jordaan a bit, locate a couple of our haunts from our last visit. We find more graffiti by the same artist whose words I found outside of Marius. We go to the grocery store, get some water and something for breakfast. We wander through the shopping area back in the middle of Centrum.
We've planned to meet up with Samir and his family for dinner, and we meet them in Spui (pronounced "spow" which I have the hardest time remembering) to eat at the Indonesian restaurant that was originally recommended for my first night in Amsterdam, but was pooh-poohed by the concierge at my hotel. I want to try it anyway. It is called Kantjiel an de Tiger (The Antelope and the Tiger). It is larger, more modern and less Indonesian-looking, and the service is faster and more casual. The food is actually quite good, though, and the faster service is good for little Reyhan, who isn't so interested in sitting still for long.
Lisa's exhausted after dinner, and we go to bed early, but I've adjusted to the time already and have been in the habit of staying out late. I lay in bed for hours and read, finishing my book that deals with the sad consequences of endless longings, and then cry myself to sleep in the early hours of the morning. I'm such a sap.
September 13
A slow start this morning, after my late night. Also, the pillow on the bed is down and musty, and I wake with a full-on allergy attack. We want to go to Haarlem today to hear the old pipe organ in the Grote Kirk, and finally motivate out of the room around noon. We visited the Grote Kirk on the first day of our first trip to Amsterdam - our first trip to Europe ever - 4 years ago. It is a beautiful place. Haarlem is only about 15 minutes by train from Amsterdam, and the trains run often, so it is an easy enough hop. I remembered there being really cute little garden areas between the train station and the church, and I want to take pictures this time. I am so much more skilled with my camera now than I was then, and I'm excited to photograph the place differently than I did before. But although we wander in a zig zag pattern, we can't find the pretty little alleys I remember from before.
Can't miss the church, though, and we enter just as the organist is starting a piece of Beethoven that I recognize. We sit and listen, wander and explore. Although the organ is beautiful, and really is huge, the church is equally expansive, and the notes seem to get lost in the rafters. I want the music to feel like a thunderstorm, but it doesn't. Beautiful, but not overwhelming. Is this the difference between the Calvin and the Catholic experience? My impression of Italian and French churches, even the little ones, is that they are the home of GOD, and don't you dare forget it. This is more like a place god visits, on polite invitation, but it is much more human-centric.
This church is plain, compared to those Latin-infused churches. Even the stained glass is fairly plain. I do love the austerity of this church, the beauty in the lines of the arches and the geometry of the roof.
And yet, if you look close enough, you can still see the storytelling in the carving and the decorations, intented to teach religion and morality to the illiterate masses. Just not quite as overtly as you might find at Notre Dame or St. Peter's.
In the back of the church there are a series of paintings on display - illustrations of psalms done in a slightly abstracted style that draws me in. I can't tell if they are oil paint or encuastic, or a mixture, and I spend a long time studying them. Thy are brightly colored, an incongruous contrast from the simplicy of the rest of the building.
When we finally emerge from the church the sky is darkening with clouds, which makes for some moody photographic opportunities. We've missed lunch, but it isn't dinner time yet, so we find some frites and eat in the square in the shadow of this big church and people-watch before heading back to the train and Amsterdam. Now that my photographer's eye is on, I find that even the train station is beautiful.
When we get back to town, I drop Lisa at a coffeeshop in Jordaan so I can explore the neighborhood in the beautiful evening light.
Once the light is used up, I introduce Lisa to Wynand Fockinck, and she's charmed, as I was. We're killing time now, waiting out the early dinner hour so we can get a later table. We wander through Dam Square and down Kalverstraat, people watching. In Dam Square at twilight, a rapper with a boombox for backbeat is
accompanied by someone playing a doumbek drum that echoes out across
the square and off the walls of the Palaise. We stop to listen and
watch another street performer, a woman with a silver hula hoop,
encorporate their music into a sinuous line of glittering light that
travels up and down the movement of her body.
