Amsterdam: The Agony and the Ecstasy

On Wednesday, September nineteenth, at 10:55 am, we took a train from London to Amsterdam. 

People do it everyday. But imagine if I said, “We took a train from New York to Paris.” That’s still a statement out of Jules Verne. Granted the English Channel isn’t the Atlantic Ocean, but still … a train from London to Amsterdam, pretty amazing! Actually the train runs from London to Brussels. In Brussels we changed trains for Amsterdam, and that’s where the amazing ended, and the nightmare began.

We left from St. Pancras Station in the north of London on a Eurostar. It’s a very easy, comfortable way to travel. The train moves at a pretty good clip, which isn’t really noticeable zipping through the farmlands and fields of Belgium. It’s only when the train runs along side a freeway, and we began leaving cars in our dust that I understood how fast we were going. That’s how we were able to complete the first leg of our journey in just an hour and a half (the time it takes me to drive from Marin to Silicon Valley.)

The train station in Brussels is one of those arched steel constructions spanned by lots of glass, kind of a cross between an enormous zeppelin hangar and a fantastic Victorian greenhouse. Being Americans having just arrived from the UK I thought of this as an international crossroads, but given that none of the announcements or the signage was translated into English I guess they thought about it more like a big regional bus depot. So here’s the situation: it’s chaotic, people are bustling every which way, we can’t read the signs, we’ve got to find the right platform to catch our connecting train, and, after sitting on a train for an hour and a half, I really need to pee.

We’re frantically navigating through this pandemonium schlepping our roller bags behind us looking for the international boy/girl silhouettes that will signal the proximity of a bathroom.

They are not easy to find. When we find one it is accompanied by an arrow that is as impossible to understand as the signs themselves. Some of the arrows seem to point skywards others appear to suggest that we turn down some dark corridor that dead-ends in abandoned construction scaffolding. I feel like I am on some Kafkaesque Easter egg hunt, and my eggs are about ready to hatch.

Finally, we turn down the right corridor and the passageway to the bathrooms appears. I leave the bags with Sharon, and run for the facilities. Two huge, padded gates that require the deposit of a coin bar the entrance to the bathroom. I have pounds and pence, and dollars and cents, but did not bother to change either into Euros before we left London. On the wall near by hang some boxes that give you change for paper money, but of course they too only accept Euros. I will myself to remain calm and continent.

I’ve got to find a currency exchange window very quickly. I explain the situation to Shar, and then run back into the twisting currents of humanity, desperately searching for someplace I can change dollars into Euros. The station is like a mall lined with every kind of small business enterprise imaginable. There are coffee shops, candy shops, souvenir vendors, and outfits that sell cosmetics, travel bags, sunglasses, you name it, but I can’t find an f---ing currency exchange window to save my life.

Running out of time and options I dash over to the train information kiosk. There’s a short line of people asking the two cherubic twenty somethings how to find their trains. In a variety of languages they slowly and carefully answer each person’s questions. I am hopping from foot to foot. Finally, it’s my turn. They tell me that the only place in the station where I can exchange currency is at Western Union, and they point to the familiar Yellow and Black sign not too far from our current location.

At Western Union there is another line maybe three people deep. They want to send word back to their people in the old country or freshen up their passport photos. I will not let them break me! When it is my turn I push my $120 in US currency and three twenty pound notes through the window and ask for Euros. She explains that it will require two separate transactions. I smile. She gives me several twenties and a handful of coins, and I am off at a sprinters pace.

Back in front of the padded gates I am pawing through my meager collection of coins trying to match one of them to the scratched and faded picture posted by the coin slot (of course there are no numbers.) I am failing. Apparently noticing my desperate and futile efforts, a guy exiting the gates tells me I need a fifty-cent coin. I don’t have one. I have a one-euro coin, which I quickly deposit in the coin changer.

The coin changer does not have one of those little chrome cups like we have on our vending machines where you hear the change drop, and then you reach in with two fingers to scoop out the coins. Instead there is a sheet metal tray about a foot wide with a lip about four inches deep that angles upward like a ski jump. My two fifty-cent coins drop, hit the tray, and like two Olympic skiers fly off the angled lip and go rolling across the station floor.   

Somehow this is not how I imagined our grand tour of Europe. I’m sure you understand. And yet, I notice in five months worth of blogs, written while logging over one hundred thousand air miles accumulated flying back and forth to Asia half a dozen times, it’s these crazy, insignificant mishaps that I spend most of my time writing about, not the fabulous art or architecture, not the temples and palaces. They appear as footnotes. The great unifying theme of my travelogue seems to be the challenge of finding some place to pee, and food I can eat. I have descended to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid.

However, after an extraordinary week soaking in both the charm and emotional tour de force that is Amsterdam I understand that this focus on my little personal catastrophes may not be as trivial as they seem. I see that what I am really complaining about is the upending of my familiar frame of reference. Outside the privileged bubble that allows me to take all these simple necessities for granted I have been forced back to my biological roots, triggering both frustration, and vulnerability. Vulnerability, it turns out, is an excellent window through which to receive the extraordinary art and tangled, violent history of Europe.

