Trains, Trams, Amsterdam - or, Mourning My Camera

I will start by saying that this is the only photo I have from Amsterdam. It was a delicious pizza, and the photo illustrates an interesting quality of European pizzas, which is that not every slice is guaranteed to have all the ingredients you might have ordered on a single pizza. I particularly enjoyed the artistry of the ascending triangles of sliced ham on the left side overlayed by the more organic shapes of the onions. However, as "only" photos go? I probably should have tried to get some shots of the actual city with my phone. Every time I was outside it was cold and raining and I had other concerns, like not being run over by bicycles.

So I will backtrack and start from the beginning. Alex and I left for Amsterdam on Saturday morning. The train left at 8:30 a.m., which meant leaving around 7:40 to take the two tram lines to Gare St. Jean. It should be noted that this was about 4 hours earlier than I've been waking up lately, and only two and a half hours after I had gone to sleep. On this trip, I decided that trains are a beautiful method of travel because one does not have to arrive two hours early, or be screened by security, or listen to pre-recorded messages of Kathy Taylor or anyone else, or, in our case, even have one's ticket checked for the entirety of the trip.

The trip from Bordeaux to Paris was beautiful. It was a TGV train, so it didn't stop at any points between, and the countryside was beautiful. The whole first hour after leaving Bordeaux was basically just fields and fields of grapes with the occasional farmhouse or small town. Mostly just grapes and sky. The grapes gave way to wheat or something -- something less green and more brown. The clear morning turned to fog at about the same time -- fog that rose absurdly high, as I could only tell when we encounted a large wind farm maybe halfway between Bordeaux and Paris, and the fog obscured the bottom half of the rotating turbines. It was a strange effect in the morning light -- crazy eddies of fog and blades rising up out of nowhere and then disappearing again. Very cool.

We arrived in Paris at Montparnasse and positively RAN to the metro, which was a lot further than I expected, trying to get across town to the other train station, from which our connection was leaving. The travel agent neglected to tell us this when she mentioned we had an hour to change trains, so it was a closer call than I would have liked. I was amazed at the trek to even get to the metro. We climbed and descended a lot of different staircases. We ran beside the moving walkways that connected several of the tunnels, because it was faster than standing still with the masses. I did all of this while wheeling my small suitcase, which likes to flip up onto one wheel and oscillate back and forth, destroying all of my attemps at stability. It was san interesting experience. By the time we got to the metro station and jumped immediately on a departing train, I was feeling vaguely asthmatic.

We spent about 15 minutes on the metro, traveling maybe 12 stops, and I had the time to get nostalgic about Paris. Bordeaux is a great town, but it has a distinctly different feel from Paris. I was trying to compare the clean, above-ground tram in Bordeaux with the tunnels under Paris, and they just give such a different feel that it was kind of unbelievable. I didn't notice how different they were until that mad dash through Paris, I suppose. I'll have to get back to spend some time there, soon.

When we arrived at Gare du Nord, our train to Amsterdam was running a few minutes late, so we were able to grab some food and get to our car with considerably less stress than we'd had on the metro. The train stopped in Brussels and Antwerp and The Hague, and we finally made it to Amsterdam. On the way there, the window I was sitting next to got colder and colder on the ride north, and I began to seriously regret my fatal error of forgetting the jacket I'd left waiting by the door.

My first impression of Amsterdam was cold and confusion. We left the train station and went straight to the tram stop, in search of our hostel. The tram in Amsterdam was completely foreign. As it turns out, the tram stops operate like tiny train stations -- instead of having a particular place where the #2 always stops, they have three tracks and a tiny changing digital sign that indicates which platform each tram is going to stop at what particular time of arrival. It took us a bit to find this sign as it was, as I said, tiny, and the tram maps were utterly confusing. They were all printed in two colors, rather than a different color for each line -- only labeled in Dutch, of which I have no knowledge -- and way too small to read in much detail.

We finally figured it out, and the tram itself was kind of a comical event. The trams in Amsterdam are huge and boxy-looking, and have someone on board who sells tickets. Rather than purchasing one before you get on, the tram stops long enough for a line to form out the door, and for all of those people to buy tickets from the bored employee near the back of the tram. When it finally does start going again, it moves with such lurching unpredictability that at first, I thought the driver was having a bad day. It was almost impossible to stand up without falling into the person next to me -- but all of the trams ran like this. A constant acceleration until it was time to screech next to a stop at the next station.

