We went to the Grote Kerk for the 11 a.m. service. There were only about 90 people in the congregation, at the one Sunday service, a communion service, at the most important Protestant church in a (theoretically) mostly Protestant city of 150,000. But it seemed to be a very pleasant, very friendly group of people. When we were greeted at the door, it became clear that we were English-speakers and someone came up to us and welcomed us, very cordially, in English. Several times during the service there were references, in English, to their English-speaking guests (there may have been others).
But what we were really there for was to hear the organ, and hear it we did! Mary Joy loved it: it was silvery and smooth; one could hear every voice. It served the organist well in his hymn-leading and hymn improvisation.
Afterwards, we went to the V&D department store and bought a couple of sandwiches for the flight home on Monday. We brought them back to our room and put them in the refrigerator. Then we went to the train station.
Buying tickets to Amsterdam turned out to be more involved than expected. We tried to get them out of a machine, but the machines didn’t take either cash or American credit cards. So we went to the ticket counter and I mentioned to the woman there that the machine wouldn’t accept my Visa card. “Neither do we,” she said, but unlike the machine, she did take cash. Reading Rick Steves later made it clear that no Dutch train ticket machines take credit cards (or American debit cards), while what else they accept may vary wildly from machine to machine (euro bills only, or euro coins only, or special tokens only). For a relatively civilized country, this seemed strange. We’ve had no trouble buying tickets with our Visa card at any Italian machine, and we did it at the one German machine that we tried, two years ago.
But we caught our “Sprinter” train and twenty minutes later we were at Amsterdam’s Central Station. We were immediately caught up in the crowd heading up the Damrak, the main street going up to Dam Square.
We didn’t have a particular itinerary in mind. Rick Steves had given Mary Joy some ideas on where to eat, and since it was after 1 p.m., that was the first order of business, though we briefly considered getting immediately on one of the canal tour boats docked by the station. Instead, we found ourselves in the horde of people moving south, past the Damrak Sex Museum and the Beurs (Stock Exchange) to Dam Square. This is where the Amstel River was dammed (hence “Amsterdam”) around the year 1250, and a village was built.
We looked into the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), but it didn’t appear to be that interesting, so we didn’t pay the ticket fee to go in. It had a Sunday evening organ concert series, but apparently not that particular evening, assuming that we would.want to stay in Amsterdam that late and come back to the church. Sol we went on, past the Royal Palace (the former City Hall in the time of the Republic, before the Netherlands had a king foisted upon it, following the Napoleonic Wars), and into the pedestrianized (and, as Rick Steves points out, cheesily, crassly commercialized) Kalverstraat.. We made a visit to the “hidden” Catholic church of St. Peter and Paul. After the Reformation, Catholicism was officially outlawed, but unofficially tolerated, as long as it kept a low profile, worshiping in churches that didn’t advertise themselves as such. This church doesn’t look like a church from the outside, but on the inside is a normal, if small, Catholic church, with all the trappings (altars, statues, pews, candles).
Next, we went to the Begijnhof. Beguines were Catholic laywomen, widows or spinsters, who, from 1346 on, lived together in individual townhouses around a courtyard, very much like the almshouses in Haarlem, only bigger, with its own church. The Beguines lived lives of prayer and acts of charity. After the Reformation, they continued, until the 1970s, though their church was taken away and given to English Calvinist refugees, fleeing persecution by the Church of England. The Mayflower Pilgrims worshiped there before leaving for America. It’s still an English Presbyterian church. Meanwhile, the Beguines turned a pair of the houses into a “hidden” Catholic church, and it still is one. The Begijnhof is still housing for single women, mostly Catholic.
Now we went looking for lunch. It took us a while—Rick Steves guidebooks have hand-drawn maps--but we finally tracked down Pannekoeken Huis Upstairs. Upstairs, indeed—the stairs were even steeper and narrower than the ones at Die Raeckse! Once we got to the top, there were only a few tables, but on this trip we were very lucky about getting into restaurants without having reservations, and that proved to be true here, too—one couple was just then leaving. We shared a large savory chicken pancake and, for dessert, a pancake with berries and whipped cream. As we were leaving, a rather heavy couple from New York was about to come up. I had been going to take a picture of the staircase, but I didn’t want to do so while they were going up, because a) it would be an invasion of their privacy; b) the stairs were so narrow that all you would see would be their rears; and c) if they fell and landed on me, I probably wouldn’t survive.
