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I am back from the Netherlands and very much don't want to be. I think that was the nicest holiday I've been on in years, and probably one of the most needed. One of my favourite poems is by Stephen Vincent Benét, "Nightmare at Noon", and has the lines, It was an old, peaceful city, Rotterdam / Clean, tidy, full of flowers / With the usual furnishings, such as cats and children.
We arrived in Rotterdam on Friday morning and I decided to extrapolate the sentiment to the whole of the Netherlands. The whole country is so small, so flat, so endlessly picturesque - there were rabbits bounding over the railway lines in front of commuter trains - so full of flashes of colour around corners, tiny, mundane wonders. We went by sea, and I was doubtful in the extreme about this - the last time I went anywhere by sea, everything was orange and ghastly, I distinctly recall, and I ended up wishing I'd just stayed at home - but we took the late train from London, reached Harwich in the dead of night, had a civilised drink by a porthole as the ship pulled out to sea, and slept peacefully on top of each other in a cabin with berths, towels and hot water by the bucket. When I woke up we were at the Hook of Holland and I've never travelled anywhere in such ludicrous comfort.
It's a very small place, with a very small railway station. The establishment at one end of the platform, where you would expect a ticket office to be, is a fishmonger's. There were ticket machines, which rejected first Shim's card, then mine. They didn't take banknotes. We were in a small town in the distinct middle of nowhere, being windswept as though it were the middle of December, and we didn't have thirty-one euro in change. I mean, who does? We went into the town, which was deserted, and had a bank with its only sign in English reading "No change". We walked back over to the tiny station, got on the tiny train, and waited to be thrown off or fined or told we must leave continental Europe for our sheer presumptuousness, when the ticket inspector appeared. He looked exactly like Lembit Opik, and said, "You must have a ticket. It is a seventy euro fine."
"We'll pay it," I said, feeling like I had proven myself unworthy of the Netherlands. "Really, we will."
"There is," he said very sternly, "a ticket office in Rotterdam. Go there."
And then he disappeared, whistling. The kindness of strangers turned out to be a theme - that, and speedy public transport, beautiful architecture and those cats and children. Rotterdam was fresh, full of busy, cheerful people, and they sold us tickets for the intercity train, which was a dream - again, you could doze off in one place and wake up in another, and then we were in Amsterdam, for which I fell, ludicrously and romantically, in the sort of way you are not supposed to fall for cities, which are really just bricks and mortar and canal-water, the moment I stepped off the train.
Things I loved about Amsterdam:
-The water. The way the city is moulded and shaped by the water, the way there are houses with small boats tied up to their front doors, and flowers growing at the edge, wild, and in perfectly cultivated pots, and how you can step up to perfect gnarled wrought iron bridges and watch the sunlight sparkle off the soft edges of it all. And then when it's all getting too poetic for words, a booze cruise drifts by, trailing beer cans and the dim smell of hemp. Shim and I waited all weekend for someone to fall out of a booze cruise into the canal underneath our balcony. This never happened. It was very disappointing.
-Balcony, yes! The apartment we were lucky enough to be staying in was film-set gorgeous; the top of an old warehouse building, almost a studio, but not quite, open-plan, enormous polished wood floors and the original, centuries-old beams holding the whole place together. Mirrors everywhere, sunlight streaming in every day from whole walls of windows, every step I took I felt like I was in an advertisement for something, possibly men's razors. It was quite noisy, being right in the centre of the city and surrounded by a lot of bars and coffeeshops, but I can usually sleep through people shouting when they're shouting in a language I don't speak.
(Although they seem to drunkenly shout in their native tongue, everyone in the Netherlands speaks English. This is a cliché, but it is embarrassing and it is true. My grasp of Dutch, after five days, extends to "alstublieft", which is how you say please and thank you nicely; as a contrast, one night we ate in a pretty Italian restaurant by Prinsengracht and the waiter spoke to the table next to us in Dutch, the one on the other side in German, and then came to us and began to precisely enunciate the specials in barely-accented English. For a moment he got sardines and anchovies mixed up. He apologised for his imperfect command of the language. I just... I cannot even. Anchovies.)
-The Café Het Gasthuys, which is possibly my favourite drinking establishment of all time. We discovered it on our first night in Amsterdam, and remembered it mostly because the waitress fell over twice. On subsequent visits, we discovered that a) all the waitresses were preternaturally beautiful (Shim notes, emphatically, that this is entirely my judgement, and he is not the sort of person who looks at waitresses in smoky bars, because he is old and respectable and I malign him); b) they are also very kind, and speak perfect English, and serve you gin with berries in it; and c) the café had the requisite cat. Its name was Kaspar, and it was amiable, black, and unruffled. It lived by the kitchen door. The place did very good food. The cat was roughly spherical.
