wandering Amsterdam part III

Conversation on Saturday night went till closing time. Apparently, in his spare time he is setting up an internet shop for his best friend, a painter, so KS told him about my etsy shop. Our Dutch friend proceeded to tell us all about his personal life and then asked several personal questions of each of us. It is not the way I am used to speaking with people I have just met, but I did appreciate his frankness. Also, it was interesting because this seemed such an obvious cultural difference - here it might have seemed like a stranger prying, but there it was more like it had never occurred to him to communicate in any other way (despite his American education).

Sunday, I was pretty tired, but we went for one last walk before I took the shuttle to the airport. Mercifully, my stop in Frankfort was less terrible than previous experiences there. I was back in Toronto and home by 9 pm.

Today, I think I will not try anything more challenging than grocery shopping. Afterall, I worked Saturday to Friday last week, not including all the hours spent travelling to and from meetings - I have decided I have earned a day off.




Even the gnomes are smoking in Amsterdam.

wandering Amsterdam part II

We had walked several kilometers are were dead tired and so we took the streetcar back out to the hotel and lay there chatting for an hour before dinner. We met a friend of K at the Rembrandtsplein and went to a popular, tiny Italian place for dinner, after waiting for a table in the pub across the street. Over dinner we discussed our jobs and science issues but then we continued for another drink, um, or five. He asked what Canadians thought of the Dutch. I managed not to say that we thought they were blunt and recognized how much it was appreciated that the Dutch always seem to remember how the Canadians freed their country at the end of each of the World Wars. Also, that the Dutch queen was born in Ottawa (during WWII) and our Parliament is now surounded by tulips from Holland.


Boats in the windows and in the canal...





Collection of those whatchamacallits - the crochet rope tools, in a window.

Explosion of Delftware.

I love the variety of scale in the canalhouses and the graffic effect of all the cream-on-black.

Seagull perched atop the angel on the rooftop.

wandering Amsterdam part I

We left our workshop at 3:30 pm and ran to catch the ferry to the mainland. We missed the bus connection to the train station, so we took cabs and ended up on the 4 pm train to Amsterdam, with the slowpokes who missed the ferry. The funny thing was that with the exception of a couple of locals our train car was filled with visiting scientists. The Scandinavians all sat together (perhaps because a Belgian teased them that it must already be dark at home). We sat in the Canadian-German-English-Belgian group. Then there was a foreigners-who-work-in-the-UK (Kiwis and Canucks, mainly) group behind us. I enjoyed our conversation and getting to see a little more of the townships and countryside in the daylight. Though conversations started with the usual topics (i.e. science from the meeting, are Canadians really different from Americans and how long was my flight home, language issues) it became quite animated. The Belgians were Flemish so they translated the announcements for us. They wanted to know how our language differed. They claimed that Québecois french was incomprehensible and I argued that it really depended, though I acknowledged that sometimes it was 16th century and people drove their char rather than their auto. The only English Canadian word I could think of was ribbit, which lead to a crazy conversation about sounds animals make in different languages. Also, strangely, none of them knew the word meme, and thought I had made it up.


After reaching Amsterdam and taking a streetcar to our hotel (in the same neighbourhood as our houseboat from the last trip), we found an Indonesian restaurant, one of the benefits to Holland of their former colony. We were going to go for a beer, but passed a theatre and randomly decided to watch Revolutionary Road. Then Saturday, we mainly wandered and shopped till dinner.



Check out the fist door knob, and requisite bikes.

Ernie and Bert down the alleyway...


The necessary tulips (even if artificial) where we stopped for coffee on a canal.

There was a beautiful Art Nouveau style restaurant in this hotel.





I returned to the Jordaan, because I enjoyed walking there previously. There are many shops and galleries, and artisans working in felt.

Dem Hoorn, the Netherlands, on Texel island in the North Sea

So I went from the Pacific to the North Sea. The flight from Vancouver to London was very long. It is somewhat frustrating to go all that way and then have to sit in Heathrow for four hours to fly the remaining 45 minutes, but that is the way it is.

I wonder if anyone else thinks about gravity waves and dispersion relations when looking down on clouds.

I went from Victoria with its bunnies, to Dem Hoorn and rabbit soup at the whiskey bar.

This is where I stayed, in the squat, tiny white building with the thatch roof. It was rather cute, but cold. Every day I went out and they would open the window while I was gone. I never figured that out. KS teased me because it did not occur to me that I could turn up the heat. She says this is because I am Canadian. Instead, I slept with two duvets on and a pillow on my head to hold the heat in.




This is a typical barn with its tile and thatch roof.

It was good workshop, if a little Euro-centric. One of these days I will get myself sent to the arctic (topic of our meeting).