Since it's Veterans Day....

Thinking of Dad, and all the others.

Odds and ends

Just for the record, the building at left is the Amsterdam office of the company I do most of my work for. Other than that - random interesting buildings, including Central Station, where I came into and went out of the city.

Streets

Bikes

Water

Amsterdam

Rumor has it that if I don't post the pictures from the last weekend of the trip, I'll never do it. As with Brussels, I'm going to put them in several separate entries, with very little text. The text is here:

The short version is: I loved Amsterdam. Not quite as much as London, but I'd love to go back and spend more time someday.

Amsterdam has water, and light, and space, and at least in the neighborhood where I stayed, restaurants from every tradition I could want: Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, Vietnamese, English (English food? well, breakfast), Irish (ditto), Middle Eastern, and not just steakhouses, but Argentinian, Uruguayan, American steakhouses....., and also, of course, little cafes with great croissants, chocolates, ice cream, waffles....

Besides eating and walking around, the one touristy thing I did was to go to the Van Gogh Museum. My favorite Starry Night isn't there (it's in New York), but lots of his very well-known paintings are. It was interesting and a bit overwhelming to have a chance to gaze at them for a while, along with practically everyone else in the city on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I intended to go to the Anne Frank House and I did see it from the outside. But the line to get in stretched halfway around a rather large block, and I didn't have enough time to wait. Next time I'll try to plan ahead and book a ticket online, ahead of time.

The water helps make Amsterdam a beautiful city. Having streets and canals running alongside each other means that there's a lot of space for light and sky between the buildings. I asked whether the canals really do freeze and one of my workmates said that they don't freeze reliably any more, so that it has been ten years or more since some famous ice skating race that stretches through part of the Netherlands could be held.

That same workmate was in the process of buying a house: a houseboat, that is. And that will be his dwelling. !!

Besides the canals, the other single most amazing and different thing (different from home, different from anywhere else I've ever been) are the bikes: they are everywhere. Trams, bikes, cars, and pedestrians all intermingle and somehow manage (it seems) not to collide. In one of the pictures I'll post, if you look closely you'll see a little blond head in a child-carrier on the front of a bike. That bike, pedaled by someone who I assume was the child's father, had just been ridden in front of a moving tram. Whew! There is certainly a different attitude about safety than the one we are familiar with: as you can also see in the pictures, there are lots of miles of canalsides with no railings whatsoever.

Great city....great trip. Thanks for following the story.

Another train breaks down

Deja vu from last summer: I left Amsterdam on a train at 2:56 this afternoon. Soon thereafter, the train's engine broke down. An hour and a half later, another locomotive came along to tow us to the station at The Hague, where we waited for another half hour for another train to rescue us and proceed to Brussels. In the end I got back to the apartment three hours later than I had planned....hence, my report on Amsterdam won't be forthcoming tonight. In short: it's an incredible city, very fun to visit, and I would love to go back someday.

The picture here is just a teaser. Eventually we'll get to the canals and the lovely street scenes and the crowds and the trams and all of that, but this was one of my first sights of Amsterdam: a bicycle parking garage. Can you imagine such a thing in an American city?

Off for the weekend

Someone's birthday out there in Ohio....Happy birthday, if you happen to read this. ;)

I'm packing up to take the train to Amsterdam in the morning -- it takes about 2 and 3/4 hours. I have a hotel reservation for two nights, so I'll get to see a few of the highlights, and I hope to have a good batch of new pictures to post by Monday night. (Internet access is likely to be expensive, so I probably won't check in much over the weekend.)

The top recommendations for places to visit include the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank house. A number of people have also said that a canal boat ride, though a little corny, is a must. So I will try that if the weather permits. Right now the prediction is for a decent day Saturday, but rain and wind on Sunday.

Time is flying by

The picture is of a sculpture called "Le Phenix," which is in a detached part of the Jardin du Roi, in a traffic circle of sorts located between my street and the office. I haven't found out what The Phoenix is "about" -- but it certainly is a striking object to walk by a couple of times every day.

Last night half a dozen of us from work went out for a very nice dinner that lasted 3 1/2 hours. No rushing people out the door around here! I had cod with a sauce/topping made with some kind of black olives: very good.

Other than that, I haven't done anything special this week, unless you count taking off from work this morning to trek over to the laundromat. It's quite a bit colder than it was a few days ago, and by the time I got done with that adventure I felt like I was coming down with a cold. I'm babying myself in hopes of avoiding more than a sniffle; so far so good.

