I don't remember arriving in France in 2003 because I was the closest to being asleep on my feet I think I have ever been. Arriving in London in 2001, we shuffled through more than an hour of queuing for customs. My first impression of the Netherlands was thus positive, because after landing at 7:15 a.m. I strolled through customs, tra la, without a line. That was good, because my next absolute encounter, with the train-ticket machine (the use of which I had practiced online, since it is the one thing in the Netherlands not available in English), was less wonderful. I could not use my MC debit card as a credit card, and it didn't work for the man behind me (who was Dutch, as I should have guessed from his ginormous stature, and English-speaking, as was almost everyone we encountered). So I bought my ticket from a human, and asked another human which track ("spoor," which interests me as a cognate, since the spoor of an animal is its track with an implication of poop) I should take. I found Spoor Een, but I just kinda got on the train without checking its direction. I had been on the train for several minutes and the buildings were getter smaller and sheep began to appear. Huh. I was, in fact, headed to Utrecht. Aha. I disembarked at the next stop and found the one Dutch person who does not speak English: I asked the ticket-clerk if she spoke English and she said, "A little." I bought a ticket to go to Amsterdam and asked which spoor. She showed me her outstretched hand, and I wasn't sure if she was telling me the minutes I had to wait or the track number. But the biggest help to get me to Amsterdam was just getting on a train that pointed the other way.
It would have been hard even for me to mistake Centraal Station for anything else. I asked another helpful information clerk how to find the Damrak and scampered thither, wheelie bumping over cobblestones. I got to the hotel by 9:15, swapped some stuff in my bags (ditching comfy socks, eyemask, and iPod, and fetching camera and sunglasses), left RDC a message, and scarpered in the direction of the Anne Frank Huis. I had an idea, from the scales on maps, that the city is about the size of my left thigh, but that idea hadn't sunk in quite enough. It doesn't have to be a 45-minute walk from the Dam to the Secret Annex, but I overshot considerable-like and then backtracked.
The first stop in my wandering would have been Nieuwkierk, but it was closed against Queen Beatrix's arrival later that afternoon. Cool: royalty.
An acquaintance of mine told me that her father thought the diary was not entirely genuine. Not that it was faked, as Holocaust-deniers allege, but that the writing is not that of a 13-year-old girl. I wonder if he had seen her handwriting. I saw it. I also saw her wee bedroom, Peter's alcove, the bookcase'd staircase, and what I hope is still the same chestnut tree flowering in the garden. I listened to the diary as an adult rather than rereading it obsessively as a child, so I didn't have the houseplans memorized. Of course: the annex did not face the canal but the garden. Several tall, narrow houses--ten or so on a side?--form a square. Their fronts face streets or canals and their backs share an enclosed space. I don't know if each has its own sliver of garden or if they all share it in common, but that's where the chestnut grew. I thought of Francie and the Tree of Heaven as well.
After more wandering and lunch in a cafe whose tables teetered on a cobblestoned bridge, I retreated to the hotel. It was 1:00, and aside from RDC's arrival around 3:00 I was unaware of that part of the planet outside my duvet for the next five hours.
In the evening, we wandered and finally found the Leidesplein. Preparations for Koninginnedag--lots of stalls and outdoor concerts--threw RDC off his bearings and it took a while to find the exact street he wanted. We ran it to earth finally and had a filling if not scrumptious Tibetan dinner. We began to walk through the Dam just as the orchestra set up outside Nieuwkierk finished its piece and the royal family processed into place. We did not see them in the flesh, but we did arrive just in time to watch on massive screens. The elite in the secure area rose from their seats at her arrival; hoi polloi in the square raised their drinks.
And the morning and the evening were the first day.
30 April is Koninginnedag, Queen's Day. The current queen's, Beatrix, birthday is not 30 April but on some seasonally less appealing date, so she observes her mother's day. And so does everyone else. I have never seen so much green in Boston on St. Patrick's Day as I saw orange on this day. The streets and canals pulsed with people and boats wearing inflatable orange crowns, moose antlers, arrows through the head, Gilligan caps, clown wigs, leis, grass skirts, nail polish, hose, rugby shirts, streamers, bunting, and balloons. The orange has to come from the same family color as makes Ireland see red, and it's a hideous color anyway, and overall there was so much orange that I saw blue after-images for hours. Weeks later, the correct metaphor occurred to me: the entire country looks like Home Depot. Next time I am going to wear a smock and carry a five-gallon bucket.
