We seem to have gone from small to big to small to big environments on this trip. Right now we are in a small environment in a very big city. I'm writing this aboard the Lucky Piper, a concrete-hulled houseboat permanently moored on Zeeburger Pad in Amsterdam while listening to the ducks on the canal and hearing an occasional groan as the boat moves against the dock. The boat even occasionally moves in the wake of a passing barge or pleasure boat.
We left Paris on Sunday for a quick drive up the expensive French motorway system to Bruges. The system is superb, excellent road surfaces, excellent signage, but it is about three times the price of American toll roads. But at the current rate of exchange, everything in Europe is expensive.
Bruges was everything I expected it to be. A crowded, tourist mecca of magnificent art, beautiful buildings, gorgeous medieval and baroque buildings, small canals, chocolate shops and cafes. Our BnB, the Hip BnB at 99 Werfstraat was excellent, clean, inexepensive, and only 15 minutes walk from the town Markt and Burg piazzas. Free parking helps too.
Our car, a Citroen C4 is excellent. We had the luck of getting a diesel engine, which is somewhat, though not excessively, sluggish compared to our Acura. The diesel manages to move the car quite nicely with enough pep on both country roads and highways and still giving us 60 miles per gallon, or so. With diesel at one euro a liter, compared to 1.60 for gasoline this is working out to be quite a saving. Perhaps a diesel is in our future.
We walked from one end of the town to the other. We had one interesting guide. John's grandmother Cross had left him with an art book of Belgium's glories dating from 1914 that had a substantial chapter with pictures of Bruges from almost 100 years ago. It was fun to compare the pictures then with the pictures now...the main differences being the fashions of clothes and the lack of autos.
Bruges at that time was a museum town (which it still is), but had little else going for it. Zeebruge, the massive port, had just opened, and there was little industry in West Flanders. Today, instead of 30,000 inhabitants (down from 250,000 in the middle ages when they were involved in the wool trade), the area is home to over 300,000 and the town expands far beyond its medieval canal boundaries. I wonder where 250,000 people slept?Our proprietor in Bruges, Virginia, had lots of recommendations, most of which we took. Her restaurant suggestions ranged from the local, moules et frites, to the vegetarian, to the friend with the coffee shop.
Moules et frites may be local but they sure are expensive. No matter where you look the price hovers well over 23 Euros. Our choice was top of the line, Breydel de Coninc just off Burg Square where the service was excellent, the Breton oysters wonderful as always, the beer very nice, and the moules served two ways: one natural for Ben, with chopped onions and celery in a clear broth, and the other for John, provençale style with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and celery in broth. Strangely, or perhaps locally, the vegetables were boiled with the mussels and were even a bit crisp as we ate them.
Our second meal was a sandwich at Da Noi cafe owned by a friend of Virginia's. A labor of love, the owner, a fairly young man who had quit the IT ratrace to start the cafe, made Ben his extra extra dry cappucino and produced an excellent local beer from the neighboring brewery for John. The sandwiches, Ben's lox and John's sausage, were excellent.
Our evening meal on Monday was at the Kok au Vin Restaurant, an upscale French restaurant, where Ben had zeeburger sole and JohnI had a wonderful coq au vin, probably the best he has ever eaten, with chopped champignons, onions and a deep brown red wine sauce. Our entree was a Breton artichoke about six inches across. The choke had already been removed and it was served with a caper mayonnaise. An amuse bouche at the start of the meal was a puree of cooked zucchini with cream, warm, with pieces of smoked trout in it. About 20 cl.
Our third evening, at De Bottilerij at the side of a canal, was a fair meal. We picked a South African sauvignon blanc, which we didn't much like although there was nothing particularly wrong with it, followed by our appetizers of beet salad with phylo pastry stuffed with boursin, which we split, after a fairly long wait, and then after about 45 minutes the mains arrived. Since it was a vegetarian restaurant that does do meat, Ben chose a phylo lasagne of ratatouille. Well, Ratatouille, the Rat, would probably agree that a dry ratatouille in phylo, with no sauce, wasn't the best of presentations. John's veal kidneys with potato croquettes were good, but I should have taken his own advice and gone with fries rather than croquettes which were dry. We did not have dessert.
Bruges, of course, is more famous for its buildings and art than it is for its food, save its chocolate, which we did not eat. Our art lesson was a selection of paintings by Memling, a Flemish primitive that were quite exquisite at the St. John Hospital Museum. Mainly triptychs, but for the portrait of a young Bruges woman. The other paintings were on loan from the main city museum which is being remodeled for a new show to open in October: two pieces of Hieronymus Bosch, Jesus on Judgment Day and the Trials of Job. The second is more in line with the horror of most Bosch paintings.
We did not miss seeing the Shrine of St. Ursula who took 11,000 Breton virgins to Rome to become Christians in front of the Pope only to see them slain on the trip home by the Huns in Cologne.
While Bruges is a walking city, it also has a large number of horse-drawn tourist carriages and lots of bicycles. Watch out or you may be run over.
Bicycles are more a part of Amsterdam. “There must be a million in that parking lot,” one tourist remarked on our boat tour yesterday, looking up at a parking garage for bicycles. Well, maybe not a million, but certainly thousands. As in Belgium, they have their own section of the road, with specially colored brick to distinguish from the sidewalk for pedestrians and the main road for autos and trucks. Trams, too, have their own rights of way throughout the city, making it a difficult place to drive if you want to. I have parked the car at the proprietor's place for the duration.