The weekend

Okay, so I stayed in Brussels again this weekend instead of getting on the train and going to Paris or Bruges. For one thing, I was tired, and it was nice to catch up on my sleep. For another, when it came right down to it I didn’t feel like traveling without a friend to hang out with.

And I had a very nice time right here.

Saturday was sunny, breezy, and cool. I walked from the apartment to the central city along with what seemed likes half the other people in Belgium. The street I walked along is the same street AIRINC’s office is on, Avenue Louise. It’s a major avenue into the city center, and the closer you get, the more it becomes a shopping district: lots of clothing stores, restaurants, chocolate shops. And people.

Avenue Louise ends in a big open area near the Palace of Justice, which is huge and imposing and, at the moment, half-covered with scaffolding. There is a ridge running across the city, and at the end of Avenue Louise there’s a panoramic view of the Lower Town from the edge of the Upper. Also some war memorials. Also public bicycles. Also lots of people taking pictures.

I kept walking, and next I came to Le Sablon, Cleo’s neighborhood, where we had brunch last weekend. That’s where some of yesterdays park and church pictures came from.

A few blocks past that area there’s a huge complex that includes museums, palaces, and government buildings. There’s also a lovely park. I bought a waffle (along with chocolate and beer one of the big specialties here) from a street vendor, with chocolate drizzled on top. It hit the spot, even though I shouldn’t have been eating it. I had to try a waffle at least once, didn’t I?

I spent a little time in the art museum that houses older work. The most interesting room was the one that had eleven huge paintings by Rubens. Most of the pictures were of religious subjects: a couple featuring St. Francis and several that were scenes from the Mysteries of the Rosary. There were also two enormous paintings of packs of dogs bringing down large antlered creatures (there were not my favorite...) Two of the Mysteries of the Rosary (the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary) were so full of light it was almost as if the light in the room was coming from them. I don’t know anything about painting....but I’m glad to have seen these works.

******

A few random thoughts about the city:

Streets and byways

In terms of layout, the city is more like Boston than like Milwaukee. That is, the streets go every which way instead of north-south crossed by east-west. So instincts about direction aren’t much help.

There are lots of little circles (with greenspace inside them, of course) where 5 or 6 or 7 or 10 (in the case of the Flagey square I mentioned a while back) streets come together. At big intersections on main streets there are traffic lights, just like at home. But on lesser streets the clues about who stops and who goes are painted onto the street. Instead of stop signs that draw the eye away from the road, the information you need is in front of you as you keep your eyes on the road.

Signs telling the names of the streets are only rarely on poles; mostly they are mounted on the sides of buildings. In two languages, of course.

Dogs seem to be as popular as parks, or maybe the two go together, since parks are nice places for dogs to run around in. Collectively, people don’t do a great job of cleaning up after their dogs, and in fact the public places in general are pretty grubby.

People

People seem very reserved, even more so than the English, who are renowned for their reserve. But I have to recognize that that’s a hasty and superficial assessment on my part. For one thing, I haven’t been out into the countryside, so I don’t have any way to know whether Belgians might be reserved in general, or just city people. People in general are friendlier in Maine, let’s say, than in Cambridge.

Also, some of the reserve may actually be my own. I don’t think I’m trying to have random conversations as much as I did in England and Scotland, because of the language issue.

Also, there are lots of people here from everywhere. With the EU headquartered here, many people come from other places and live here for a few years, then leave again. I don’t think it’s as remotely rootless as Orlando (where, as Betsy says, “No one is from here”), but maybe there are basically a lot of subcommunities within which people just keep to themselves.

Guess I’ll have to travel to more countries to make a comparative study. ;)

(Guess I’ll have to win the lottery first.)

Noted in passing

A typical view down a side street...

Public bikes for ad hoc use...

Trolley lines converging at a turnaround place...

A view of the lower city from near le Palais du Justice...

Rooftops...

A hidden hoop.

Near the Place Royale

Palaces, parks, museums, street scenes.

Place du Petit Sablon

Another garden....

The Church of Our Lady of the Sablon

This church is very beautiful, both inside and out. But I will have to go a long way to find a church that doesn't seem a little understated in the magnificence department compared to York Minster. Then again, I'm only a novice at exploring European churches, so who knows!