It drizzled on Koninginedag (Queens day), but that didn't dampen spirits here in Amsterdam. We had heard that Queens Day was a giant flea market, but we did not really imagine the scale of the operation. It should not be a surprise, however, that in this country that was built on trade, the biggest national holiday should be a day devoted to the spirit of bargaining and free trade. A million people come into Amsterdam on this day, and it seems as if they all have something to sell (or buy).
There was a giant rock concert on the Museumplein, but we were a bit too overwhelmed by the crowds to attend. We saw plenty of performers in the Vondelpark, though -- most of them under 12 years old.
Of course, there was plenty of ORANJE everywhere.
and royal crowns.
We scored some great items for few Euros, although the need to pack it all up and bring it home one day restrained us a bit.
On Queens Day, the only person who did not make a sale, I'm sorry to say, was Dennis.
You know, when you tell people you are moving to Amsterdam they generally shoot you a wink, an impish grin, or if they are particularly demonstrative, they raise their thumb and forefinger to their lips and suck the air in loudly as if they are . . . well, you know. One of our friends told us to look for the bench in the Vondel Park that he had carved his initials on back in 1976. He'd been sleeping on it for weeks.
Well, the sixties and seventies are over and while there is still lots of marijuana and prostitution in Amsterdam, the party city of freewheeling hippie life that so many people of a certain age remember has not been immediately apparent to us.
Until now.
Spring has sprung in Amsterdam, and it brings with it a lot more than flowers. Suddenly the Vondel Park is like Woodstock.
The outdoor cafes at Nieuw Markt are overflowing.
The bohemians and street performers are out in droves (here is an impromptu parade for the Bohemian Museum).
And everybody is out cleaning up their boats and getting them ready for the giant party that is Queens Day, coming up on Friday.
The queen's birthday (actually, the queen mother's birthday -- the birthday of the current queen is in February, not so good for a street party) is apparently a big excuse for a giant flea market, street festival and 24-hour drinking binge. Or so I hear. Everybody wears orange, and we are ready with orange T - shirts emblazoned "Lang leve de Koningin" (Long Live the Queen). Bet you never thought you'd hear that from this Democratic ward leader. I have also been given an orangecowboy hat. Yee haw!
I'll be sure and post some photos. Please be patient if it takes a week or two; on Saturday we head off for a week in the south of France, where we will have no Internet (poor us).
Here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for . . . tulips. Holland is the world's most prolific producer of tulips, and for two months each year they are on exuberant display at the mother of all flower shows: Keukenhof ("kitchen garden"). It's just outside Amsterdam, so today I took a bus from Schiphol and met my second-cousin Carla (our grandmothers were sisters) for a day of catching up and flower-gazing.
We roped a passerby into taking our photo.
Keukenhof has several indoor pavilions and a few auxiliary attractions like a petting zoo and a windmill, but the main event -- and the draw that brings in over 800,000 visitors a year -- is the outdoor gardens: seven million bulbs, planted in strict formation, producing a well-organized explosion of color.
Personally, I like a wilder, more naturalistic style of garden, but I couldn't help but be impressed with the beauty and diversity of the flowers, which range from the sublime
to the bizarre,
or by the ambitiousness and precision of the displays, which this year were focused on the rather sweetly old-fashioned theme, "To Russia With Love."
a live floral portrait of St. Basil's Cathedral!
Although I have to admit that my favorite aspect of the day was catching up with Carla and learning heretofore unknown (to me) details about my family history, I enjoyed my tiptoe through the tulips, and will likely go back (the kids have to see it too, of course!
Here's the best part: the fields of cutting flowers (here seen from the vantage point of the windmill's upper deck). Unfortunately, I found it impossible to capture the splendor of this vast expanse of blooming hyacinths and tulips in a photo. But here's a hint:
So the weather in Amsterdam is absolutely gorgeous today and it's hard to imagine there is a threatening cloud of particulate matter hanging over us. We live in a bit of a bubble -- until this morning we were mainly concerned with whether my father-in-law would make it across from NY on Wednesday as planned. But the extent of the problem is starting to sink in. The European edition of the New York Times tells us supermarkets here may begin to run out of perishables soon, so I think I will stock up on meat and frozen and canned goods when the stores open tomorrow. Hope it's not too chaotic. I'll report back.
Turns out the parrots are really rose-ringed parakeets, and they have colonized Amsterdam and some other European cities following a release in 1987 in Brussels when a zoo was closed. What a strange thing to do, don't you think?
When you are living in a foreign country, what is initially new and exotic quickly becomes familiar. If you're not careful, you can forget to pay attention to what is different and therefore exciting or stimulating about this new place. Luckily, the changing season is providing me with new sights and discoveries that create the electric jolt I need to remember to look around -- take note -- consider -- wonder -- remember. Little things like, say, parrots in the trees.
At least I think they are parrots. They showed up about the time the cherry trees blossomed. I found this one busily eating flowers and tried to capture him with a blossom in his beak, but either I or the camera was too slow.
Bird life in general here in Amsterdam continues to surprise me. The first surprise was that herons, which I consider a rare and elusive sight at home, are everywhere. The canals provide them with great fishing opportunities, and they don't seem troubled by the proximity of pesky humans, even those with cameras.
I snapped this one in my neighborhood green spot, Sarphatipark. And believe me, I don't have much of a zoom (our best camera disappeared in The Great Rustenburgerstraat Car Break-In and I now use the kids' cameras). I was just about close enough to touch this guy.