Amsterdam is lovely. It is a very big city with a very low profile so there are few tall buildings. In many cases, the tallest man-made structures lie along the harbor—the cruise ships at the port. It's central point is Central Station, a late 19th century building where all trains start and end. It's surrounded by tram and bus termini and the docks for the boat tours.
We took one. Since it began on the harbor, John's first reaction was ho-hum, another harbor tour, but then it turned into the canals. Built over the centuries as the city expanded, they show an architectural heritage that goes from Peter Stuyvesant's time to the contemporary. However it's mostly 16th-18th century buildings. At the heart of Amsterdam's predominance in trade worldwide, they are the protected structres and obviously are maintained with generous government subsidies.
The quays that run along side serve as the site of bars and pedestrian benches, art students, cycles, runners and the ordinary Amsterdammer living his daily life. The gables all reflect different times and styles, but the buildings are uniformly narrow and six stories tall. The bridges are uniform and when seen in a row, are much like a never-ending view through a mirror.
Our houseboat is anchored on a newer canal facing a row of apartments in Dutch style with gardens along the canal shore. The ducks and geese cackle at night and only the slight roar of the morning rush or an occasional train rumbling 300 yards away indicates the presence of the city. Right outside the front door it's there because the houseboat is just across the street from a light-industrial section of town. The Windmill Browerij IJ at the end of the street. It makes a great beer.
Last night we went by tram to Samo Sabo, near the Rijksmuseum, for rijstaffel on the recommendation of our friend Rainer. The restaurant is older, the service impeccable. The rijstaffel is lots of fun with its 17or so different dishes, ranging from satays to coconut soup to milder-than-Thai curries, vegetables, shrimp chips, and so on. We enjoyed it immensely thought I must admit we have had better Southeast Asian banquets at Thai functions. But, for a restaurant thousands of milesfrom the former Dutch East Indies with the food europeanized somewhat, the meal was excellent. The drink: a wittje beer with a slice of lime. Ben did not enjoy it much. John did.
Thursday morning. Breakfast with the cygnets, swans and ducks...and a pigeon who had no fear whom we named Wim. They all got a few croissant crumbs.
Thence to the Anne Frank Huis museum. It's a very moving if depressing endeavor to go through the Franks' hiding place from 1942 to 1944 at the height of the German occupation of Holland and the establishment of its racist regime in conquered lands. While the house is sad, the better sight is the groups of middle and high school students from many European countries, including a large contingent from Germany, who were visibly moved and shaken by what their ancestors had done.
We followed up the visit to the Anne Frank Huis with a visit to the Homomonument just down the street. It's a grouping of three pink marble triangles, one of which dips into the nearby canal to show both the descent to which mankind can go when hatred takes over but also to the arising of the group as it struggles for relevance. It didn't hurt to listen to a small lecture from an ethics professor at the University of Edinburgh explaining the political uses of groups like Jews and Gays for the classes that keep power at any cost.
From there we walked down many a canal to the Pleinstraat, a major shopping district, found Rainer's recommendation for tonight's dinner, the Stoop en Stoop, and then had falafel and a salad at a local fast food joint.
Our next stop, the Rijksmuseum was great. Much of the museum is closed but the grand masters, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals are all in a separate gallery where we took the audio tour. A fine 90 minutes of great masters that we enjoyed immensely.
Back to the boat for coffee and a rest and then out to dinner this evening. Let us add, Amsterdam's tram network is a wonder. It goes everywhere regularly. Maps and time tables in all the kiosks.
We took a late-ish dinner at an Amsterdam Brown Bar, this one was off Leidesplein in the center of the tourist district, recommended by Rainer. Brown bars are Amsterdam restaurants that specialize in local beers and Dutch specialties to eat. Much like an English gastro pub without being too fancy.
Our choice was Stoop and Stoop on a narrow street. The ambiance was excellent. It was not totally overrun by foreigners, we heard lots of Dutch, and surprisingly Danish from the next table. The bar was lively, and the seats outside allowed us to watch the strolling students and young workers as they searched for a place for a late evening meal.
The food was adequate. No one has written books extolling most Dutch food except for the pancakes and the rijstaffel. John had a Dutch steak with a pepper cream sauce and Ben had two sole filets. Both were acceptable but by no means remarkable. Ben's spring rolls as an appetizer were fine, but John had a Dutch specialty, fried balls of goo, with bits of mystery meat in them, known as “bitterballen,” supposedly a piece of fried casserole. The waiter was a bit put out having described them as a well-liked specialty to find John didn't particularly care for them. Well, you can't have everything.
Friday morning.
We decided today to go the Haarlem. We took a morning train, all of 20 minutes, from Amsterdam Centraal to Haarlem, and then walked through the quaint town to the Frans Hals museum. It's a wonderful museum and a lovely town.
We were much taken with the Dutch modern architecture which incorporates parts of Charles Rennie Mackintosh of Glasgow, the Bauhaus, and Frank Lloyd Wright into a workable whole. Very nice and very deco.
We took the recommendations of the NY Times and had herring from the stand in the central square. It was melt-in-your mouth good.
We followed up with excellent coffee and then returned to Amsterdam for our last dinner. We ventured to a Spanish tapas place written up in the Times in an upscale neighborhood. Very good lamb dishes, but a minimum of seafood, which one would expect in a Spanish restaurant.
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