So now we’re in Amsterdam. Warned of the potentially long lines, the first thing we do after breakfast on Thursday morning is walk the few blocks from our hotel to the Anne Frank House. I wasn’t expecting much. We all know the story backwards and forwards. We’ve seen the movie; we’ve read the book. In New York you go see the Empire State building, in Amsterdam you visit the Anne Frank house. But when we walk in, and are immediately confronted by film clips of Nazi’s goose-stepping down the charming canal-lined streets we have just left, I begin to tear up. Imagine overnight, having this:

Turn into this:

Grief turns to anger. I might almost say hatred as we wend our way through the narrow corridors, and up the stairs to the bookcase that hid the secret entrance. We climb the steep, ladder like steps into the cluster of four tiny rooms where the Franks were forced to live, in fear of their lives for years. I can hardly tolerate having my bathroom requirements being delayed by fifteen-minutes. Do you have any idea how many “Anne Franks” went into hiding in the Netherlands during the war? Tomorrow, at the Jewish Museum, we will learn that there were 28,000. By the end of the war only 18,000 managed to survive. I am flooded with Nazi revenge fantasies. Nazis are such perfectly convenient evildoers.

But then at the end of the tour, we enter a room with a video presentation being projected on a wall. We are confronted with a series of modern day moral dilemmas and asked for our verdict. Tension between Christian and Muslim students in French public schools has repeatedly erupted in violence leading to a ban of the hejab, the headscarf worn by Muslim girls. French authorities insist that public schools, which are nonsectarian, should be free of all religious symbols. We are asked if we agree or disagree, and can register our opinion by pressing a button. By a large majority our group comes down on the side of the Muslim girls and their right to freedom of religion and self-expression. This conforms to the majority of people who have been through this exhibit, whose numbers are posted on the next slide.

Next we learn of a case confronting the US Army. Violating their own strict ban on the display of religious symbols while in uniform, they allowed a Sikh to continue to wear his turban both out of respect for his religious beliefs, and because his language skills and cultural knowledge were desperately needed by the military. What do we think about this decision? The majority of us, and the public, following the same values we applied in the last case support this decision. Okay what about Christian soldiers that want to display symbols of their religious belief, including writing bible versus on their helmets and guns while serving in Islamic countries? Now it’s getting more confusing with responses almost evenly split.

Hitler came to power by winning a popular election. So in Germany all neo-Nazi propaganda is banned as a form of hate speech. Never again! In the UK a right wing militia is fond of marching through minority neighborhoods staging rallies that at times leads to violent confrontations. This activity has also been banned. The majority agrees with this policy, but the same problem has existed in Northern Ireland for decades. In this case, however, the government defends the free speech right of the Orangemen to march through Catholic neighborhoods although the violence resulting from this activity dwarfs the violence of the rightwing marchers by magnitudes. The same rational used to ban rightwing extremists provides the precedent for arresting Occupy protesters. You get the picture. The moral is clear: for the cathartic satisfaction of moral outrage stick with Nazis.

On a brighter note we had a glorious time at the Van Gogh museum, which we were lucky enough to catch just days before it was to be packed up and moved to the Hermitage. (Evidently a remodel is about to take place.) On Saturday we went to the Rijksmuseum, and saw the Vermeer’s and Rembrandts. We all know the tragic story of Van Gogh: brilliant but tortured, cutting off his own ear, institutionalized, dying by (a self-inflicted?) gun shot wound before he ever sold a painting. Rembrandt, on the other hand, was the most celebrated painter of his day, receiving lucrative commissions from the leaders of a great world power. It turns out that there’s more to the story. Rembrandt lived long enough to see his style of painting fall out of fashion. He eventually went bankrupt, lost everything, and had to be supported by his son. He even outlived his son by a year, which meant that he died penniless, and was buried in an unmarked grave. It’s a surprising world.

The biggest surprise for me was seeing this landscape by Jan Van Goyen painted in 1621. He calls it, “Two Oaks.”

I can almost smell the scent of grass and wild herbs in the humid air. I identify with the two small figures embraced by nature, touched by the warmth of the filtered light, supported by the two old oaks, somehow connected with the tiny gull flying off into the distance. As I am flooded with these sense memories the prerecorded commentator explains:

“This is a flat piece of canvas. Van Goyen created this picture using four colors: grey, brown, green and yellow in a single tint as was in vogue at this time.”

I realize that I go through museums so filled with my own thoughts and experiences: I like this, I don’t like this, I don’t get this, what is this supposed to mean, that I have somehow missed this simple observation. Almost four hundred years ago some guy had this rich experience of his own humanity, expressed it by dabbing four colors on a flat piece of canvass, and through the alchemy of art, I am moved.

So now it’s Sunday evening, almost seven, and a soft, steady rain ripples the canal bellow our wall of windows. Everything rests in a soft grey light. The brick lined street is quiet. The tall alder trees that line its banks have begun shedding their yellowed leaves into the olive green water below. Little rowboats, one large and blue, one a little smaller in red, and two dinghies in white are tethered to the brick embankment on the opposite side of the canal. Church bells chime some melodic, but unrecognizable tune. On the second floor of a white townhouse across the way I can see the silhouette of someone sitting in an easy chair in a softly lit living room by a white bookcase. I imagine he is reading. Across the little three-arched bridge, just visible through our corner window, a few bicyclists, some with umbrellas, some without, pedal on through the rain.

One brave, little black duck has paddled his way down the canal, trailing a tiny V-shaped wake behind him. I watch him until he vanishes from my frame. 

I will probably never be here again. I am so glad that I am here now. So pleased that it is raining and quiet, that I have remembered to look out the window, and see the peace, depth, and beauty through painter’s eyes.