bad metaphor

After we left Amsterdam, we paid a visit to the Keukenhof Tulip Gardens on our way back to Nijmegen. Now this might have been the most disappointing part of the trip. I wanted to go to the gardens so I could see fields of tulips and take photos – but, as it turns out, you could only see the tulip fields on the bus ride there. Also, the fields were less than spectacular at this point; many of the bulbs had been snipped off, or had withered in the sun. As for the gardens themselves – let’s just say it was a haven for old people tourists. Not that I didn’t expect this, of course, but for some reason I had thought there would be open fields of endless tulips and it wouldn’t much matter. In enclosed gardens, the throng of old people in socks and sandals, families with screaming children, and large couples with cameras, was far more bothersome. We tried a maze, but I wanted out not too long into it because I was starting to get quite claustrophobic.

Pond in the tulip garden.

See that sign? That sign says “keep off the grass.” I kept accidentally disobeying the sign because I am a stupid tourist.

Tiptoe through the tulips.

Those Dutch and their windmills!

The closest we ever got to seeing fields of endless tulips. Le sigh.

At a petting zoo in the middle of the tulip garden (:?:)

I think he was getting hungry.

A cool fish (?) patterned flower bed.

When we got back to Nijmegen, we had dinner at this lovely restaurant I have forgotten the name of- something unpronounceable, with few vowels (surprising, as the Dutch seem to like to cram superfluous vowels wherever they fit). They ordered some salmon that was absolutely fantastic, probably one of the best salmon dishes I have ever sampled. I wish I’d ordered it, but oh well.

The next morning, E’s mother showed us around Nijmegen, the Roman walls and ruins, and the area near the major bridge in town. Apparently Nijmegen was accidentally bombed by the U.S. during WWII, in a kind of Dresden-like incident; there is still a cloud of suspicion about how “accidental” the bombing was.

Bridge over the river in Nijmegen, rebuilt after the bombing obviously.

Statue to commemorate the bombing.

We visited the bicycle museum, yet another quirky museum of, well, bicycles, and fun interactive things (including some sort of weird black booth that, when you climb in, blares the French national anthem as you look upon a scene of French soldiers passed out next to their bikes. (:?:))

Entrance to the museum.

Ye olde bicycle (quadcycle?)

I’m still not sure how this was supposed to work.

We then strolled through the market, where we picked up some delicious fried fish, the name of wish I have also forgotten. So much good food.

Open air market (we sure saw a lot of these), where one can buy cheap scarves and fish!

Crazy fries! I can’t say this statue made me very hungry.

Major movie theater in the downtown area.

The next morning, we said goodbye to Nijmegen and drove back down to Germany – to Hohr-Grenzhausen, and E’s grandmother’s house.

Before going to Amsterdam, we debated about whether or not it would be better to drive to the city and park, or pay a little extra and take the train. I’m glad we talked E into the train idea, because when we got there, it was immediately apparent that driving around in the city would be a horrible, horrible idea. Construction seemingly everywhere, hordes of cyclists zipping past, trams and buses zooming along. It was a challenge enough for us as pedestrians; we were at the bottom of the totem pole here as far as right of way was concerned.

Tried to get a photo that captures the chaos of Amsterdam traffic, but it was hard to do while in the midst of it (try taking a picture when there are three or four large objects trying to run you over!). Had to settle for this quieter one.

One of the many trash-filled (yet still somehow lovely) canals in the city.

Wherein the day before was spent in communion with nature, and other such hippie nonsense, this day was full of tourists, bus noise, lights, and general commotion. Amsterdam, as you can imagine, is a highly cosmopolitan city, attracting people from everywhere. There were even quite a few Vietnamese “loempia” stands, which serve Dutch egg rolls. If I hadn’t been so stuffed from lunch I would have ventured to try a loempia, but we had made the mistake of ordering a rice table from Sari Citra, one of the many Indonesian restaurants in the city. The food was excellent, to be sure, but way too much for two people. A rice table for two at this place, approximately 28 euros, could actually feed four.

The first thing we did when we got there, naturally, was to visit the cat museum – the KattenKabinet, the existence of which I discovered while doing research on Amsterdam previously. (yes, it was definitely my idea to go. E still had a good time. I think.) The KattenKabinet was chock full of delightful crazy cat art, and staffed by a woman who looked like she belonged at a European Renaissance Faire. She was crocheting some sort of silver tinsel onto some stockings when we came in.

One of the three feline residents of the KattenKabinet.

This cat has seen better days.

Modern art kat.

A hallway in the KattenKabinet.

Hands down, the most awesome painting, ever.

Afterwards, we wandered around some open air markets: the Flower Market, as well as the enormous Albert Cuypstraat Market.

Wooden tulips at the Flower Market.

Some of the most adorable graffiti I’ve seen.

Albert Cuypstraat Market is one of the biggest open air markets in Europe.

This market is full of all of one’s needs: cheap socks, clothes, Playboy swag (seriously, there was a lot of this. Are middle aged Dutch women really that into Playboy, or do they just think the bunny is cute?), meat and cheese, fish, VCRs and vacuum parts. And, most importantly to me, cheap scarves (I got three for 1.50 euro!).

