Amsterdam

It would have been hard for me to be more satisfied with Spring Break 2010 than with the 6 nights in Amsterdam. I know it seems strange—the weather is not exactly your classic spring break destination. But for a professor from Cairo, spending a week in Amsterdam is a welcome relief from the Egyptian heat as well as from the third world craziness of Cairo. Things in Amsterdam are clean, well organized, and the pace in the city center is laid back and casual. It suited me perfectly. The weather was a bit too cold at times, but on average it was just chilly and I was OK with a coat, my son Daniel’s cap, and my favorite (and only) scarf. Come to think of it, I think all of the warm weather things I had were given to me: the coat is from my nephew Alex, the cap is my son Daniel's, and the scarf was a gift from an Italian friend I met in Cairo. Most of my adult life has been in South Texas, Florida and Cairo, and living in those places doesn’t exactly fill your closets with warm weather gear. And I consider myself fortunate for that!

One of the best things about Amsterdam is the availability of public transportation. You take a train from the airport to the center of town, arriving at the Central Train Station, which is a beautiful building:

The Metro is here, which is a great way to get around the city, but most of the time I took the trams, because they go to more places and are easier to just hop on and off. The public transportation makes getting around the city easy, but unfortunately actually finding the places I wanted to get to was difficult. I was armed with a guidebook and a map, but I’m not the best at navigating in a new city. I lose my orientation and I think I’m heading north when I’m really going southwest. And this problem is compounded in Amsterdam because the city is built around canals so the streets wander quite a bit. And all the signs are in Dutch, which makes it hard to remember where you have been. I found after the first day that I did better navigating by canals rather than streets, but still, I spent too much time in the city with a map in my hand and a perplexed look on my face, wondering just where in the hell I was.

The city center of Amsterdam, the old medieval part of the city, is designed to be extremely unfriendly to automobile traffic. Bicycles, on the other hand, are strongly encouraged. Bike lanes are everywhere, and bicycles have the right of way. So you can be in the middle of the city on a workday and the traffic is almost non-existent except for lots of people riding bikes. I’ve read some of the history of how Amsterdam’s city planners deliberately put into place policies to encourage the bicycle over the car, and I marvel at their foresight. It seems like most of the locals are fine with biking instead of driving, and it certainly provides exercise and a healthier lifestyle than the American suburban commute (which often also includes a McDonald’s drive-thru). Cleaner air too, and less dependence on foreign oil imports.

The garage right next to the Central Train Station is filled with bicycles:

My first stop in Amsterdam was the Vincent Van Gogh Museum, and my favorite museum from the trip. 

I knew the famous Van Gogh paintings, and I got to see them here, but the best thing about the museum was the portrait it provides of Van Gogh’s life. The top floor of the museum has a room for each place Van Gogh lived. On the wall of each room is written a brief biography of his life at that place and his goals as an artist during that period. As you move from room to room, you can see his development as an artist and how his mood changed over time. So you move from a room full of dark, somber paintings from his time in Paris to a room filled with bright colors and tranquil scenes from his time in Arles- he was obviously happier in Arles. You can get a pretty good idea of this from the museum’s web site.

The most memorable picture I saw in the museum was "Skull of a skeleton with burning cigarette." Just because it is a striking picture and because it seems so unlike the Van Gogh that is famous for sunflowers and starry nights.

  

Of course, you cannot visit Amsterdam without taking a canal cruise. The views on the cruise were neat, but the best part was hearing everything explained in 4 different languages: first in Dutch, then German, then English and finally Spanish.

They explained on the cruise how all of the houses in Amsterdam have a small crane at the top:

Since the city is built on land reclaimed from the water, space has always been at a premium. So the buildings are built tall and thin. One consequence is that the staircases are narrow spirals, because who wants to waste precious space with a wide staircase? So anything large going onto the upper floors has to come in through the window, not up the stairs. The cranes are used to lift things up where they can be maneuvered in through the window. Still sounds like a tough moving day, but probably better than carrying stuff up the stairs.

To get out of the city center one day I ventured out to tour a working windmill. I didn’t know it until I got there, but the windmill is used to pump water out of the city (I imagined grinding grain). I cannot say enough about how excellent our tour guide was:

She was very knowledgeable about the mill’s history and operation, and could even answer all of my technical questions (that mechanical engineering degree wasn’t for nothing, you know). I was also impressed that she was fluent in English, Dutch, German and Italian, and I’ll bet Spanish too. She explained how about half of Holland is below sea level so it is not possible for storm sewers to drain the rain water by gravity to the sea. In Holland gravity works against you, so they have to use windmills or electric pumps to get the rainwater out. This is done through a series of canals, and each canal is assigned a water level, like 1 meter below sea level, for example, and it is the job of the pumping station to maintain that level. They pump into a canal with a slightly higher level, and then the water is pumped into a still slightly higher level canal, and so on until the water is finally pumped out to sea.

 Here is a picture of the mill. The windmill blades were removed a few days before for maintenance. This was actually a good thing, because it meant the mill was not operating at the time so we could go in and see all the workings inside.

The last day I was in Amsterdam I visited the NEMO museum. 

The building that looks like a large tanker ship in the distance is the museum. It was designed by a famous Italian architect, Renzo Piano, who I had not heared of before this visit but is evidently quite famous to people who follow architecture. The museum is a science museum for kids and is the best of its kind that I have seen anywhere. The exhibits are hands on, fun and instructive. I spent about 3 hours there and really enjoyed it. The day was a school holiday, so it was full of Dutch school children, and that also made the visit fun with their energy and excitement about the exhibits.

Oude Kerk means “old church” in Amsterdam and I made a visit inside this famous church. The church sits right beside the Red Light District. So you can literally walk out of the church and look across the alley and see sex shops and girls sitting in the window with the red light on.

They are renovating the church so there wasn't much to see. Most of the stained glass was missing and half of the church was blocked off as a construction zone. I read in the guide that Rembrandt’s wedding started here but was completed at some other church, for reasons I didn’t exactly understand. There is a sign in the church where some part of the wedding ceremony takes place that says in Dutch, “Those who get married in a hurry end up crying for a long time.” Ha!

They were tuning the pipe organ while I was there and that was nice to hear.

There are also a lot of people buried under the floor of the church. I think this is a common European custom, but I found it a bit creepy. Here is a video I took walking along looking at the floor, most of which is marked for who is buried beneath:

Finally, here a just some random shots from around the city. Here I am on the bridge heading over to the NEMO museum:

I don't remember where these shots are from:

Another view of the central train station:

The Vondelpark, a large park in the museum district:

I also took a brief tour of the houseboat museum:

And found beer available in vending machines:

I stayed at the Brouwer Hotel which was a quaint little place with only 6 rooms. The view from my room during the day:

And the view at night:

I really liked the vibe in Amsterdam. And while I did see some people smoking pot at a few of the cafes, for the most part that whole side of Amsterdam is out of sight out and out of mind if you are not looking to indulge. I guess if you want to go there and get stoned it is a great place to do it, but if not it is a great place to just wander and visit the museums. A lot of flights from Cairo to the US go through Amsterdam, so I should get another opportunity to visit there again.