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They have a very nice breakfast buffet at the hotel. We sat with Dean and Norma (one of the couples we met on the ride in) and learned more about them. They’re from Colorado Springs. He is a retired pediatric dentist. She’s a retired pediatric dentist office manager. They’ve been on 5 cruises. They must be in their early 80’s but look great.
Viking had a walking tour of Amsterdam today for us. About 12 of us actually. We are the youngest except for a few kids (grandchildren?). The tour was led by Nico who seemed nice. Viking uses a wireless mic system with a headset. It’s really great because you don’t have to push and shove to be near the guide to hear. You can wander even a few hundred feet off. So you can look around and still hear the spiel. I especially liked this because it meant I could get away from the mass of people to take pictures without a mass of people in them.
We took a slightly different route into town on the tour than we had taken earlier. We crossed a pedestrian bridge that swings open to let boats through (and did so just after we crossed it). We got a great view of the old town as we walked in along a canal.
Nico gave us some useful hints for finding our way around and orienting ourselves. And we meandered through the old town area towards the town center. We saw house boats and house arks. The difference is a house ark was never a functioning boat, just a house on a floating platform. Nico explained the different kinds of gables on the houses. There are 3 but I don’t remember what they are :-). Although I do have pictures of each.
As we were walking, a person started across the street and the bike path when a guy on a bike shouted (with an accent) “I have no brakes!” in the hopes they would get out of his way. But they didn’t. And he stopped. He turns and looks at us and says “I have brakes, is ok”, smiling. We would hear over and over on the trip, don’t walk in front of the bicycles. They are not fans of stopping I guess. Not just in Amsterdam but all across central Europe. It’s safer to walk in front of a car.
Much of where we’re walking is reclaimed land. As the saying goes, God made the earth but the Dutch made Holland. A huge percentage of the country is reclaimed. They don’t fill in so much as dike and drain. Although this area was largely filled in (from ground dug out from other canals).
We passed one of the universities. Education is free in the Netherlands (if you can pass the test to get in) but living expenses aren’t. So it’s still expensive to go to school but I like the idea that the government believes enough in education that it is a service that is provided.
Marijuana is not actually legal but ‘tolerated’. Which amounts to the same thing but it’s an interesting distinction. Amsterdam is known for its liberalism, which really is more a form of libertarianism. As long as you’re not hurting anyone (except yourself), you can pretty much have at it.
We saw some nice looking places (probably expensive) in this part of town. It was cool to look in windows and see how people lived. The houses are right up against the sidewalk so it’s hard not to peek in. We walked through the NewMarket again where we had seen the vendors earlier. But there was no ‘market’ happening this time.
We had been told by a friend of Marion’s that the houses were slanted slightly outward and we had noticed this as we walked around. They slant out towards the street. The reason for this is so they can lift things up to the higher stories without banging them into the house. The ground floor doors are typically too small to get furniture through. So you attach a pulley to a beam at the top of the house and haul it up to a window on the 2nd or 3rd floor. Since most of the buildings in this part of town were originally warehouses, it makes even more sense. The guide mentioned it also keeps water from sitting on windowsills, which makes maintenance easier. And they also might actually be sinking a bit. Everything is on pylons. The ground is soft/sandy.
Another interesting tidbit is 30 people or so a year drown in the canals. Mostly drunk tourists who get too close trying to take a leak and fall in, then can’t get out. Tourist traps in a very real sense. There are no easy hand holds or ladders so it’s like being in a pool with 8 foot sides. There are also no guard rails or anything so people sometimes accidentally drive into them as well, since parking is right next to them. There were cars that were inches away from the edge. But I guess you get pretty good at judging that.
Amsterdammers are not well liked by the rest of the Netherlands apparently (he likened it to people’s feelings about New Yorkers who weren’t from New York).
We passed a building that used to be for women who got into some kind of trouble back in the day (out of wedlock children and the like). It was a work house of sorts. But now it’s a nice set back area of homes. We saw the building that was the old orphanage which is now the historic museum. It was a very odd collection of stuff including a David and Goliath from some amusement park (and Goliath’s head swivels!).
The last stop was the Dam Plaza (or the damn plaza if you are not a fan of hordes of tourists). The center of Amsterdam and the Dam on the Amstel river that gave the place its name (although why it’s not called Amsteldam, I don’t know). There is a large building that used to be the town hall that was converted into a palace by Napoleon’s brother when he came and took over the town (and the Netherlands) at one point. It’s an impressive place. And next to it, a cathedral. The first of many we would see.
