Birthdays in Amsterdam

Since I last wrote I've had a birthday! To celebrate we spent the whole day in Amsterdam. We started with a canal tour on a long, flat boat called a rondvaart. It took us through the canals, out into Amsterdam harbour and back to the central station. As a part of the tour we went down the gentleman's canal, so named because that was where the gentlemen built their massive houses in the golden age. Most Amsterdam houses are about six metres wide, but these bad boys are double that and have forty to fifty rooms apiece. We also tracked down the home of my great grandfather using nothing more than my Dad's gut instinct. Lunch was at my favourite pancake restaurant where the waiter put cocktail umbrellas in my pancake and later in the afternoon we had frites met -which translates as "chips with". The "with" part is almost always mayonnaise, known as "fritessaus". You can of course choose other sauces but I'll never know what they taste like because I won't go past the mayonnaise. It's not all deep fried starch and carbs - one of my other favourite foods, raspberries, are big, sweet and cheap, and I buy those every chance I get.

 

Delicious birthday pancake with cocktail umbrellas!

It's easy to forget that this is the Summer because it's almost always overcast and the temperature hovers between fifteen and twenty. It's a lot like Canberra's autumn except the sun doesn't set until ten. Everything is lush and green. Rhubarb and pumpkin grow wild everywhere and no one eats it. Having come off a farm the yield on the land here makes me want to cry. The cows look positively jaunty. No need to ever even walk because there's so much food lying about the place. I am reliably informed that despite being tiny and having almost twenty million people, Holland still manages to export a hell of a lot of food.

Yesterday I went and trained with Black Bear taekwondo,  a school a little out from central in a dubious neighborhood. The class was two hours long and intense. Being held in a hall with hard floors instead of a dojang with foam floors took its toll. By the end of the night my feet had massive blood blisters on the bottoms of them and I could barely walk. Still worth it because I felt more relaxed than I have since I landed. Speaking of landings...the airport here is called Schiphol. It's outside Amsterdam and when we landed the flight tracking screen said we were at minus five metres sea level. Any other airport in the world and you have to land pretty hard and fast to make it that far down. What an eye opener.

The entire country is completely flat - not even mountains on the horizon. Today we travelled out to afslurtdijk - a twenty kilometre long dike that closed off a huge part of Holland giving them a large inland lake of fresh water and a bunch of new land. As I write this we're sitting in Lelystad, which is a city in the new part. Everything here and in the immediate surround is only twenty or thirty years old but still the forests they've cultivated look like they've been here a century or two.

Dad continues to talk to everyone and takes his role as cultural ambassador for Australia very seriously. He gives directions when he has no idea where the destination really is, along with unasked-for life philosophy and history lessons to anyone foolish enough to look either bored or simply unoccupied at the time. It is not unusual to have to go looking for him twenty minutes after he went for a cigarette only to find him deep in conversation with someone about the cultural merits of whatever society they come from and whatever society they've interacted with. Only the French consistently come off poorly in these discussions. Well. Occasionally the poms - especially after watching one British couple try and dodge a train fare.

I'm having a lot of trouble convincing him that the internet can help us organise most of our adventures. He remains deeply suspicious of it, still calls it "skyping" and insists on bothering the train information people every chance he can. He can't seem to understand that they don't have any vested interest in his journeys and zero concern over knowing what the answer to his question was. He persists in trying to educate them. My favorite example of this was where he bothered the train information guy for a good ten minutes trying to get help planning an extended off-rail jaunt. After arranging it elsewhere he went back to explain everything to the original train info guy as a "courtesy". Conversation goes like this:

Dad: Gees you don't even look interested in this.
Train info guy: I'm sorry sir but who ARE you?
Dad: Oh come on, we had a long conversation about this NOT FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO.
Train info guy: Sir my shift only started five minutes ago.
*awkward pause*
Dad: Really?
Me: Dad, I did tell you it was a completely different person but you wouldn't listen.
Dad: Did you? Well they all look the bloody same to me.
Me:  That's just the uniform Dad.

God I love him. For all that it is occasionally frustrating trying to catch trains and buses while the old man sucks down the last of his cigarette it is amazing to travel with someone who knows so much about the history of this place. Floods, wars, cultural growth, he knows it all. He struggles with the language, occasionally coming out with the most random Dutch words and he continues to persevere with my shocking inability to see any link at all between Dutch and English. I'm doing my best. Today a hotel/restaurant advertised itself as "Eaten en drinken en slaapen". Apparently this is not "eat, drink and slap", which is an admirable advertisement for a bar in my opinion but "eat, drink and sleep". The old man almost killed himself laughing.