Last Stop Amsterdan

Four days here in Amsterdam, after leaving Celebrity. Mike had arranged for an apartment at 402 Singel.

Singel is one of the rings of canals in the fashionable west side of town. An even house number so it is on the west side of the canal, very close to the main drag on which three of the trolleys run from the main station.  Most of the streets are one lane wide and one way, but are traversed both ways by many bikes and motor scooters.

So you have to look both ways, carefully, before stepping off the curb.

Here a treat was that we were joined by Mike and Lindas grandson, Trevor, from Austin via a year abroad in Spain for his sophomore year of High School. The only problem was the injured list grew worse. Mike and Linda flew home to get care for Lindas wrist two days early and Ilene was feeling punky too, maybe bronchitis, so we were not as active as other we would have been.

One nice thing about cruise ships: they visit port cities. Pretty obvious but important to a water lover. Amsterdam moves on its canals, like Venice, except here freight moves by land rather than exclusively by canal boat, and here they do have a land based trolley system rather than rely on the vaporettos --canal bus-boats -- for passengers.

They have a museum of canals, which I visited, -- flying the Amsterdam flag, not the Red Light District flag, despite its XXX appearance.

It spoke about how planned the city was and how it expanded in planned stages, with walls built around it before each new expansion, walls that are useless in the face of modern warfare. The drive to the airport with our driver, Abe, shows that most of the city is now outside the walls. But most tourism remains within. This museum also showed how the houses were built on platforms mounted on myriad pine pilings, imported from Scandinavia, reinforced  (recently in the long history of the town) with cement filled steel piles. So too did the Harlem YC have to be reinforced during the early 90s. It was very cleverly done with visuals shown against the sides of model houses and internal projections inside the windows of a big doll house to show life inside such a house. But this museum, only two blocks from our apartment, was ultimately more about the houses than the canals themselves.

More instructive as to the canals was a boat tour ride, about five miles in a counterclockwise loop. The canals have no tides, the city being separated from the sea by locks and depth is  7 to 15 feet. The annual fee for a canal side tieup for a small boat is very inexpensive but if you want to live in one of the many houseboats that line some of the canals, you have to buy one; there is no more space available.

We boys strolled about the red light district in the evening which I found garishly unpleasant with coed mobs roaming the streets, Dam Square with the City Hall, left, and its adjacent cathedral,center,

the courtyard of the Beguins, a community of religious Catholic women who wanted to live together but not to become nuns,

and the Van Gogh museum.  None of these had any watery references. Though I did see Van Goghs painting of this bridge. or one like it, that we passed under on the canal tour.

Better luck, for those interested in things nautical, was at the Rijsmuseum,

which was built late in the 19th century and recently reopened with the courtyards  covered

which provide spaces for this Calder which was being assembled while we were there.

It was built as a secular cathedral to the art of the Dutch rather than for religion. Nice library, restricted for scholars.

Off to the side of the great hall filled with famous works by Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer was a salon of naval scenes.

I learned of the antagonism between the two great rival trading nations of the day (the 1600s). We all knew of the British taking of New Amsterdam from the Dutch West Indies Company. But I had never known of the context of the larger war including the Dutch Attack on Chatham. They sailed up the Medway, a tributary to the Thames, near its mouth, and blasted the heck out of the town and the British fleet at anchor there. There is so much non-American history that I did not know about.

They also have a nautical room in the basement with models and artifacts related to the sea.

A highlight of our visit was the Anne Frank House where we waited on line outside for about 80 minutes, along with a horde of others who felt this was an important place to be visited.

I was moved and now have added her diary to my reading list. I learned in the canal museum that Anne Franks family had lived next door to us at 400 Singel until they went into hiding.

Trevor is really a great kid, who patiently stayed with me in the museums, most of the time. Except for his eating habits. He is the third generation (at least) of Whitmans (with Ilene the sole exception I know of) who lets just say do not have adventurous palates. So Rijstaffel (rice table -- an Indonesian delicacy from when the Dutch East India Company owned that area of the world) was off the menu. Our apartment had a kitchen and we cooked a few times and no one went hungry.

The flight home was uneventful. And now for some real sailing!!

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