Continuing to follow the Rick Steves Amsterdam City Walk, we went through the Bloemenmarkt (Flower Market). While there certainly were flowers there, it might more accurately be described, at least this time of year, as the “Tulip Bulb Market.” A lot of it was dedicated to selling tulip bulbs and other seeds to tourists for use in their home gardens. The only full-grown tulips there (tulips being a spring flower) were wooden ones.
We went down the busy Leidsestraat, finally starting to cross the famous canals of Amsterdam, until we came to the Leidseplein. This is how Rick Steves characterizes it: “Filled with outdoor tables under trees; ringed with cafes, theaters and nightclubs; bustling with tourists, diners, trams, mimes, and fire-eaters; and lit by sun- or lantern-light, Leidseplein is Amsterdam’s liveliest square.” Maybe a little too lively for our tastes. We decided not to stop there, and instead go on to the Vondelpark. But I made a wrong turn (Rick Steves maps!) and eventually we ended up at the Rijksmuseum, instead. This is the greatest art museum in the Netherlands. When my father and I saw it in 1991, it had been largely closed because a special exhibition was being set up, so most of its most famous paintings (by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, etc.) were crammed together in a relatively small space. Mary Joy and I had considered going there, but hadn’t been able to figure out getting tickets in advance, and were now there so late in the day that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to pay the twelve-and-a-half euro entrance fee.
So far, Mary Joy was not impressed with Amsterdam, finding it too crowded with tourists and too commercialized. Steves suggested that Jordaan was a nice neighborhood, and had a tour of it in his book, so we passed by the entrance to the Vondelpark, which is sort of the Central Park of Amsterdam, and didn’t go in. Instead, we crossed the bridge back over the Singelgracht (“gracht” means “canal”) to the Max Euweplein, with its large-scale chessboard (Max Euwe was world chess champion in the mid-twentieth century). To get back to the Leidseplein, you go through a modern-classical colonnade, above which is a Latin inscription which had impressed me with its sage advice when I first saw it twenty-one years before: “HOMO SAPIENS NON URINAT IN VENTUM,” which tells you what a wise man doesn’t do into the wind.
I had liked Amsterdam back then, as had my dad, though he had thought that it was unfortunate that so much of the city was defaced by graffiti. We didn’t notice much graffiti now.
We went through the Leidseplein, again without stopping, and back down the Leidsestraat, turning left at the Prinsengracht. Here is how Amsterdam is laid out: the Amstel River comes in from the southeast. It originally ran into the larger IJ River about where the train station is now, creating a harbor just before the IJ flowed into the Zuider Zee (a large bay leading to the North Sea, but now mostly reclaimed as dry land). As we’ve seen, the Amstel was dammed at Dam Square in the thirteenth century. Since then, the riverbed both north and south of Dam Square has been filled in and turned into streets (Damrak and Rokin). The River itself is now led through canals north on both sides of the old town center, which is now basically an island, with canals like a deep cup surrounding it on three sides, and the harbor, to the north, sitting like a lid on the top of the cup.
During the city’s golden age, during the seventeenth century, it expanded beyond the old town, to the west, creating three new canals to drain the new real estate development: the Herengracht (Lords’ Canal), Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal) and Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal). The Prinsengracht, alongside which we now walked, is very pleasant, with shady banks. Tied alongside these banks are Amsterdam’s answer to a 1930s housing shortage: houseboats. These are mostly old barges that have been turned into living quarters, with plumbing and electricity. Most of them are not exactly beautiful, looking like what they are: beat-up former working barges. There is even a Houseboat Museum, along the Prinsengracht.
