Amsterdam

Amsterdam – what a welcome! We arrived late on the afternoon of 30th April which is Queen’s Day and the Dutch sure know how to party. The whole country stops to celebrate Queen’s day – parades, entertainment, street parties on lots of corners and drinking, drinking, drinking!!! Many of the streets were closed so to get from Central Station (where we arrived from Paris via Brussels) was a bit of a mission. But we made it. To start our Amsterdam experience off we went to a live concert in Museumplein and mixed in with the younger people listening to a popular singer called Jan Smit. One young man befriended Clive and gave him a Dutch party hat and a welcome to join the celebrations. Some beer cans being thrown suggested it might be a good time to leave but it did appear overall to be pretty well behaved. The smell of dope is everywhere – all around the concert venue and outside the coffee shops which line the canals. The next morning was also very slow – the streets were deserted with people beginning to surface around 11.00am; the streets were awash with litter and the omnipresent smell of urine. Yuk!!
The Dutch speak English very well (and most of them will speak at least some) so getting around and buying things like food and music and stuff is generally very easy. And bikes galore in Amsterdam. Everything moves slowly because streets are just so crowded with not only bikes, cars and pedestrians (tourists from lots of European countries seem to flock to this relatively expensive city) but a very efficient tram service as well. After a minor hiccup getting the strip cards validated for our first trip, tram travel has been either not necessary or very easy. We enjoyed a 75 minute canal trip – missed out on the commentary because we chose to sit outside (as it turned out above the engines which provided warm seating) but with a map in had we were able to see what we were passing. The canals are very similar to those in Venice only wider and some of the older houses in the warehouse district have been built with a distinct lean to allow hoists from the building tops to pick up loads from the barges in the canals below. So that’s why they seem to be leaning but it doesn’t explain the sideways lean on other buildings, especially those away from the canals (unless they have been built above now filled/reclaimed canals.) Following the canal trip we ventured on our way and spent a good number of hours in Amsterdam’s Historical Museum before hitting the streets again and ending up at the Central Railway station. A brief stop atthe closed Catholic Church of Saint Nicholas and we wandered on stopping for what we thought was a Dutch Beer – it turned out to be Belgian (so, in Amsterdam, we had a Belgian beer which meant we were able to have a beer for every European country we had visited). From the pit stop we ended up walking through the Red Light District which is one of the most frequently visited areas of Amsterdam where the girls offer themselves from behind glass windows. From the Red Light area we wandered back through Rembrandtsplein where stands a statue of the artist himself along with moulded copper statues of characters from his painting, ‘Night Watch’.
The second day in Amsterdam we split: Shelley went to van Gogh Museum and Clive wandered the city getting bearings and bought a Jan Smit CD. After a brief re familiarisation with the city we headed off again looking to go up the tower of Westerkerk to get a city view: no luck!! The church was closed to visitors at that time and the tower was fully booked. Maybe later! A walk along the canals took us to the narrowest house in Amsterdam (as wide as a door); and we also found our way to Begijnhof, a secreted away community now providing homes for women, which was once the home of the Beguines, young women who led the lives of nuns without actually taking nun’s vows (and therefore never became nuns.)
Our last day was again spent with a bit of a purposeful wander. It started with a tram ride into the Centraal Station and from there a stroll into the edge of the Red Light District to an old church in the attic. The entrance was via a house but the church on the third level was spread across three houses and it was here that Catholics came to worship for 200 years after Catholicism was banned by the Reformed Churches (who in the end actually turned a blind eye to the practice of Catholicism, so long as the church itself could not be identified from the outside.) After this visit we attended lunchtime Mass in the Church of Saint Nicholas. This church was constructed after Catholicism was again allowed to be practised in the 1800s and it kind of showed in the release of artistic expression throughout the interior of the building. From this church we made a visit to the Oude Kerk (the Old Church) which is no longer used as a church but more as an exhibition centre. On display here was a World Press Photo Exhibition (2008) which was an interesting array of photographs of all sorts of world situation from war to famine to life in general. We split up after that: Shelley going to an Evensong in Saint Nicholas and Clive returning to the hotel to update the blob site.
And thus endeth our Amsterdam experience. They say it rains here: but for five days for us brilliant sunshine and warmth.