Back to (Artificial) Nature

April 25

We took another trip out of town today, and saw something we had only known from photographs.

We rode a train to the airport and boarded a bus for Keukenhof (pronounced more or less like “KOOK-in-hawf”), a vast series of flower gardens in the town of Lisse. Its advertisements say there are more than 7 million daffodils and tulips there. Not all of them were in bloom today, but enough to be impressive.

There are formal gardens, espaliers, and whatnot. Everything is growing and everything is the result of artifice. A very strange feeling.

The house of pebbles was fun.

And so were the dueling birds.

In the distance, the tulip fields were in bloom. You can see bands of color and people walking in them. There is a bike rental outside the entrance to the gardens so people can pedal to the flower fields.

Needless to say, I took as many photos of that as I could hoping to get the best perspective. There was a windmill that had been brought in and reconstructed in part of the garden that edged the fields.

The gallery of the windmill was probably best view. There are fields in bright yellow, shades of red, and dark blue. The blue may be hyacinths. The gardens have a lot of them in that shade.

My camera didn’t get the colors right, but today’s photo will give you an idea of what they looked like. This is one of the things I have hoped to see. It’s the main reason that I am in the Netherlands in April.

The windmill isn’t functional but the sails go round. The slowly sweeping shadows as they turned put me in mind of the effigy of Colin Clive hitting one after being thrown off the roof by the monster.  

We spent a good three hours or so wandering the garden paths but didn’t see half of it. But that’s all right. Three million bulbs is enough for one day.

There are pavilions named for Dutch Royalty: Oranje-Nassau, Willem Alexander, Wilhelmina, Beatrix. Willem Alexander is like a flower show—small beds of specimens, most of them in bloom because it was indoors. One highlight was a tree with black hats hanging on it. A lady suggested we add ours.

A concession sells bottles of Heineken there, and I was ready for that.

There is a walk of fame near the Oranje-Nassau building. It consists of small beds of tulips with a photo of a celebrity to which the plot is dedicated. I guess when the idea was originally floated, nobody mentioned that they look like grave plots.

Celebrities include Willem Alexander, who becomes king on Tuesday. God, everybody here is wrapped up in Orange and excited about that. 

The walk has plots for other celebrities, many of which may be Dutch, whom I don’t know. Rutger Hauer is not represented, although Pink Floyd is. So are a pink pig puppet named Purk, and several Disney characters including Aladdin and the Lion King. Spongebob Squarepants also makes the cut.

Next to the walk of fame is a platform that was drawing a crowd, so I had to go see what that was about. Last year, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee (I think that means she’s been queen long enough to turn into stone, but I’m not sure) the U.K. gave Holland a representation in tulips and hyacinths of London's Tower Bridge and the Big Ben tower. I am again unsure, but that tower may have been renamed Elizabeth Tower last year. She’s been around so long, they seem to be naming all kinds of stuff for her.

On the way back the bus took a detour that came close to the flower fields. The shots out the window of the bus were not as good as the ones from the windmill.

We got back to Amsterdam craving red meat, so we went to a steakhouse. Right now it is popular here to style a steakhouse as Argentine. We went to the Global Kitchen, a little more ecumenical. Besides, we were so damned hungry anything looked good and this was the first decent-looking place we passed.

We walked down to the Dam and continued past there onto a street called Rokin.

We found a bar there called Bier Fabriek. And yes, they make the beer there and sell it only there. They had three taps, so I ordered half-pints to give me chance to sample all three and still walk straight.

Bier Fabriek has one of the best red ales I’ve ever tasted. It has the nutty red malt flavor but lots of hops for a surprisingly sharp edge. The black ale was also good. Some stouts are sweet and this one was on the dry side—or it seemed so at the time—closer to Guinness, for instance, than to Samuel Smith.

The blond ale was cloudy and rich. 

Of course, taste is so subjective and fickle. I may have to go back in a few days to confirm these impressions.

We wandered some more, and eventually wound up navigating curious byways between Singel and Spuistraat. This is a great town.