We walked along the west bank of the Prinsengracht for about fifteen blocks, crossing a number of side canals and passing across from the Westerkerk, where Rembrandt is buried, and the Anne Frank House. We were now in Jordaan.. Rick Steves says: “Welcome to the quiet Jordaan. Built in the 1600s as a working-class housing area, it’s now home to artists and yuppies.” A very pleasant neighborhood. Mary Joy liked it a lot more than the commercial center, overrun by hordes of tourists (like us). We needed coffee at this point, so we stopped at a recommended café, Café ‘t Smalle, and even though the skies looked threatening, sat at a table by the canal (a side canal running into the Prinsengracht). We ordered slices of apple cake with our coffee, which arrived just before the rain. Our table had an umbrella, but it didn’t cover everything, so Mary Joy got hers out, and we finished our cake and coffee, staying dry.
The rain didn’t last long, so we crossed over the side canal and took a look into the Cheese Museum. There didn’t appear to be anything about Wisconsin cheese in this museum, so, disappointed, we went out and crossed the Prinsengracht to the Anne Frank House.
Everyone knows the story of how Anne Frank and her Jewish family hid in a secret annex behind her father’s office, a story somewhat similar to Corrie ten Boom’s. This was the building, a modern commercial building facing the Prinsengracht. The context is a little disorienting: here is where Anne and the others hid from the Nazis for two years; a block south is the Westerkerk, where Rembrandt is buried, under Amsterdam’s tallest steeple; across the canal is the Cheese Museum. The line to enter the Anne Frank House stretched out in front of the building, so we didn’t try. Instead, we followed the Rick Steves “Jordaan Walk” backwards, along the Leliegracht canal, toward the center of town.
It started to rain very heavily. My umbrella, having been turned inside-out several times, had some holes in it, so I was getting wet. Along the Leliegracht we stopped several times under cover of awnings or roof overhangs, to wait for the rain to let up a little, but it didn’t. One of the places we stopped, I think, was a “coffeshop.” In Amsterdam, a “coffeeshop” is not a place where you get a coffee. It is, instead, a place where marijuana is sold and consumed, legally. However, a recent law will, in a few months, ban sales to foreigners. Several times on our visit to Amsterdam I smelled something that brought back memories of younger days (though, like Bill Clinton, I had never inhaled).
Eventually, before we got back to the center of town, the rain pretty much ended. We went looking for an early dinner and ended up at Kantjil en de Tijger, an Indonesian restaurant behind the Begijnhof. We weren’t hungry enough for a full-scale rijsttafel (“rice table”), a multicourse meal, so instead we each had a single large bowl containing rice, meat and vegetables.
Now we went back down to the boat docks by the Central Station, to see if we could get one of the recommended canal tours. We had less than twenty minutes to wait for a 100 Highlights Cruise with Holland International. We got window seats in the low boat, designed to pass under the bridges. The hour-long tour took us first out into the harbor, which we hadn’t before seen, then into the canal system—we cruised along the Prinsengracht a lot faster than we had walked the same route. The pre-recorded description was in Dutch, German, English and Spanish (not French, for some reason). It was interesting to compare and contrast the versions in the different languages—not always exactly the same. The tour was interesting and relaxing and we were glad we took it.
We caught a train back to Haarlem. Walking back to the hotel, Mary Joy expressed a hunger for some fries—the ones she’d had in the market the day before had been very good. On a Sunday night, there wasn’t much open other than pizza places and bars. We might have gotten fries in the latter, but that wasn’t clear, and I was tired, so we went back to Die Raeckse and finished packing.
The next day, everything went smoothly. We took the train to Sloterdijk, changed to the airport train and arrived in plenty of time to catch our flight to Reykjavik. We ate our Haarlem sandwiches on the plane and, when we got in, had something at one of the airport cafeterias. Our stay at Keflavik Airport was much shorter than on the way over, only about an hour-and-a-half. On the plane to MSP with us were a group of older people, as well as a pair of young men (one of them wearing a horned Viking helmet) who had been representing Iowa pork producers at some Icelandic event.
No skyr on either flight. We got into the Humphrey Terminal around 6 p.m., got quickly through immigration and customs, and called our friend Mary Kay, who picked us up and got us home.
All in all, a good trip. In the future, we’ll aim for less traveling around. Mary Joy said that she was afraid that I’d end up with a heart attack, moving our heavy bags around. I really didn't have any trouble, though: neither was more than about 30 pounds.
Next? We haven’t decided where our autumn trip will be, but we’ll have to make up our minds soon. Next summer? Probably Spain.
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