After the tour one of the couples asked us to lunch but we begged off to go walking to some stores Marion wanted to see. We felt a little bad since we’ll be spending two weeks with these people and need to get to know them. But Marion had some places she’d found in the guide book she wanted to check out.
We walked to a pastry place Marion had read about. It turned out to be not very exciting. We had lunch next door at an Italian-ish place that wasn’t bad. Then we walked to Bookie Wookie (Boekie Woekie)– a homemade books store. But it was uninteresting as well. Marion was hoping for more creative creations of the books themselves but these were basically just self-published books and I would say there was likely a good reason a publisher didn’t want to publish them. So on to the last place on her list, Hama – the Dutch Fred Meyer (one stop shopping). That was kind of fun and we got some stuff there. In the process of finding the tram to get back we found we were by the central station and ended up walking back to the hotel.
One of the interesting things you can do that you can’t do in most cities is take a Red Light District tour. Marion found this in the guide book and since Amsterdam is known for its red light district and we weren’t going to wander through there ourselves, we figured we’d give it a try. We tried to sign up on line but it was late in the day and we didn’t hear back from them. So we weren’t sure if we’d be able to go or not. We walked to the hotel where the tour started but couldn’t find anyone who knew anything about it. I asked a couple of people in the hotel but they had no clue. So we milled about out front until people started arriving. And we all stood there confused together until the guide showed up.
The guy leading the tour had just watched Netherlands beat Chile in the World Cup and move on to the next round. He was wearing his bright orange Netherlands shirt. Everyone on the street was very excited about the win with lots of whoops and hollers. The first tidbit we learned was about the hotel itself. I guess it’s a fairly famous/fancy hotel (the Victoria Hotel). When it was built, they bought up all the land needed to build it. But one person wouldn’t sell. They kept offering more and more money but he wouldn’t budge. So finally they gave up and built the hotel around the apartment. So in the front facade of the hotel (which we of course failed to get a picture of), there’s a narrow piece that’s of a different architecture and style that was this recalcitrant person’s apartment.
The tour was 80% ‘city tour’ (with some duplication of what we’d heard on the earlier tour) and 20% red light. But interesting. It was very weird to see the ladies in the windows. They’re dressed in bikinis or things resembling bikinis that you probably wouldn’t wear to the beach except maybe in Brazil. And there are different areas you go depending on what your tastes are (African, Asian, etc.) But leave it to the Dutch to turn it into a business process. It’s very much like going to the mall to look for shoes. Although maybe it’s different if you’re actually planning to buy.
The Dutch are ambivalent about it. Churches and schools and residences share space with the windows. We actually would have been fine walking around in there since it’s just a regular part of town that happens to have women in bikinis standing in windows who will have sex with you if you pay them. The women are regulated (they must join the union), prices are fixed (50 euro for 15 min for whatever you do), health care is provided, etc. It’s safer for the women, the government gets paid, even patrons are protected. Pretty much a win-win. Women decide when to work and if they’ll let you in or do whatever it is you have in mind (it’s up to them, not you). $150 to rent a window for a ‘shift’ (8 hours). So it can be pretty good money I suppose if you’re popular.
We learned some other stuff too – Amsterdam is represented by 3 X’s in their city coat of arms (to signify the 3 things they’re most worried about – fire, flood/water and disease according to lore, but probably not historically accurate). When they (and Denmark) made it legal to mail pornography, and the world’s porn supply started coming from there, it showed up with 3 XXX’s on it and ultimately it came to mean hard core.
We found out the airport name, Schiphol, means “ship graveyard” in Dutch since when they built it (out of reclaimed lake or ocean floor of course) they found a lot of shipwrecks. Ship Graveyard is not a name that fills the heart with confidence for an airport as the guide pointed out, so they use the Dutch so at least foreigners don’t know what it means. On the other hand, the Dutch name sounds like Shit Hole which isn’t a whole lot better.
We also passed a lot of chocolate, sweets and waffle places. The tour is 90% female. Just me and one other guy and 12 women. The women are more interested in food than girls behind windows. We’re stopping at the wrong places. We hadn’t had much dinner so we finally stopped and had a burger (me) and a cheese sandwich (Marion) after the tour. We got a chocolate frosted cupcake too. Haven’t tried it yet but it looks good.
LOTS of walking today. My back is not happy about it. We’ll see what it thinks in the morning.
6/23/14
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