Winding Up

May 3-4

I skipped an early-morning e-mail today for two reasons. I had to get out of the hotel by 11, and if I managed it, it would be the first time. I also knew I’d have time to kill at Schiphol.

It’s a little after 7 Eastern Daylight Time right now, a little after 13 here. I have been nursing one of those super space cakes from Paradox since last night. I had a third of one before I went to bed. If my dreams were in Technicolor, they happened too long before I woke up so I don’t recall them now.

I had a little more before I left the hotel. I just have to remember that the last third is in my jacket pocket. I have to eat that before I land in Heathrow. I’m flying British Airways and have to change planes in London. There’s a one-hour window. Don’t think I’d do this again unless it saves a ton of money. And it didn’t do that this time.

I left the hotel shortly before noon yesterday with the intention of revisiting the Rijksmuseum. I worked my way down there on the bike and the line was around the block, at the front and the back. 

Hey, this is Friday. Why aren’t these people at work and doing something useful? Look, a lot of them have kids with them. What kind of example are they setting?

There’s no way I’m gong to spend that kind of time standing in a line, unless I’m with children and they insist.

So after having looked up Admiral de Ruijter on Google yesterday, I thought a good Plan B would be to go to the Nieuwe Kerk, near the palace at the Dam, to see de Ruijter’s tomb. According to Wikipedia, anyway, he is buried there.

The church was gated.  

Plan C, always a pleasure here, was to do more wandering. I rode along the Prinsengracht to the Pancake Baker. This is the pancake shop where the guys pulled up in a boat last summer and passed beers and plates over a houseboat.

The view from my table:

I had a pancake with bacon and pineapple, and that was fun. It went well with a Heineken.

I went down to the old city, and on the way managed to fall off the bike again. I had to stop short for a car in front of me entering a narrow street. I couldn’t get my foot planted in time, so that overweight Dutch bike and I went down. This time I took most of it in the palm of my right hand. The leg is getting better.

I was able to photograph the Cafe in de Olofspoort, which was still shuttered at the time. The singing lady who owns the place came out the door while I was there.

It is billed as one of the oldest taverns in Amsterdam. 

The Olofspoort’s website is in Dutch. After I took it to Google Translate, I wasn’t sure about some of the details. It’s possible that a drinking establishment has operated on the spot since the 1400s or 1500s. The current building is probably newer than that, but not by much. 

Gordon’s Wine Bar in London traces its roots back even farther, to the middle 1300s and a charter for operations from Edward III. The last time I was in Gordon’s it was hardly as pleasant a place as the Olofspoort. You had to fight a press of people to get a glass of wine and the selection, at least of wine by the glass, was unastounding.

By the way, the other day I said Geoffrey Chaucer was a young man in 1450. No way. He was dead 50 years. He was from the 14th century and may have been young when Gordon’s got its charter. 

Nobody knows exactly when Chaucer died. Apparently there is no written record. He didn’t collect his pension for 1399 or maybe for 1400. Pretty good documentary evidence for being dead.

I walked, albeit slowly, around de Wallen, winking at the girls in the windows and stopped for another beer at a place I couldn’t pass up: Aen’t Water. It’s painted on the window, so I know they mean it. They had a couple of exotic looking taps, but they were out, so I had a Heineken, or something basic like that. Good, but fairly common for this place, but also, as advertised, Aen’t Water.

It was warming up, so I sat in the sun for while outside the bar.

I took a quick tour before returning the bike. I went out to the Brouwerij ’t Ij but didn’t stop for a drink. I had already had two and was taking it easy.

I crossed the Skinny Bridge over the Amstel and worked my way back to Star Bikes to return the bicycle. 

After I met Larry on Haarlemmerstraat we walked to the Arendsnest for a toasted rye IPA, which was sweet for an IPA, but tasty enough. The bar served the IPA in  

Arendsnest glasses. Larry pointed out that the brewery was probably too small to afford its own glassware, so it was served in generic glasses.

We had no firm dinner plans, which probably wasn’t an ideal situation, given my gimp. We wound up walking to a narrow street called Nes below the Dam. We stopped in a popular place called Mappa, where we had an interesting antipasto and mediocre pizza. The topping was adequate, but the crust was like eating an unsalted cracker. It wasn’t even toasted.

The more I walked the easier it got, and I was doing pretty well by the time I got  back to the hotel. I was in bed by 10 or so and set the alarm for 8. 

I ate part of my last space cake before lying down. But if it did anything to my dreams, I can’t recall.

The alarm is one of the few things that work in the Season Star hotel. There’s no phone in the room. Sometimes the elevator refuses to come to the first floor. They forget to leave a roll of toilet paper or the right number of towels. There is no heat, and it got cold at night.


The people seem sweet and lovely but they are truly incompetent. And I paid the same rate for the Grand Union, on 32nd Street in Manhattan, a few weeks ago. And the Grand Union provided soap and shampoo.

Larry tells me had a similar experience in Italy and as a rule you shouldn’t book a hotel near the train station. I don’t know if that’s true everywhere, but from what I can tell it’s true of Amsterdam.

Along with my meds, I took a little more the space cake before I left this morning.

Maybe it was the space cake, but I remembered to take some video of an Amsterdam landmark outside the Central Station. It’s a bicycle parking deck.

Hallucinations may have been very vivid by the time I got to the platform. I was able to transfer them to my camera.

I don’t know when I’m getting home or how. My flight to Heathrow should be leaving just about now, but the plane hasn’t shown up. There’s no way I’m going to make my connection at Heathrow, so they will have to put me on another plane to get me home.

The same thing happened to Joanna and she didn’t get home till after midnight Sunday morning.

I’ll just have to stay mellow, which shouldn’t be too hard to do. I had a couple of beers with lunch, including a rich dark called Westmalle. According to the label on the glass, it is Trappist. 

I had dessert and coffee with an Amstel.

A little before two I had the last of my space cake with a short Heineken.

I’ll send a recap of what happens.

Gotta run now.