We arrive at an Italian place on Spuistraat at 9pm that I'd heard about from a friend, and put our names in for a table. The place is so small we can see every table from the street where we wait, but no one is leaving. Finally, we're seated about 9:40, along with some other folks who walked in off the street right behind us with no wait. Next time we'll know: late dinner shift is 9:30, not 9. The food is good but not spectacular, and the group at the table next to us is chain smoking and my allergies are still lingering. We reach a point where we realize we can't really taste the food any more and get anxious to leave, but it is hard to get the check in a Dutch restaurant. I feel grateful that I live in California, where smoking is not allowed in restaruants at all. There is less smoke here than I remember from our first visit, but still far more than I'm used to, and tonight it feels overwhelming and gross. Even my hair smells bad, and I'm grateful that it is too short to actually be in my face.
Today is meriko's birthday, and we text back and forth to settle on a plan to meet at a bar in Jordaan after she returns from her dinner at De Kas. None of the four of us have the actual address, just the name and the street (De Kat en de Wijngaert on Lindengracht), so it is a bit of an adventure to find the place, but we finally do, and toast her with a glass of the good Dutch beer I'm growing fond of just before the bar shuts for the night. We all head home to our respective rooms. No late reading for me tonight - I'm exhausted.
Sept 14
Today the first order of business is laundry. I've been travelling long enough now that I'm out of clean clothes and even the ones that don't really need a wash still smell like smoke. We find a laundry a few blocks over and get there early enough to do a load before we have to get to De Kas for our lunch reservation that meriko was kind enough to make for us when she was there the day before. Doing laundry in a foreign country is always a bit of an adventure in translation of odd English, even if you are lucky enough to find signs printed in English. Luckily the proprietess is friendly and willing to show us what to do. We discover an excellent bakery right across the street and sit in the sun front of the laundry with fresh sausage and spinach/cheese rolls for our breakfast while our clothes get clean.
After dropping our clothes back at the room, we walk up to the train station to catch a taxi out to De Kas. We've been to this restaurant once before, on our last trip. That time, we went for dinner, and my youngest sister Deborah was with us. It was one of those amazing meals that comes up in conversation pretty regularly. "Remember that ___ we ate at De Kas? That was so good," whenever we have some inferior version of that same ingredient at home. It is really cool this time to be there in daylight. The restaurant is built into a huge greenhouse, and set in the middle of an open park area. All windows, filled with pretty views. The dining room is large, and although there are a good number of other diners, we are seated in a corner away from the larger groups. The table settings are simple and elegantly pretty.
The food this time is amazing as well, starting with possibly the best olives I've ever tasted, and continuing through veal tartare (something I'd only eat in Europe), roasted beets with lobster tail, place fish served over a simple roasted vegetable mix with mashed potatos that Lisa swears she could eat at every meal for the rest of her life. We have the cheese course, skip dessert, but the coffee comes with sweets, so we aren't really missing anything. Even these are spectacular - lavender merengues, fresh fruit gelles, and somthing with lemon curd and almonds that halfway between marzipan and a lemon tart. Simple food, exquisitely prepared. Perfection. We eat for two and a half ours, then wander through the greenhouse to smell the variety of basils before we head out to our waiting taxi.
We ask the driver to take us to the Botanical Garden, which is next to the Jewish Quarter where I want to walk. The sky is starting to threaten rain, though none was forcast today, and while we stand outside the Garden trying to decide if we want to go in or save this on our next trip, the rain arrives. I'm game to tough it out, but after walking through the Jewish Quarter and back across the Amstel to centrum, it is raining hard and Lisa is skeptical of my standing under-the-eaves trick, so she talks me into ducking in to a coffee shop to wait it out. We're not the only ones with this idea, and it is a damp but friendly place to hang out for a while. The barkeep jokes that you get every season every day in Amsterdam, and I have to agree. When the rain eases, we head up to Kalverstraat, where I want to pick up a pair of shoes I've been eyeing for days. For *months* I've been looking for a pair of brown pumps for work, and not finding anything I like. My first day here, I found three pairs in the same shop window, and I'm determined not to go home without one of them. Today, mission acomplished.
But it is raining again, so we head for Cafe Luna, an adorable little place I first read about on the Blop [p] blog (I love her drawings!). I'm completely enamored of their stripey walls, and the food and coffee is excellent as well. A very nice place to sit out part of a rainy afternoon.
We stopped for groceries on the way back to our room, both for a light dinner and to make a picnic for tomorrow. We're planning to rent some bikes and take the ferry across to Amsterdam Noord to ride in the countryside, something we've wanted to do here since our first visit. Despite the rain today, it is supposed to be sunny and nice tomorrow, so we have our fingers crossed.
