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?