By Monday, we realised we had been in the city four days and done nothing whatsoever. I mean... not nothing. We had slept in, and walked down sunlit alleys full of flowers, and watched the boats go past, and admired waitresses, and sneezed outside coffeeshops, and been momentarily horrified by the Red Light District (I believe it gets initial capitals because it's the oldest one) - the girls in the windows were disconcerting enough, but I was dazed by the girl who opened her window, swept the front with a handily placed broom, and then stepped back into her window and her livid backlight as though nothing were odd - and drank a lot of coffee, and discovered the Dutch equivalent of J. Sainbury, Albert Heijn, and spent happy half-hours procuring waffles, coffee and cheese.
But we hadn't done anything that tourists do, we'd been too busy being on holiday. So we went to the Anne Frank House, which I was last at when I was eight and it was being refurbished, and it was... sobering. Outside, the queue was miles long, there was a group of tourists with southern Californian accents saying things like, "So, like, who was this Anne Frank person?" and "Like, so, was this her house?", and I wondered if it was a bad idea - but inside was worth seeing. The museum aspect has been done well, subtly, and mostly it lets extracts from the diary explain themselves, with the bare minimum of explanatory notes. I always forget how young she was. Thirteen when she started writing, and fifteen when she died. The sunlight outside was necessary, afterwards.
(We also, through a mistake in navigation that was entirely not my fault, ended up walking by the harbour, and while we were there, paused to look at the Amsterdam, a reconstructed Dutch East Indiaman currently moored in the harbour. I've been reading a lot about the Age of Sail. It was worth seeing - tiny, and beautifully reconstructed, and we peered into the hold full of cinnamon and nutmeg, a gunroom I couldn't stand straight in, and perched on the top decks and looked up at the rigging and out of the water. More fun, I think, than museums, really. And that was it, for Serious Cultural Things In Amsterdam. I suppose pancakes are cultural - we found, also, the world's best pancake house, run out of the front room of the people who had the apartment next to ours. It was run by two guys, had only four tables, could only be accessed by ladder, had a roof covered in kettles, and served the best pancakes I have ever seen. They were enormous, covered in cream and cinnamon and apple and bacon (not all at once, but nearly) and it was with great disappointment that we discovered they were only open three days a week. (My theory is that the owner must be putting himself through chef school, the rest of the week. Mmmmm.))
And so there we go. The return was unfun, not because it didn't go smoothly, and not because there weren't the same easy fast trains and cosy wee berth out - but because it was a return. What a wonderful country. All the syrup waffles you could ever eat. A monument, in the city centre, with fresh flowers laid on it, for oppressed LGBT people throughout history. The sound of tram and bicycle bells waking you in the morning. Flowers, running water, children, cats. We got back to dim grey England and went back to London on a dim grey commuter train, and I have returned to the north, and all went entirely to plan, and oh, I do wish we hadn't left. The days were all perfect, full of nothing but varied and disparate joys, with my dear-and-much-maligned-beloved, all washed through by water and golden sun.
We said we'd go back; I hope we do.
We arrived in Rotterdam on Friday morning and I decided to extrapolate the sentiment to the whole of the Netherlands. The whole country is so small, so flat, so endlessly picturesque - there were rabbits bounding over the railway lines in front of commuter trains - so full of flashes of colour around corners, tiny, mundane wonders. We went by sea, and I was doubtful in the extreme about this - the last time I went anywhere by sea, everything was orange and ghastly, I distinctly recall, and I ended up wishing I'd just stayed at home - but we took the late train from London, reached Harwich in the dead of night, had a civilised drink by a porthole as the ship pulled out to sea, and slept peacefully on top of each other in a cabin with berths, towels and hot water by the bucket. When I woke up we were at the Hook of Holland and I've never travelled anywhere in such ludicrous comfort.
It's a very small place, with a very small railway station. The establishment at one end of the platform, where you would expect a ticket office to be, is a fishmonger's. There were ticket machines, which rejected first Shim's card, then mine. They didn't take banknotes. We were in a small town in the distinct middle of nowhere, being windswept as though it were the middle of December, and we didn't have thirty-one euro in change. I mean, who does? We went into the town, which was deserted, and had a bank with its only sign in English reading "No change". We walked back over to the tiny station, got on the tiny train, and waited to be thrown off or fined or told we must leave continental Europe for our sheer presumptuousness, when the ticket inspector appeared. He looked exactly like Lembit Opik, and said, "You must have a ticket. It is a seventy euro fine."
"We'll pay it," I said, feeling like I had proven myself unworthy of the Netherlands. "Really, we will."
"There is," he said very sternly, "a ticket office in Rotterdam. Go there."
And then he disappeared, whistling. The kindness of strangers turned out to be a theme - that, and speedy public transport, beautiful architecture and those cats and children. Rotterdam was fresh, full of busy, cheerful people, and they sold us tickets for the intercity train, which was a dream - again, you could doze off in one place and wake up in another, and then we were in Amsterdam, for which I fell, ludicrously and romantically, in the sort of way you are not supposed to fall for cities, which are really just bricks and mortar and canal-water, the moment I stepped off the train.