We were really confused and cold when we got on the tram the first time. We knew we got on the right line, but not if it was in the right direction. We knew we had to get off the tram at the Van Gogh museum stop, wherever that was and whatever it was called. The tram stops did not make as much sense to me in Dutch as they do here in Bordeaux, so we didn't really know. We got a map from the ticket-vender-person and tried to read it, mostly just falling over a lot and looking generally like idiots. It turns out we had chosen the right direction and some helpful people told us the name of our stop, and then reminded us when it was about to happen. It was difficult to tell which stop, because rather than a digital read-out, the same perosn who sold the tickets would announce each stop in very rapid, annoyed-sounding Dutch.

We found our hostel, which was called the Inner-Amsterdam Stopover, and checked in with a woman who was very stern and not very customer-service oriented. She pointed us in the right direction and we found our room. The room was about the size of my college dorm room (which is to say 8 by 16) except that it housed three bunk beds and a small bathroom. They had assigned us the wrong beds, so we took the ones that seemed unoccupied and introduced ourselves to the two roommates who were there. They turned out to be Swayne (pronounced more like swiney?) from the Dominican Republic and Philippe from Brazil, who were both film students in Spain about to finish their masters work and leave Europe for the time being.

About at this point was when I realized there was something very wrong with my camera, which is why I have no pictures. I must find a repair shop in Bordeaux somehow. I'll let you know if/when that happens. To continue:

Philippe and Swayne went out with us and showed us some of the places they'd seen, landmark-wise. We also walked a bit through the red-light district, which was interesting and sort of depressing on a level that I didn't expect. Almost all the light is red, which for some reason I expected to be more figurative than literal, and it shines off of the canals in the area in a sort of eerie way. There's a woman in every window. Only some of them are actively trying to lure customers in. Most of them are smoking cigarettes with one bored hand on a hip or standing back from the window to talk to the woman in the next window over behind the partition that separates them. All up and down the canals there are shops advertising live sex shows of various kinds for various prices and looking different levels of sleazy. Definitely a new and interesting experience.

Another strange thing was the idea of legalized marijuana. Near the red light district there are a lot of coffeeshops. A "coffeeshop" in Amsterdam is where you go if you want to buy and/or smoke weed or hash. It can be purchased in various amounts either pre-rolled or not (and also in the form of baked goods), and I think there's a law about the maximum amount you can carry on your person, as well as a rule about only being able to smoke in coffeeshops. The coffeeshops have coffee, apparently, but usually are limited to a "coffe or latte" sort of choice. A "cafe" is where you would go if you actually wanted coffee.

The weird thing about Amsterdam was that, in the "middle" of town, there were no Dutch people. There were only tourists, going in and out of coffeeshops, cafes, restaurants, gift stores. I get that LOTS of their commerce is centered around tourism, but I encountered very few Dutch people in that area. Lots of Americans, British, French. Others whose accents I probably wasn't listening for as closely. I looked all weekend for Dutch food (some things had been mentioned to me by name as worthy of trying) and found nothing. We ate some great Thai food once (for the first time since moving here -- French Thai food has, in my experience, been about par with Eggroll Express-level Chinese food in the States). And the pizza in the photo was particularly wonderful. But everything else was McDonald's, Burger King, and "American Hot Dog" stands.

Most of the trip was walking around the city in the cold, marveling. The buildings are very different from Bordeaux in that they're not all made of the same, uniformly-colored stone -- there were dark reds, and oranges, and blues and greens, and it suddenly struck me as begin very colorful by comparison. The bike culture was cool -- apparently EVERYONE in the Netherlands rides a bike, so there were bikes EVERYWHERE, littering every street corner. Most of them weren't even chained, just sort of piled around since there were never enough bike racks. I wonder if it's still that way when it gets colder?

The highlight of my trip was easily the Van Gogh museum. They had several of the more famous self-protraits and sunflower studies. It wasn't a very large museum, but I spent over two hours walking around marveling at the brush strokes. I guess that's kind of the point. One of the coolest things was a room of imitations -- a bunch of paintings by other artists (mostly realists) than Van Gogh had admired and imitated using his own style. They hung most of them side-by-side with the originals, and it was really fascinating.

We came home on Monday afternoon (after a REALLY close call catching our connection in Paris in which we jumped on seconds before the train pulled away and had to walk through most of the train to find our car). It was a whirlwind trip, and I'm going to have to go back soon to see the Rembrandt museum and the Anne Frank house, neither of which we got around to during our visit. Also to search for some of the mythical Dutch food I heard about.