After returning to the room and eating, we walk down to what has become our neighborhood coffeeshop to sit and play cribbage until we are ready for bed. I spent a while trying to draw some canal houses from a photo, but got frustrated with my rendition. I had a fantasy of spending lots of time sitting and drawing on this trip, but that hasn't really panned out. Partly because there aren't a lot of really good places to sit and also have a good view, but also because we've been on the gogogo, and I have to be in a certain calm headspace to get into a drawing. Oh, well. There will be other trips.
Sept 15
Today is bike day. First we stop by the antique shop to settle up for our room. I've also lost track of what day it is (vacation mission accomplished), so I confirm it is really Saturday with the nice guy we're renting from, and we have two days before checking out and needing to show up for our flight home. The antique store guy has been moving in to the flat above us over the last few days, so we've seen (and heard) him coming and going. There is a large statue of a saint in the front room of his new flat, and we've been watching passers-by stop to point at it from our vantage point of our window, below his. St. Nickelaus, he says. We had guessed St. Patrick, since he's dressed in green, but St. Nickelaus makes more sense for Holland. Though it isn't close to Christmas, and would you really want to have a life-size saint in your dining room all the time? Odd.
We go to Frederic's to rent bikes - 10 Euros each for 24 hours, two locks that are demonstrated for us, and off we go. My bike is green, "For Scotland!" the bike guy says. He sounds like he's from Scotland. The antique store guy is from Portugal. Sometimes it seems like hardly anyone here is actually Dutch.
We have packed our picnic lunch, and swing by that good bakery again to get some breakfast to discover the square is swarming with people for the Saturday market. I wish we'd known, as it looks interesting, but we're finding the crowd hard to navigate with bikes that we aren't used to yet, and we do want to get going on our ride. Lots of folks are leaving the market with enormous bouquets of flowers, and I marvel at how they balance their bundles and packages on their bikes. My penchant for extravagant flowers would find me in good company here.
We've read that there are two free ferries across to Amsterdam Noord that leave from behind Centraal Station, but when we get to the ferry docks, there are 5 or 6 ferries to choose from, and all the signs are in Dutch. We eventually deduce which one is the right one, and push our bikes on. The crossing only takes a couple of minutes, and it is a bit of mayhem to unload on the other side. Pedestrians, scooters, motorcycles, and a small car are all sharing the same deck, and no one is directing traffic. Somehow it all works out, and we're off. We don't have a map, but Lisa has an idea where she wants to go - toward Edam - and as we ride we start to realize how to read the signs on the bike path. It is actually pretty well marked, so I start to relax about whether we are going to be able to find our way back, and just enjoy the ride.
We've left the city behind on the other side of the Ij, and once we ride past the edge of the shipyard near the ferry, we are definitely in rural Holland. And it is flat. Really flat. No mountains to be see on any horizon, which is really weird for this California girl. It does make the bike riding easy, though. We ride along a pretty, wide canal for a long way, admiring houseboats and cows. We see a few other riders, but mostly we have the place to ourselves, and it is incredibly quiet and peaceful.
It is well past lunchtime when we decide to stop to eat in the village of Broek en Waterland, and ride a circle around the ancient church looking for a good picnic spot. The church bells start pealing in celebration of a wedding and we see the groomsmen in a boat heading around the back of the church, on their way to the party. Eventually we find a bench facing out to a wide spot in the canal, where an older couple is also enjoying their repast. It is nice to watch the boats come and go and I'm reminded of canal traffic in Venice. This waterway is a well-used thoroughfare, as much as the bike path we've been riding on.
After being off the bikes for a while, we have to talk ourselves back in to getting on them again, as the hard seats and cobblestones are starting to cause tender spots on our backsides. But Lisa's determined, and I'm game, so we continue on.
We ride as far as ****, which is a very pretty little village, with shaded canals , quiet cobbled streets, and a large and crumbling old church, where they seem to be having some kind of modern art exhibition. I wander around taking pictures of the church while Lisa looks for an open restaurant where she can use the bathroom.
We find a big directory sign near the church with a map and realize that we've ridden almost 9 miles from the ferry docks, and Edam is another 4-5 miles away. I'm feeling tired and bruised already, so we decide to turn back and retrace our route back toward Amsterdam.
