Saturday morning before flying out I got up before sunrise and tried to get the ATM card to work again. I still had problems with it. The sky was very clear so I went down by the lake and looked at the stars. I found the big dipper and the north star. This far north it is very high in the sky and not where I'm used to seeing it. The sky was so clear, and light pollution so low, that I even saw a satellite's refection as it was going over in a polar orbit. You can tell it's a satellite because it was much fainter (higher) and faster than an airplane. Before this I don't remember seeing any since I was a kid in rural North Carolina.
The train to Kiel was five to ten minutes late arriving. This meant that when I got to Kiel I had just missed the bus connection to the Hamburg airport (it is timed to leave just after the train arrives) so I had to wait an hour for the next bus. After we boarded and started out the bus was flagged down by someone in a car. So the bus pulled over and picked up a passenger from the car as well (apparently they had just missed getting on the bus back at the station). So I got to the airport later than I liked and had to run to the gate to catch the plane. When I was checking in I recognized the attendant. She checked V and I in when we were flying back from Germany last December. Anyway, I made it to the flight and was off to Amsterdam. All along the way, on the train, bus and in the air I noticed all the windmills that dot the landscape. These aren't the old fashioned kind, but tall modern ones with airplane-glider-wing-like blades. All the windmills I saw, and there were many from Germany to the Netherlands, had exactly three blades and rotated clockwise when they faced toward you. This made me curious if there are any counterclockwise windmills somewhere in Europe.
After landing there was a rail station directly under the airport and the ticket machine had signs in English so I followed the directions and bought a return ticket to the Central Station in Amsterdam, then boarded the train and was off. After walking out of the central station I noticed two things right away; there were bicycles everywhere,
I have never seen so many locked up in rows upon rows, and that the sky over the roads was a web of wires for the city tram system.
I had some time before it got dark and walked aimlessly for a while before heading to the hotel. (The next day I had an agenda however.) I just turned down a random side street toward the center of the city. It had narrow streets with buildings built up tall over them (for that "old world" feel) and crowds of people walking between.
As I walked by I saw one shop after another that sold marijuana, hash, and/or hallucinogenic mushrooms and cacti (like peyote). I know I am being hopelessly American when I say this but this amazed me that it was advertised openly here in the center of town.
I walked into a shop out of curiosity and there were people there buying the mushrooms and eating them. I snapped some pictures before someone grabbed me out of the blue and told me not to take any pictures of the pot or mushrooms.
I stepped back outside and there was a woman with a rope going to a pulley on the top story of one of these buildings and what looked like people about the push a heavy box tied to the other end out of the window. (Note that this was a crowded street [and this is the off season] with people walking around her and under the trajectory of the box.) They were really struggling with the box so I figured if she held onto the rope when they let go she might fly up into the air but they seemed indecisive about pushing the box out and eventually wrestled it back in so I gave up waiting and walked on some more.
I found an internet cafe and started to go in to post on this blog and send some email, but the air was so think with smoke (and it wasn't tobacco) that I was afraid to spend too much time in there, so eventually I headed for the hotel. On the way back to the hotel I passed a shop that sold lots of varieties of absinthe. Absinthe is illegal in the US and some countries in Europe. It is an alcoholic drink with wormwood extract in it and has been blamed as the reason Van Gogh went crazy and cut off his ear as well as for many other people loosing it. Sure enough, they seemed to capitalize on this and varieties had names like "mad cat".
I booked a room at the "Lloyd Hotel" because they were pretty cheap, but it was quite a walk out of town. It was next to the main waterway and by the time I got there the sun was setting.
I checked in and went up to the room, on the 6th floor in the attic. The hotel is an old renovated building. In some places it has art nouveau windows. My room was down a narrow hallway that at some points had floor to ceiling windows that looked down into the rest of the building.
In my room the wall on one side was white painted sheetrock with nice little lamp lights mounted on. The other side was the raw wooden underside of the sloping roof, complete with splinters and old nails. It had a window that opened and overlooked the water in front of the building.