A benefit to everyone getting drunk in the street on orange beer (I exagerrate: only Usans color their beer) was that the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh were comparatively empty. Neither had a line. Much of the Rijks collection is in storage while the building is renovated, but I saw Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter and View of Houses in Delft and especially The Kitchen Maid (The Love Letter is not in the selected display), and I marveled over the dollhouses. Despite its being only a partial display, I think I'm done: I don't often care for people or buildings in my paintings, Vermeer being an exception, and so whatever I am supposed to admire about Rembrandt I usually don't. The dollhouses (really, miniature actual houses and vanity pieces for housewives, not toys for children) were exquisite (plus I have that small=cute thing) but, yeah, people and buildings do not make for interesting art on the whole.
The Van Gogh is small and perfect. I still love Starry Night (which I've seen at the MoMA) and Wheatfields with Cypress, which I must have seen au Musée d'Orsay, but here I saw The Potato Eaters (people, but people with a purpose) and Wheatfield with Crows and Wheatfield with Thunderclouds and a Sunflowers and his bedroom at Arles and Trees and Undergrowth. I took a picture of an outdoor concert on the Museumplein from a window in the Van Gogh.
Koninginnedag was like St. Patrick's Day in Boston combined with the day after the World Series last year, minus the burning of couches (UConn after a basketball team won an NCAA tournament) or overturning of cars (Denver after the football team the Superbowl). Drunken buffoonery but no drunken brawlery. It was just a lot of fun energy.
In the evening we ate in a Japanese restaurant, seated at a table with four Usan men who were in Amsterdam for the weekend, for the party, before going to London to see Eric Clapton. They were...interesting, and fun, and the six of us were already obviously the Yanks in the joint long before the loudest said that Michael Jackson's comeback song was going to be a cover of Elton John's "Don't Let Your Son Go Down on Me," shocking me into an outburst of I-can't-believe-you-just-said-that braying.
Sunday we went to Keukenhof, 70 acres of tulips, daffodils, lilies, hyacinths, and 150-year-old beech trees. It was staggeringly beautiful and staggeringly crowded and blisteringly hot, way more than the "vingt trois" the Frenchie behind me in line for postcards and please more water claimed. It wasn't just that I had packed for Farenheit 50s and cloudy and that the press of people redefined clusterfuck ("kloosterfook") and that it was humid too. It was just fucking hot.
And goddamn loud. In the entrance was a giant, electric hurdy-gurdy that was blaring, as the entry crowd absorbed us and spat us into the interior, "Summer Lovin'." Muzaked "Grease" was just not the right background noise, but, as RDC said, what else would tourists take photographs of if not this? On our way out, "Bohemian Rhapsody." When we were out of earshot of it, we were stalked by two different musterings of Canadian bagpipery. Bagpipes are ordinarily just fine by me--men in skirts: what can go wrong?--but they were only slightly less inappropriate than the gypsy van hurdy-gurdy. A measure of my grumptitude was that the sight of men in skirts did not make me happy: they wore kneesocks and made me feel hotter. I looked up animal group words for an appropriate one for bagpipers, and a mustering is a collection of storks. I don't know what Canadian bagpipers were doing in the Netherlands, but "mustering" is an appropriate term for them there.
It was hot and loud and crowded and I was parched and hungry, so four of my five senses had ruffled brows and wanted to run screaming. But my eyes, my eyes were happy. Fucking hot, goddamn loud, and absolutely stunningly beautiful.
We were possibly going to go to Den Haag after this for (I alleged) more than just my slavering over Girl with a Pearl Earring but by four o'clock we were completely done in. Eventually we ate reistafel in Kanijl and De Tijger: a whopping bowl of rice and a dozen smaller servings of meat, vegetables, and seafood, that add up to a bulimic nightmare.
Monday was, thank heavens, cool again, and misty to the point of rain. We visited the Stedelijk CS. It too is being renovated so the temporary location has one work per year from 1875 to 2005. In this museum I felt guiltless for just walking past a piece if it didn't immediately appeal to me. RDC liked it better, as we both expected.
Then we took a canal boat tour, which was required on our visas. I kid. It was touristy as hell but I liked it.
Tuesday I left for home and RDC for South Africa, which (well, Cape Town to start) he reports is breathtaking. I spent two days traveling for four days in the Netherlands: South Africa is two days each way. Next time.
Threescore pictures and six, including the above, are here.
When we got back from the vet and Blake had had snacks (including toast), he begged for the reading chair in the living room. Instead I offered him my lap in RDC's office, and he is now tucked.