The light here in the afternoon is magical. The canal is so still, and the light is so pretty, and I make Lisa stop over and over to let me take pictures, though only a couple of the ones I take really capture the serenity of the place.
The bike path goes on and on - we really did ride a long way - and I'm exhausted by the time we get back to Broek en Waterland, so we stop for a cup of coffee and a rest off the bikeseats. Coffee is often served with a small cookie, often gingerbread, a custom I've quickly grown to appreciate. Usually the cookies are individually wrapped pre-packaged things, though quite good, but this little cafe serves handmade gingerbread cookies that are exquisite. While Lisa lounges, I stand on the corner and draw a pretty house in my journal. Finally, a little bit of on-site drawing! Our waitress overhears us talking about the remaining ride back to the ferry, which we are assuring each other is very short. She says it takes her 45 minutes on her morning commute each day along the same path. Damn. Our level of bike-seat discomfort is becoming comical, and we spend the rest of the ride laughing (and wincing) and trying to find the most comfortable perch. Even my hands are bruised now, as I've been shifting my weight forward off my tailbone for miles. I'd written in my journal when we stopped for lunch that I was going to be sore tomorrow, but I'm sore now. I'm not going to be able to walk tomorrow. Bike riding is good exercise. I really should do it more often.
Finally we arrive back at the docks and ride the ferry across (we're pros now, the crowd of bikes exiting the ferry doesn't faze us), and return to our room to rest. Although it seems like we've been riding all day, it isn't actually that late. We have missed Frederic's closing hour, though, so we lock the bikes up securily on our tiny patio and cross our fingers that they won't get stolen overnight. We're probably overly cautious, but I've heard so much about bikes getting stolen here that I'm paranoid. We guzzle water and take some Advil (traveller's best friend - I never travel without it), and Lisa heads out to do a little souvenier shopping and I collapse on the bed with a book.
The rest does me good, and I'm ready to find some dinner by the time Lisa gets back. Actually, I'm *starving* after so much exercise and only a fairly light breakfast and lunch. We wander until we find Cafe de Reigel, where Samir swears he had eaten the best mussels in his life, but it is Saturday night and they are packed. We can't even get a server's attention to ask about the wait. We decide to go back to one of the restaurants I was familiar with along Rozengracht, and try the tapas place first, since Lisa hasn't had tapas here yet. But they are *jammed* with people, so we wind up at the Indonesian place again, where I'd eaten my first meal here. The service is a little faster this time, as it is later in the evening and they are motivated to get us through the meal and out so they can go home. The food here is really quite good, but the chicken soup is phenomenal. I need to find a recipe for Indonesian chicken soup when I get home. Light and lemony with just the right amount of noodles to balance the broth. There is no carousing for us tonight, as we're half asleep by the time we leave the restaurant. We walk home and collapse.
Sept 16
Today is our last full day and I'm determined to take a bunch of pictures. I'm glad that I've been experiencing, and not hiding behind my lens, but I find this place so pretty and I want to try to capture some of it.
I can tell the weather is going to be gorgeous, so we make a plan to walk all the way down to the museumplein so I can explore the sculpture garden at the Rijksmuseum. But first we have to return the bikes. We're really sore, though the advil and a good night's rest has helped somewhat. I hope that walking today will also help loosen up our stiff muscles. We stop by our now-favorite bakery on the way to the bike shop, but they are closed! Drat! There's a small Albert Hein nearby where we find an alternate breakfast, and stand on the sidewalk to eat it, while we watch the Sunday morning neighborhood foot traffic. After dropping the bikes, we consult the map and head off across town toward the Rijks.
It is a pretty long walk, it turns out, and the Museumplein area is swarming with tourists. I haven't been here since our first trip, and I'd forgotten how busy and plastic this area is. I've gotten used to the quiet, pretty Jordaan neighborhoods, and the sounds of Dutch, not tourist, voices. I marvel at the idea that many tourists only ever see this part of Amsterdam, and never see the parts I've grown to love out on the edges, away from the tourists centers.