The floor was sealed concrete and in the middle of the room was a white, spotless fluffy bed with oversized pillows and blanket. The bathroom was separated from the rest of the room by a blue frosted glass wall (cut to fit the sloping roof) and was gleaming white tile.
I think they were going for an avant-garde contrast between the rough and refined parts of the room. I dropped my stuff and headed back out for some supper. I passed several McDonalds and found a döner kebab place and got a döner. (I need to make a separate post later to explain these.) Along the way I passed all kinds of tourist shops that combined postcards, clogs, porcelain windmills, t-shirts with things like hash lollipops and grow kits. I followed the crowd of people and ended up cutting through the infamous red light district. Prostitution is legal here and there were women soliciting all along the sides of one of the roads, but it's not quite what it sounds like. Besides the 20-something young men there were also grannies and kids walking by all this along the sidewalks and not even batting an eye, again I was very surprised. I ended up in a back alley and guys were trying to sell me drugs and/or "live shows" so I figured I'd better head back and called it a night. Along the way back I got behind a group of Americans (there were lots of Americans and British there) and I heard them exclaim that even the manhole covers had a triple X on them. (The ancient symbol of the city is three white "X"s on a black and red background.) As I passed a bar door someone threw a bucket of apparently puke out the front door right into the street in front of walkers. I picked my way around and watched my step more carefully on the way back.
The next morning the crowds were gone and the light was good for pictures so I headed back into town. This was when I could see how pretty Amsterdam is. The city is crisscrossed with canals and bridges.
I picked up some postcards then stopped at a cafe and ordered a ham and egg breakfast. When I bought the cards the people in front of me used a €0.20 coin with a Maltese shield on it. Malta has just joined the EU and this was the first Maltese coin the shop worker had seen. He saw me admiring it to and offered to sell it to me for €0.20. At breakfast I got out my guidebook and started flipping through it. Amsterdam was/is a major world port city for centuries and has museums with amazing collections such as Vermeer and Van Gogh and many other world class cultural resources such as Anne Frank"s house; so where did I go? The choice was obvious, I went to see the thinnest house in Amsterdam. Apparently, for a long period in the cities history property taxes were calculated based on how much street length your house occupied. So houses grew thinner and thinner in response. The house I was looking for has the record in the city at 2.1 meters and is completely self contained, not just a shed beside a larger house. It was near the red light district so I headed back in that direction. Here street sweepers were cleaning up the garbage on the sidewalks from the night before and families were out walking with their kids and strollers. The house was so thin that I walked right by it the first time without seeing it and had to backtrack (honest). It looked like single rooms stacked one on top of another.
I snapped some shots and headed off deeper into the city. I passed some more cafes and diamond shops then came out onto a flower market. The market is along one side of a canal and the shops are on floating "house" boats.
They had bulbs and cut tulips of course and orchids and cacti and the apparently ubiquitous marijuana seeds for sale. I walked through snapping some pictures then headed off to a different part of the city. Along the way I passed lots of graffiti. Here in Europe graffiti doesn't seem to mean the same thing as in the US. In the US we take it as a sign of bad neighborhoods and run down buildings, but here I have seen it everywhere, in small towns and on university research buildings. Some of the graffiti here was very extravagant and too up entire buildings.
I also saw every kind of bicycle imaginable. Some folded up into tiny sizes. Some had two wheels in the front with large boxes on top for carrying things. Some had two seats and two wheels in the back for transporting people taxi style.
People of all ages were on bikes everywhere. Some sitting sideways on the back hitching a ride. I grabbed a sandwich at a small shop for lunch and eventually I came out near the central station again and started back. I ended up home in Germany late Sunday night at about 10:30 pm, just in time to wash a load of clothes before the week started again.
1 comment:
Just a thought about windmills spinning clockwise: it may have to do with avoiding bad luck, going in a widdershins direction was considered unlucky.
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