deckardcanine | The long- if little-awaited vacation report

The Netherlands
Shame we spent half the trip in Amsterdam, because it was my least favorite of the three cities where we spent at least one night. Part of it had to do with the gray skies, rains, and high winds, probably exacerbated by the flatness of a dug-out country (no wonder they have windmills). The antique, leaning buildings are tall and thin due to an ancestral area tax, which meant plenty of stairs that didn’t fit my feet except sideways. Our neighborhood had plenty of litter, uncollected dog scat, and graffiti, tho at least some of the street art looked good enough for Exit Through the Gift Shop. To me the canals were less scenic and more something extra to walk over and around. The public urinals near them didn’t help, tho at least we’re not in a century where every Dutch person drank ale because the water meant instant death.

The first night didn’t help my impression of the city. Duvets are the hotel/B&B norm, inconvenient in the summer. The walls did little to drown out the nightlife. Our windows couldn’t be entirely covered, and the night sky is pretty bright that far north. I’d grown up near a church with bells on the quarter-hour, but they didn’t play complex soprano melodies like these. (Why do churches think they still need to announce times thru the night?) Never before had I slept so little in more than two days. Others had their sleep interrupted mainly by a persistent mosquito.

If there’s one thing I like about those streets, it’s the low number of cars. You could walk the middle of a one-lane street for several minutes before having to move, not that I did that. Many cars are tiny, like the Canta LX, which is about half the length and width of a minivan. Nearly all American cars are Fords, some with unfamiliar model names like Mondeo, outnumbered by Peugeots and Citroëns (which actually translates to “Lemons”). In more business-oriented areas, trams, pedicabs, and hansoms largely take the place of buses and taxis. Bikes are plentiful enough to get their own traffic lights. BTW, they give countdowns to the green light instead of the red, perhaps to help the patience of those who wait.

And what did we find on those streets besides townhouses? A nice chain called Bagels and Beans. A niche curiosity shop somewhat misleadingly called The Totalitarian Art Gallery. Beggars with accordions. Madame Tussaud’s and nearby street “performers” who mainly stand around dressed as showy characters, especially from horror, like Rambla rejects. An eight-story library that offers a piano, pizza, and beer. A plethora of Argentine restaurants, popular due to the queen’s birthplace. A several-block open-air bazaar. A clothing retailer called Sissy-Boy Homeland. A coffee shop called Any Day and another called Amnesia (not a bar?). A restaurant called Vertigo. A shoe store called Bitter. The Convent Hotel. Other establishments called Acne and The Factory. Reggae concert posters, probably more common since pot legalization. A sign for “A’dam-west.” An omnipresent triple-X motif, which does not mean any of the first three things you probably thought.

Some pharmacies continue an old tradition of posting a big 3D head with a gaping mouth, as in saying “Ahh” for the doctor. These heads usually depict a minority race and/or an exotic culture, because medicine was once thought to be mystical, like everything they barely knew. This was an early sign of European political correctness differing from American.

Yes, I eventually saw the famous red light district. Mom warned me the guide said there was something to offend everyone; I made her laugh by replying sincerely, “I’d better put my glasses on.” I didn’t have to get that far before seeing porno postcards and weird condoms. I passed lots of bikini-clad women in doorways, not making eye contact or gazing at other parts of them for long. Honestly, I was there just to reach Our Lord in the Attic, an underground (well, high-above-ground) church from when Catholicism was actively persecuted by law. Before then, it was about as tolerated as prostitution in much of the U.S. today.

For some reason, we started our museum spree on a glum note: the Anne Frank House. That educational experience saves me the trouble of reading her diary. Next was the related but more heartening Dutch Resistance Museum, which included the most live-looking footage from 1938 I’ve ever seen. I wonder if the Deus Ex writers knew that “NSF” was already the name of a rebel group.

From there it was mostly art, as usual for our European trips. My favorite was the Mauritshuis, a mansion-turned-gallery sporting deceptive still-lifes (those flowers don’t bloom at the same time), Golden Age simplicity a la Vermeer, challenging paintings like one of a gallery itself, subtly suggestive paintings like a woman preparing oysters for the viewer, and… too many ugly baby Jesuses. Paulus Potter’s The Steer used to be the most popular of all for its realism, including, ironically, its literal bull****.

We visited two other parts of the Netherlands for less than a day each. One was Delft, home to famous pottery and a cathedral. The other was Enkhuizen, a 17th-century village preserved as a museum. Rick Steves had called it cute, but to me only the local farm animals were so. Here we saw our first windmill, which had a curious steering wheel in the back. We traveled by both stoomlocomotiv and cruise ship on a “triangle” tour to Enkhuizen; you train enthusiasts would have loved the oldie and its station. (I should mention that the trains and trams seem to have an honor system, as it looked very easy to get a free ride, which we didn’t.)

Despite a nearly equal amount of written English, I picked up on a little written Dutch and some rules for pronouncing it. I’d never have guessed that their “bruin” sounds just like our “brown,” but that explains the bear name. My mom thought that if you heard someone speaking Dutch and didn’t listen, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t English as readily as if it were, say, Spanish. I might agree if not for the G sound, which is what Tolkien called “the Black Spirant” and ascribed to evil fantasy races. Fortunately, it brought to my mind German and Scottish Gaelic more than Orcish. I learned enough to figure out Stieg Larsson’s De vrouw die met vuur speelde and happily recognized Tad Williams’s Berg van zwart glas. Too bad Disney’s Cinderella is “Assepoester,” even if the first part must connect to ash.