By the time we finally locate the Rijksmuseum, our light breakfast is long since used up, and we backtrack for lunch at the Wagamama nearby. We first found Wagamama in London, when we were there in January, where you can't throw a stone without hitting one. It is a vaguely Japanese noodle house, designed for quick, simple meals. Sort of the antithesis of Dutch food culture, but perfect for the middle of our day today. And the food it healthy and tasty. I notice they have a cookbook for sale, but I'm already worried about getting everything back in my suitcase tonight, so I decide to skip it and look for it online when I get home.
Refreshed, we return to the Rijks, only to discover that half of the sculpture garden is locked up tight for the weekend. I'm sure my tourbook would have told me this, but I forgot to look. The part that is open is nice, if small, and we walk around the exterior of the huge Rijks building, most of which has been closed for renovations for years. Someday I'll come to Amsterdam and this museum will be open, but for each of my three trips so far, only one wing has been open to visitors. But is a gorgeous building, even in its state of mid-repair.
We wander our way back up toward Muntplein, stopping for a while to watch some guys moving furniture by rope and pulley up into an apartment on the fourth floor. They really do use those hooks on the fronts of buildings for this purpose!
As we walk through centrum, I carry the bittersweet sense of being about to leave a place I love and not knowing when I'm going to see it again. I catalog the things I'll miss as we walk: this view, the familiarity of that intersection, the way the buildings lean on each other and seem to hold each other up, the harsh music of Dutch being spoken around me, the arc of this bridge, the street performers in this square, this bar.
We return to Wynand Fockinck for our evening apertif, and because we are in no particular hurry, we sit a while in the alley and talk to the regulars. One works in the GPS industry, and travels to the Bay Area often - he visits our home as we visit his. We have another round as the sun angles low, then decide to walk over to Cafe de Jaren, so I can have another bowl of the tomato soup I've been craving since I had it last week before Lisa arrived.
It is a pretty walk through the grounds of a university, and not far, though me stopping to take pictures every few feet slows us down a bit. The cafe serves a more formal dinner in the evening, and we walk through the dining room to the back patio in search of a more casual meal. The patio is on a corner where two canals meet, overlooking a small pedestrian draw bridge in one direction and a larger road bridge the other way. We order our soup, cheese and olives, Kreik for me, mint tea for Lisa, and it would be entirely pleasant if not for the young woman chain smoking at the next table and the slight breeze blowing her smoke directly into our faces. My irritation with her smoke in my food makes me a bit homesick for California's no-smoking laws, and reminds me that home is good, and not everything about "away" is better than home. Just different. I realize that I'm starting to look forward to being at home. I miss cooking my own food, sleeping in my own bed, getting my clothes out of the closet and not a suitcase. I miss the cats. I miss my studio.
After dinner, we walk back to the hotel to pack up our cases for our morning departure (though I can't resist taking more pictures of crooked buildings along the way). We end the evening back at Amnesia, over cribbage and tea, and the last gingerbread cookie of the trip.
In the morning, the alarm is set for "early" as we have to walk to the train station to catch a cab to the airport, and our flight is scheduled for 11AM. It is raining again. We're pretty much drenched by the time we get to the taxi stall, and we steam up the cab on the 20 minute ride out to the airport (this cabbie is not a talker - he barely says 5 words to us). When we arrive, we are told that our flight has been delayed for a couple of hours, but my business class ticket at least gets us an invitation to a lounge where we can relax and play more cards while we wait.
The flight home is long, and we are seated separately in business class and sardine class. One of the hostesses recognizes me from the flight over, which amuses me for some reason. As usual, I only sleep a little on the first leg and feel gritty and wired when we arrive in Atlanta. We spend forever in line at customs which leaves us with just enough time to get to the gate for the second leg. And then, finally, home, or at least a familiar airport, familiar sights, familiar language and cadence of speech around us. We've hired a car to take us home (a suggestion from a friend who used to travel a lot for work, and the best idea ever - we now do this when we return from any overseas trip), and our driver makes up for the quiet cabbie in Amsterdam by chatting non-stop from the baggage claim to San Mateo, and maybe further, but by then I've been lulled to sleep by the motion of the car. Why do cars make me sleep, and planes keep me awake?
By the time we get to the house it is 10PM, and I'm glad I can go straight to bed without calculating what time my body thinks it is and how much longer I should stay up to try to adjust to the local time. It is bed time here, and I'm going to bed. Lisa stops to say hi to the cats and I'm asleep already by the time she crawls in next to me. And I sleep through until morning. Home.