While the herons look familiar -- I am not enough of a birder to know if we have the same species in North America -- spring has brought out lots of other water birds I've never seen before: ducks with black bodies and white faces, all-black ducks with bright red beaks, giant, exotic-looking brownish ducks that the kids liken to wild turkeys. Of course, it stands to reason that the fauna would be different here from that back home, but somehow this has taken me by surprise.
By the same token, I did not realize that Amsterdam's latitude was considerably north of Columbus's. So I was very surprised on arrival in January to find how much shorter the days were here. Mornings were terrible -- it didn't get light until about 8:30. Now that it's spring, things are back to what I consider normal. I'm told the days in summer will be delightfully long.
Another sign of spring is construction, and with it comes another of those little details of daily life that remind me that this is elsewhere: everywhere that dirt has been turned up, there are tiny seashells.
This photo was taken not at the beach but in front of our apartment, where the sidewalk has been dug up for the endless construction project that seems poised to swallow our building. In compensation, it offers us this: evidence that our neighborhood, like most of Amsterdam, was once under water.
Construction here is distinguished by the ubiquity of cranes. Not the flying kind but rather the kind that are used to hoist things and move them around. I don't think construction is possible in the cramped spaces of Amsterdam, where every inch of dry land is pressed into service, without the use of construction equipment that is extremely vertical. We see the cranes everywhere, astonishingly tall, lifting everything from two-by-fours to forklifts. The garbage collection trucks use a sort of crane device as well.
Of course, springtime is when the baby animals are born, as we were reminded 2500-acre pleasure forest that was planted just outside Amsterdam about 75 years ago. Just a quick bike ride away, it offers miles of biking paths, canoes and pedal boats for rent, a rowing club, a cheese farm, several swimming areas, a high ropes course,
numerous watering-holes, and an amazing little farm where the goats and children mix as naturally as if they were not from different species. The goats wander about the playground -- I saw one trying to go up a metal slide -- and Clara picked one up and held it like a baby. Birthing season was in full swing when we arrived on Saturday, with several goats in labor and one still-wet newborn tottering about on shaky legs. I watched on Mama goat labor for quite a while, hoping to be present when her kids emerged, but eventually had to leave. I felt for her, fully recognizing the focused and inward-turned expression on her face. We couldn't resist going back the next day, and there in the spot where she had been laboring were the two adorable fruits of her labor.
Okay, I bet you were expecting to hear about the flowers. It's still glove-wearing weather in the mornings, but the afternoons are sunny and warm. Here in the city we have already had snowdrops, crocuses, daffodils, hyacinth and forsythia, and the trees are currently blooming.
About the tulips. While they are ridiculously cheap in the markets, I've not yet seen them blooming in gardens. However, the Keukenhof, the mother of all tulip gardens, is now open, and I'm planning to go there next week with a long-lost Dutch cousin. I'll report back then.
Our four-day visit to Paris was a whirlwind tour. I'm especially impressed with my kids for keeping up with the pace: Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees, Sainte Chapelle, Notre Dame cathedral, Latin Quarter, Luxembourg Gardens, Tuileries Gardens, nostalgic pilgrimage to Suzanne's dormitory from her junior year abroad in 1981, Louvre . . .
(not sure how Clara and Zander got this:
when the crowd in front of Mona Lisa looked like this:)
. . . Musee d'Orsay, St. Germain des Pres, Montmartre (portraits of the kids! ), le Marais, Eiffel Tower (a special thanks to Clara for not being TOO disappointed that we decided not to go up), a dinner party chez Martine Higonnet near Place de la Concorde . . . and more. We got wet several times and it hailed on us once at the top of the steps of the Sacre Coeur Basilica in Montmartre.
Clara and Zander are great travelers, and despite less-than-stellar weather, Paris was as amazing as ever. I'd forgotten how big it is, and how filled with surprises. I'll never forget the look on Clara's face when our taxi emerged into the Place de la Concorde and she caught her first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower -- and the Arc de Triomphe, and the Invalides, and all the other amazing monuments that lie spread out and glistening before you as you circumnavigate that enormous roundabout. Everywhere you look there is something absolutely stunning.
A few shots:
And yes, they have a store called "Bexley" on the Champs-Elysees:
Yet what I will remember best from this trip is the power of the small moment. It is one of those lessons of travel that I keep learning time and again: when all the travel guides are put away, and you are done obsessing over seeing everything and doing it all, and you take a moment to follow your instincts and do what the moment impels you to do, you can find a kind of nirvana in just being in a foreign place. In Paris, I found that moment here,
Where, just after a downpour, the proprietor dried off three chairs and a table for me and the kids (Dennis was running an errand) and I sipped a glass of Pouilly-Fumee while enjoying the just-washed air, the glistening pavement, the echoes of late-afternoon street life in St.-Germain-des-Pres, and took in a view that included this
while cherishing my appetite for the upcoming meal nextdoor here:
The restaurant was supposedly a favorite of Gide, Joyce, Hemingway, even Kerouac. It gets quite a bit of tourist traffic but still seems to exist in a previous era (the interior, I'm told, has changed little since the late 19th century). It was so conducive to the spirit of travel that Clara actually tried an escargot! (and liked it).
But back to the small moment in the outdoor cafe nextdoor. At that pinpoint in time, I wasn't thinking about Hemingway, or Frommer's, or what the dinner tab for four would be. I was just breathing in Paris. And that's what I will remember.