Bruges
I had made sure that the whole family saw the 2008 black comedy In Bruges to prepare for this. The town looked rather quaint and pretty then, and it did again in person, thanks in part to sunny and temperate weather (tho we sometimes wished for air conditioning or at least window screens). We never found quite the same scenery, partly because the movie plot needed the bell tower unsecured enough for a fatal fall. The real tower—which we happened to visit on the 731st anniversary of its worst fire—gave us a little trouble with the stairs: sloping wooden steps, lack of clear directions for when and where to ascend and descend, beams you didn’t have to be tall to bump your head on…. I might add that a sign in eight languages forbade writing on the walls but was surrounded by writing anyway. Oh well, it was worth the exercise.

That day was celebrated by Catholics for the Ascension of Mary. I’d missed mass the last two Sundays, so I obliged on Monday morning. I’d been to several foreign-language masses before, some in similarly ancient and decorous cathedrals, but none with certain parts spoken in four languages (Belgium has more Spanish than I expected). Afterward, we had to navigate carefully, even on foot, in light of a long line of coaches and watching crowds for a 708-year-old Bruges tradition.

If you want a light-hearted tour, go to the brewery called De Halve Maan (The Half Moon). You don’t need any interest in the highly varied and reputedly lovely Belgian beer to enjoy the guide’s deliberately funny English monologue, nor must you drink at the end. My parents and sister drank more in that one week than ever before in my presence, tho not dangerously much. For mine own part, it was beer to me. The only one I ordered the whole time was 2.5% alcohol and raspberry flavored; if that tour guide had seen, she might’ve beaned me with the bottle.

There are enough chocolate shops to make a tourist wonder how they can all stay in business. Creative ones offer shapes like phones, cameras, cigarette boxes, and a gelt euro priced at an ironic 0.90 euros. I bought a box of unshaped variety for my office and was glad they neither melted nor disappeared too slowly. After Belgian chocolate, I was afraid Hershey bars would taste like candle wax, but perhaps I didn’t spoil myself that much. I passed on the gummy Smurfs despite a Gargamelesque temptation.

Bruges is big on dogs, especially small ones. Cats appear in shop windows among other places; we saw a woman try to lead one on a leash. Rounding out the cuteness with an uncomfortable edge were children playing violins for money. Between them and the teen waiter we got at one restaurant, Bruges must have loose child labor laws.

For the train to Brussels, the clerk accidentally gave us more tickets to Bruges instead. Good thing the ticket taker understood and was going that far anyway. I advise you all to check these things yourselves.

Brussels
Yup, the chronological order was also closely alphabetical. Maybe we’d’ve stayed in Charleroi next. Anyway, despite being further away from France, in contrast to Bruges, Brussels uses more French than Flemish. With that in mind, I had to adjust my pronunciation of “Grand Place” and “Mannekin Pis,” the latter being the notorious city mascot. It’s even tinier than expected, more so than some of the many distasteful commercial uses thereof (“Taste the Coke side of Belgium,” really?).

One rare spot that uses primarily English writing is the Mercedes-Benz Museum. Despite the dubious tagline of “125! years of innovation” (not even the universe is 125 factorial years old), it’s pretty interesting to see how things came along from a motorcar that barely looked horseless. My dad, who has gotten headaches from watching a few minutes of NES games, surprised me by trying his hand at the state-of-the-art driving arcade simulation.

The last museum we visited was the one I’d basically looked forward to before we left the U.S.: the Belgian Comic Strip Center. As you may know, Belgium’s two most internationally popular comic franchises are of Tintin and the Smurfs, both of which happen to have movies out this year (with higher hopes for Tintin). Lucky Luke, a slapstick cowboy, probably comes in third, but I hadn’t heard of him; the only other I already knew was the Disney-bought Marsupilami, who turns out to be a monotreme rather than a marsupial. That doesn’t stop Belgians and their close neighbors from taking pride in their cartoons in general. Heck, we’d seen a crowd of men dressed as Smurfs at an Amsterdam bar, but I digress. A choppily animated adventure of Willy Vandersteen’s “Bob et Bobette” proved funny both by accident and on purpose. My favorite cartoonist name: Henri Winkeler.

We didn’t notice as many questionable establishment names as in Amsterdam. There was a Madam Mim store selling nothing obviously wicked or magical. Worse was Shamrock, “a Smart Indian Restaurant,” not smart enough to remember cultural archetypes.

As a stickler for linguistic humor, I’ll throw in some more odd wordings and whatnot. An Enkhuizen sign started a sentence with “The hammer was sued to…,” presumably meaning “used.” “Made-made” almost passed for “man-made.” A menu listed “Dub. espresso” (that’s a double) and “Thee” (tea) back to back, making me think, “I hereby dub thee Espresso.” And the Dutch name for a water mill is the suspicious watermolen.

Other notes for visitors to the general vicinity:
- Be patient in restaurants. They have low waiter-to-customer ratios and will not bring the check any time soon unless you ask, after which you’d best pay at the front desk. Expected tips are lower, but you have to tip in cash. You will get only the silverware you need for your ordered meal; occasionally they slip up on that. You may have to do more food preparation on your own, like mixing hot chocolate as you like. Also, the fries (which they don’t call chips) tend to come with good mayo or no condiment at all, tho I’ve heard some places offer a peanut sauce for ‘em.
- If you buy breakfast and snacks at grocery stores, consider the sweet stroopwaffels or poffertjes. The cereal aisle is big on muesli; if you want American brands, Kellogg’s and Quaker dominate with modified product names like “Frosties.”
-Bathrooms vary. Some faucets reverse the usual directions for hot and cold. Toilets have numerous flushing mechanisms and may be in rooms separate from the sinks and/or showers.
-If you use a local computer, you may find slight adjustments from your usual keyboard. I like to call it “awerty.”