Another triangular plane. This is where all the cool Dutch kids hang out.

(I left my camera at the hotel at this point. No use in getting it pickpocketed!)

Now, E’s mother had given me a museum pass that gets you into most of the major museums for free. She lent it to me so I could use it. We went to the Rijksmuseum, the museum of the Dutch masters (Rembrandt, Vermeer, etc)., and just as I was handing my pass to the man at the counter, I noticed an important oversight – her birthdate was on it! I tried to be sly and hand it to the man with my thumb over the date, but of course, when he scanned it he looked at me and smirked. “Born in 1950, eh?” He let me through anyways, red-faced and chagrined.

Afterwards, I didn’t really want to risk using the museum pass at the Van Gogh museum, so we went ahead to the Anne Frank House (which doesn’t take the pass anyways). I would highly recommend to anyone going to Amsterdam, if you see nothing else, to go ahead and go here. Honestly, I have to admit that I hadn’t much interest in going here, beyond it being a tourist attraction. I’d read Anne Frank’s diary in middle school and remember it as a really good read, but I wasn’t exactly super excited about a history and morality lesson.

But the Anne Frank House is one of the better museums I’ve been to, as they have done a terrific job integrating the building with its history. Oddly enough, the outside facade is this weird modernistic steel and glass construction (E: “how did the Nazis miss this?”), but it actually provided a stark contrast between modern times and the historical part, I suppose. It was incredibly moving, much more so than expected, to actually stand in the space where Anne lived for those three years. It’s very dark inside, as they obviously had to keep the shades down, and though the space didn’t seem bad enough at first (the annex is probably bigger than an averagely priced New York apartment), being trapped in those few rooms for three straight years would be unimaginable for me.

Strolling through the annex and reading the accounts of how they passed their time, brought home the surreal horror of the Holocaust. They would cook each other elaborate meals out of the scraps they had (canned beans, potatoes, some lard). Anne would paste photos and clippings of movie stars on her wall to make the place look cheery. They were perfectly pleasant, ordinary people. Why did this happen?

I think it affected E much more strongly than I, though he’d had less interest in going, as he had just been tagging along on my touristy forays. E’s half German, and his grandfather had actually been stationed on the Russian front. His job was, the story goes, to run under the cars and light them so that they would start. He’d been shot four times, and after the war ended, he walked all the way back home from the Russian front, surprising E’s grandmother in a field. Really, quite the romantic story, and worthy of a sappy blockbuster movie ending – if you discount the fact that the protagonists were, more or less, fighting for the Nazis. For us in the U.S., WWII is a distant thing; in Europe, all the wounds and scars are still plainly visible.

We left the Anne Frank House and returned to the normal touristy world of Amsterdam. We stopped to get some coffee, of course, and I’ll just leave it at that. Also, because I was morbidly curious, we peeked into the red light district. Now E had been to Amsterdam before and said he found the red light district pretty depressing, as many of the workers are from third world countries, and are likelier than not, victims of economic exploitation and circumstance. I had my misgivings as well, but since I don’t know if I’ll ever come back here, figured I should at least see what all the fuss was about.

And as it turns out, not much. Tons of lights and weird display areas where the bored women stand naked in the windows. One woman even chatted on her cell phone; we figured she was probably trying to make more money by working as a phone sex operator. A lot of the girls looked like average girls one might find on the street, or behind the counter at a cafe. This was very different from my observation when staying in Honolulu and seeing prostitutes for the first time – I had looked at a woman standing by the street, and it just clicked in my head: “that woman is a hooker.” I’m not sure what makes a person look prostitute-y or not; maybe it’s roughly correlated to the amount of makeup.

Amsterdam, in general, was a very confusing city for us to navigate (perhaps it had something to do with the, uh, coffee). After awhile we just decided to walk home; we probably stumbled through the same flashy, blinky street carnival about eight times as we were trying to find our way around.

Exhausted, we went to bed early; the next day we were to head back to Nijmegen, by way of a tulip garden.

We were reluctant to leave Hallstatt, but as we were leaving it was rainy and misty. Beautiful, to be sure (I find few things more lovely than fog over water), but I’m sure it would have been even harder to leave if it had remained sunny and idyllic.

Winding through the Alps, the mountains churned out mist like factories – it was gorgeous. We got in late to Nijmegen, and wandered around the downtown area near where his parents are staying, looking for food. Note: there are seemingly thousands of donner kebab places in the Netherlands. This is strongly correlated, I’m told, to the amount of smoking that goes on here.

A bit about the house – apparently it used to be the case, in the Netherlands, that people paid taxes according to how wide their houses were. To exploit this loophole, basically all of the buildings in the Netherlands are really skinny and tall. The stairs are a serious challenge; I found I had to walk sideways up the stairs in order to get my bearings. I have absolutely no idea how the elderly, blind, or otherwise disabled manage to live in this country without breaking their necks. Do they never have to go upstairs?