Things I loved about Amsterdam:
-The water. The way the city is moulded and shaped by the water, the way there are houses with small boats tied up to their front doors, and flowers growing at the edge, wild, and in perfectly cultivated pots, and how you can step up to perfect gnarled wrought iron bridges and watch the sunlight sparkle off the soft edges of it all. And then when it's all getting too poetic for words, a booze cruise drifts by, trailing beer cans and the dim smell of hemp. Shim and I waited all weekend for someone to fall out of a booze cruise into the canal underneath our balcony. This never happened. It was very disappointing.
-Balcony, yes! The apartment we were lucky enough to be staying in was film-set gorgeous; the top of an old warehouse building, almost a studio, but not quite, open-plan, enormous polished wood floors and the original, centuries-old beams holding the whole place together. Mirrors everywhere, sunlight streaming in every day from whole walls of windows, every step I took I felt like I was in an advertisement for something, possibly men's razors. It was quite noisy, being right in the centre of the city and surrounded by a lot of bars and coffeeshops, but I can usually sleep through people shouting when they're shouting in a language I don't speak.
(Although they seem to drunkenly shout in their native tongue, everyone in the Netherlands speaks English. This is a cliché, but it is embarrassing and it is true. My grasp of Dutch, after five days, extends to "alstublieft", which is how you say please and thank you nicely; as a contrast, one night we ate in a pretty Italian restaurant by Prinsengracht and the waiter spoke to the table next to us in Dutch, the one on the other side in German, and then came to us and began to precisely enunciate the specials in barely-accented English. For a moment he got sardines and anchovies mixed up. He apologised for his imperfect command of the language. I just... I cannot even. Anchovies.)
-The Café Het Gasthuys, which is possibly my favourite drinking establishment of all time. We discovered it on our first night in Amsterdam, and remembered it mostly because the waitress fell over twice. On subsequent visits, we discovered that a) all the waitresses were preternaturally beautiful (Shim notes, emphatically, that this is entirely my judgement, and he is not the sort of person who looks at waitresses in smoky bars, because he is old and respectable and I malign him); b) they are also very kind, and speak perfect English, and serve you gin with berries in it; and c) the café had the requisite cat. Its name was Kaspar, and it was amiable, black, and unruffled. It lived by the kitchen door. The place did very good food. The cat was roughly spherical.
By Monday, we realised we had been in the city four days and done nothing whatsoever. I mean... not nothing. We had slept in, and walked down sunlit alleys full of flowers, and watched the boats go past, and admired waitresses, and sneezed outside coffeeshops, and been momentarily horrified by the Red Light District (I believe it gets initial capitals because it's the oldest one) - the girls in the windows were disconcerting enough, but I was dazed by the girl who opened her window, swept the front with a handily placed broom, and then stepped back into her window and her livid backlight as though nothing were odd - and drank a lot of coffee, and discovered the Dutch equivalent of J. Sainbury, Albert Heijn, and spent happy half-hours procuring waffles, coffee and cheese.
But we hadn't done anything that tourists do, we'd been too busy being on holiday. So we went to the Anne Frank House, which I was last at when I was eight and it was being refurbished, and it was... sobering. Outside, the queue was miles long, there was a group of tourists with southern Californian accents saying things like, "So, like, who was this Anne Frank person?" and "Like, so, was this her house?", and I wondered if it was a bad idea - but inside was worth seeing. The museum aspect has been done well, subtly, and mostly it lets extracts from the diary explain themselves, with the bare minimum of explanatory notes. I always forget how young she was. Thirteen when she started writing, and fifteen when she died. The sunlight outside was necessary, afterwards.
(We also, through a mistake in navigation that was entirely not my fault, ended up walking by the harbour, and while we were there, paused to look at the Amsterdam, a reconstructed Dutch East Indiaman currently moored in the harbour. I've been reading a lot about the Age of Sail. It was worth seeing - tiny, and beautifully reconstructed, and we peered into the hold full of cinnamon and nutmeg, a gunroom I couldn't stand straight in, and perched on the top decks and looked up at the rigging and out of the water. More fun, I think, than museums, really. And that was it, for Serious Cultural Things In Amsterdam. I suppose pancakes are cultural - we found, also, the world's best pancake house, run out of the front room of the people who had the apartment next to ours. It was run by two guys, had only four tables, could only be accessed by ladder, had a roof covered in kettles, and served the best pancakes I have ever seen. They were enormous, covered in cream and cinnamon and apple and bacon (not all at once, but nearly) and it was with great disappointment that we discovered they were only open three days a week. (My theory is that the owner must be putting himself through chef school, the rest of the week. Mmmmm.))
And so there we go. The return was unfun, not because it didn't go smoothly, and not because there weren't the same easy fast trains and cosy wee berth out - but because it was a return. What a wonderful country. All the syrup waffles you could ever eat. A monument, in the city centre, with fresh flowers laid on it, for oppressed LGBT people throughout history. The sound of tram and bicycle bells waking you in the morning. Flowers, running water, children, cats. We got back to dim grey England and went back to London on a dim grey commuter train, and I have returned to the north, and all went entirely to plan, and oh, I do wish we hadn't left. The days were all perfect, full of nothing but varied and disparate joys, with my dear-and-much-maligned-beloved, all washed through by water and golden sun.
We said we'd go back; I hope we do.
