Doorways: Red Light District, Amsterdam

I think if I lived here, I'd worry about my door getting fly posterd over one night...

Dutch Tiles

I really like tiles. Well, tiles of the quality decorative sort, rather than the hideous, cheap 1980s bathroom variety. The luminous colours in these ones caught my roving eye - I was particularly impressed that this gorgeous Art Nouveau porch was still intact, unblemished and hadn't been replaced with something cheaply attempting to be 'on trend'.

And how could I resist this thoughtful looking tile cat, cleverly blocking a small street fronting window. I wonder if there was a real feline snoozing somewhere behind the facade?

Weird Doesn't Cover It...

Witnessed today: sitting in the first floor of a café we heard a siren, heralding the arrival of two fifty something men, the type who have lank hair and T-Shirts stretched over grossly distended beer bellies. They made a bee line for a group of teenage girls sitting in the corner: one proceeded to tell them that he was the King of England, Richard III, and periodically pressing his little sirem-sound-making-device, whilst the other one put a plastic joke shop turd on his head and pirouetted around ranting and raving.

We sat there wondering is this really happening, has our coffee been laced with something exotic, is this some weird candid camera type tv stunt? Not to mentioning readying our best Anglo-Saxon in case they decided to attempt to persecute us.

Then, after approaching another group and being told where they could go, they pressed the siren again and announced ‘Time to go’.

Photos were taken outside (yet another) cafe in Amsterdam. I do do things other than loitering in cafes and blogging - promise.

Amsterdam: Sweet Moments

We called this place the Schnoozy Puss café, as that’s how a handyman (who appeared to be paid in ice cream for his endeavours) greeted one of the café’s three cats. The cats, who curled on perfectly feline sized chairs, sealed the obsession that had been seeded a few moments earlier when we had spied people sitting outside eating luscious ice creams.

The ice creams were fresh and tingly and so good that we came back twice during our stay, discovering that their fruit tarts and coffee were even better. It was unpretentious and uncontrivedly simple, and it has the atmosphere of somewhere that was a familiar, loved treat.

Visiting our other felicitous discovery was like sitting inside a cake, perhaps their strawberry sponge. Decorated with mismatched everything and large, extravagantly decorated fake cakes, it was a bit like experiencing a baker’s trip. It was quite perfect, as were the teas – you got a pot with a selection of different tea varieties – and the cakes. I had a truffle tart, and layers of chocolate sponge were sandwiched with hazelnutty buttercream, topped with a thin chocolate seal and an impressively chunky chocolate curl.

I think the sugar content affected us slightly, as we veered between giggly and hysterical, once reaching the alarming point of ‘I-think-I’m-going-to-pee-my-pants’. Or perhaps it was just something in the atmosphere of the place, staffed by laid back people who might be continuously high on sugar. The office was two desks with computers in the café, and as we scoffed we could see staff preparing drinks, cleaning up, and even licking a bowl of chocolate round (this was watched with jealousy) in the food prep area.

Amsterdam: Most Sombre Moment

Waiting in the queue for the Anne Frank House, the bells of the church struck the hour, irresistibly reminding us of John Donne’s famous poem:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

And how diminished have we been by the deaths of so many? It was one of those moments when it was easy to feel despair at our frailty, the seeming pointlessness of human endeavour in the face of such evil.

The House is, unsurprisingly, a slightly odd place. To start with, the exterior is a modern box, which is bizarrely incongruous.

The tiny annex rooms still retain an interrupted atmosphere, despite the thousands of tourists who must tramp through them yearly.

But, I didn’t find it a depressing place, despite the horror of their years of incarceration in dark, airless rooms, betrayal and deaths. Despite my rather morbid thoughts in the queue, I came out feeling energised by our potential.

In Anne’s writing, in the pictures pasted to the walls, in the recollections of birthday gifts and dinners, in the fact that people helped them, there is the sense of possibility of the quietly amazing things that humans are capable of if we allow ourselves to be involved in mankind.

Dutch Skies

We were incredibly lucky to have two days of blue skies and sunshine, the perfect backdrop for gabled roofs and sparkling canals. Before we started questioning whether we were in fact in Northern Europe in August, our last day had a some impressively monsoon like showers.

At this point I realised I had perhaps made the worst purchase to date in my life – and given this is up against the red/black lipstick I purchased a teenager, you will understand this is no passing gripe.

I bought an umbrella with a hole in it. Not an accidental fault-in-manufacturing hole, not a tear. No, this was an umbrella deliberately designed and manufactured with a hole in it. To be precise, it was a pretty looking tulip shaped insert in fabric that was very far from waterproof, as I discovered when my left eyebrow got dripped on.

For the rest of the day me and my friend, who for blog purposes I will christen CatGirl, kept having the following exchange:

Me: ‘I cannot believe I bought an umbrella with a hole in it.’

CatGirl: ‘I cannot believe someone would make an umbrella with a hole in it.’

Skywatch around the world.

Amsterdam

compulsory canal shot

Just back from a quick jaunt to Amsterdam. Once I’d got used to the thimble sized coffee cups and slipped back into cycle dodging mode, I fell in love with the city. Not just how pretty the central parts of the city are, or how outstandingly delicious the cakes are, but the whole atmosphere of the place: it seemed permeated by something more relaxed, less flashy, more – dare I say it? – genuine than the England’s Sarf East. I’m already planning my next trip back to try and see how much of this is rose tint and how much is ‘real’.

I could tell you what all the things on this boat symbolise...if I reached for wikipedia. oops.

I’d mainly been put off going to Amsterdam by the fact that it is a magnet for groups of British lads who want to get mashed up and tell their mates they’ve shagged a whore. Although we had a hysterical/enraging encounter with an aforesaid group on the train from the airport, who were pretending to be all hard and talking like they came from a cartoon ghetto, not aware that yes, they were getting female attention but not quite in the way they imagined, thankfully for my future plans that would be somewhat thwarted by a murder conviction, that that was our only such encounter. Well, until it became time to get the plane home, and one of the same group was clearly trying to psych himself up to still believing that it was unbelievably awesomely hardcore that he’d got a X X X tat whilst shitfaced.

Leffe - looks nicer than it tasted.

Deciding to avoid areas thick with bars sporting British pubs and offering breakfasts with a pint and psychedelically decorated coffeeshops, we percolated around the streets, discovering two of my favourite aspects of Amsterdam: the lack of crowds and gezellig.

Clogs AND tulips - who could resist?

I really hadn’t expected Amsterdam to have a spacious feeling to it, and I suspect that this impression is aided by having lived in Shijiazhuang, where your personal space could be considerably less than the volume of your body, but it did.

where's the rest of my coffee?

Gezellig is apparently famous for being a slightly untranslatable word meaning roughly cozy or comfortable or the idea of togetherness: for us it meant time to have long, winding conversations over properly delicious coffee, cake or beer in snug and interestingly decorated cafes, many of which seemed to have an inhouse cat or two, without being subjected to antisocial imbeciles, terrible, overloud music, or the atmosphere that you are being done a huge favour by being allowed to patronise the establishment.

any country that has ham and cheese toasties for breakfast is good with me!