Dutch stairs, a.k.a. “neckbreakers.”

Even in the countryside, where there is plenty of space, all the buildings are tall and skinny and smashed together, like giraffes in a huddle, balancing on tiptoes. The setup of Dutch buildings and housing developments most definitely contrasts with the sprawling, spacious American suburbs.

The next day, we got up early to go on an expedition to the Hoge Veluwe, a huge nature park outside of Nijmegen, whose name I still cannot pronounce. I think E pronounced it about five different ways when pressed about the matter. Each pronunciation vaguely sounded like a cat barfing.

Outside a wonderful little modern art museum in the center of the park. It houses a rather large collection of Van Goghs.

The statues are kind of snooty here. But I posed with him anyways!

Triangles and triangular setups seem to be really popular in Europe. Here’s an instance of a triangular plane.

At first I thought this was a maintenance unit, like for plumbing or sewage. Upon closer inspection, I realized that maybe this was art!

Stairs to nowhere. A lot of the sculpture art here seemed like practical jokes. (There was one which E had seen without me, which consisted of fake trees – in the middle of real trees – which where then watered and tended by groundskeepers).

The entrance admission to the nature park included access to bicycles. There are parking lots in several places in the park, full of bikes. You can take a bike, ride it somewhere, leave it and pick up a new one, which is a neat system. I was initially nervous because these bikes did not have any brakes (!), but it wasn’t too bad once I got used to it. Really fun, actually. The Netherlands is super flat, which is part of the reason why bikes are so popular here, and there were no cars or many other people around – thus eliminating the two things I hate to deal with when biking: hills and traffic. I could really get into biking, some day – even faster if I lived near a park like this.

So we rode around for a bit, and the rushing wind against my skin felt so nice. We came across this area that was made to look like the African Savannah for some reason (maybe hearkening back to the Dutch colonial days? who knows). We played in the sand for a bit and then rode some more. Basically it was like a gigantic playground, expansive enough for us to pretend that we were the only two people in it.

A sheep farm just outside the park. Yep, we came all the way from Kansas just to see a farm!

This sheep had some sort of weird disorder (it was shaking a lot), but it was cute and we fed it some grapes. Hope we didn’t make it more sick!

The baby lambs seemed to be doing well, despite the mother’s illness. So cute and fluffy.

We rode around and played in the park all day, until we were exhausted. No rest for the weary, however – the next morning, we set off for Amsterdam.

Without question, the most beautiful place in the world. (The world I’ve seen, at least.) Also, the place on our trip that most precisely displayed the concept of gemutlisch. As I sat out on the lake and wrote in my journal, the owner of the place we stayed (Pension Haus Sarstein) rowed out on the lake in lederhosen, his young son (grandson?) in tow. Everything was quiet, peaceful, and majestically beautiful. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves:

View of Halstatt Lake from the balcony of our pension room.

Little gemutlisch town!

The Austrians here have tamed these trees into submission. E said they’re like 3D objects they’ve attempted to force into a 2D lifestyle. Can’t be good for the foundation, but it’s awfully pretty.

Hiking up the side of the mountain.

Where we had a picnic!

Grafitti on the mountain, the work of bored gemutlisch Austrian punks, no doubt.

Here’s where things get a little odd. Yes, those are human skulls, located in the beinhaus of the Catholic Church atop the hill. In this area, up until as recently as 1960, they would dig up bones whenever they ran out of room in the cemetary. They would then paint the names of the dead on their skulls, as well as some dainty little flowers and other decorations. (Me to E: “Even the fucking skulls here are gemutlisch!”)

Okay, back to the land of the living. A pretty lake, a pretty town, a pretty day. Could life get any better?

Swans (like the rest of their bird cohorts) are evil. This feathered demon attempted to attack the adorable little boy from our pension house. Just look at those beady, plotting eyes.

I have this as a desktop background.

Dramatic skies.

E’s favorite photo – a lucky occurrence as I was fiddling with the night settings on my camera.

Notes I jotted down in my journal:

- The German word for jewelry is “schmuck.” Insert any number of jokes about people being suckers for buying expensive jewelry.

- Cats rule this town! There are several little wooden walkways leading out of the windows of many of the houses, made specifically for feline traffic. Even when we were at the local schmecker (mart), I noticed a significantly greater portion of the pet food aisle devoted to cat food, as compared to dog food (opposite of most places).

- Like most little towns in Europe, Hallstatt is divided by the Protestants, who worship at a modestly sober lakeside Lutheran church, and the Catholics, whose cathedral is positioned higher up, on the side of the mountain. The vestiges of the Protestant – Catholic divide manifest in bell-ringing wars: on the hour, the Protestant church’s bells would ring first, for a solid minute; swiftly thereafter followed the Catholic bells.

- There was another tiny town across the lake, perpetually shrouded in fog. If fairies suddenly swarmed out of the middle of the waters, I would not have been surprised; this place was so magical.

- The Alps! I was in the mothereffing Alps! How crazy is that?!

- None of us wanted to leave. How could the trip possibly get any better?