A Little Worse for Wear

May 4

I stepped off the plane at Heathrow just about the time my connecting flight was taking off.

But that’s all right. It gets funnier.

They had a bus for people who missed American flight 107. I was supposed to get on the same bus, but I had to ask to find that out.

The rebooking desk was kind of busy. The man at the counter said I was already rebooked for a 6:15 flight. I confirmed that the time is 18:15 on the 24-hour clock.

The gate closes 20 minutes earlier, at 17:55. So I first think “7:55?” No, subtract 12, not 10. I don’t know why this gives me so much trouble. Maybe my mind sees it as military time and refuses to accept it.

Anyway, I get the gate information a little later, because first the guy behind the counter gets on the phone. I hear him mention my last name. It is always strange to hear it preceded by “Mister.”

Then the conversation gets chatty. I can’t hear everything he says, because he is turning his head away. Something about how somebody looks.

He gets the information he needs, prints the papers, and then asks me to meet him at the end of the desk. OK, I think, the pony tail has done it again. He has summoned the authorities and I am about to be searched at another border. Laboratory analysis might be able to find traces of contraband in the form of cake crumbs, although I was careful about resealing wrappers when I was carrying cannabis.

But no, it gets funnier. Apparently he considered it discreet to tell me out of hearing of the line waiting for rebookings that the airline had run out of economy seats on the flight and had bumped me up to business class. 

I figure that must have been the purpose of the phone call: Before they confirmed the upgrade, the airline wanted to make sure I looked put-together enough not to upset the class of higher-paying customers. 

I got to use the fast track security line. Whenever you go through airport security, you can always tell who the Americans are. They take their shoes off even in countries where you don’t have to.

I’m at Huxley’s bar in Terminal 5 at Heathrow right now. There is some kind of exclusive lounge that my boarding pass entitles me to use. I think I’m going to look for it.

More later.

Harry by the Nieuwe Kerk wall.

May 5

I never found the lounge. But I had leg room on the plane. I could get up and walk around whenever I needed. I watched the Coen brothers’ remake of “True Grit,” which is very good, and “Expendables 2,” which is ridiculous, but hey, things blow up.

British Airways had Fuller’s London Pride in cans, and I had two of those.

We landed around 8:15. There was no line at passport control, but this is Newark so it took several minutes anyway.

Miss Libby was there in all her eerie shining glory.

I got home some time after 9. It has been a while since I was that tired. A little achy too, but that will pass. It shows that I have been busy.

When I emptied my pockets, I found a wrapper from the Paradox space cake that I finished between Schiphol and Heathrow. I didn’t see any dogs this time, so it was OK.

Everybody be well, and remember: Dress for an upgrade because you never know when you’ll get one.

May 6

Gotta LOVE a free upgrade!!! I've had other friends tell me that wearing a tie definitely helps. No champagne?

Glad you're home safe and sound.

Larry

May 6

I had a glass of champagne while the plane was waiting at the gate. I had the Fuller's during the flight.

Harry

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.

A Park for Rembrandt

May 2

Everywhere you go here you see something interesting or unusual, a canal. old crooked houses, a drawbridge. 

Today I went farther west than I’ve wandered before.

The route took me from Centrum out to some newer suburbs—fewer townhouses and more apartment buildings. My destination was Rembrandt Park, not for any particular reason except curiosity.

I stopped on the way out at a vishandel. It’s a fish store. “Handel” means shop or business. A related word has come back into English slang, probably from Yiddish. I’ve seen it spelled “hondl” and it usually means to bargain. 

So I got a smoked mackerel sandwich with a bottle of water on the side (you can tell I’m still under the weather) and ate it at the handel.

The store was in a commercial strip, possibly on Jan Evertsenstraat or Admiral de Ruijterweg. The admiral is a legendary Dutch hero of the 17th century wars against the English. It was one of his subordinate admirals whose tomb we saw at Utrecht.

The big thing I see advertised right now is “nieuwe haring.” The store had that but I wasn’t sure if it was smoked and ready to eat, or needed to be taken home and cooked. So I wimped out and had mackerel. 

Rembrandt Park is fairly large and has lawns and ponds, live ponies and statues of dogs.

One side of it borders a canal lined with weeping willows. 

The park was fairly empty, which isn’t surprising considering it was a Thursday afternoon, so I coasted up and down the bike lanes for a while. In my black clothes, I was playing Mafioso on a bicycle.

I got off the bottom of the map for a little while and watched a drawbridge open for a cabin cruiser. 

Then I was on Koninginneweg (which I later learned is Queen’s Way) which ran into Willemsparkweg.

I pedaled for a few minutes when I saw the towers of the Central Station. Wow, that was quick. But as I got closer it became clear that this was something else—the Rijksmuseum, in fact. They may have been designed by the same architect because they look alike.

 Still OK, though, because I know how to get to the hotel from the Museumplein.

This is the neighborhood were we were going to have dinner later.

My ass not punished enough by the bicycle seat, I decided to explore some more. I followed the Singelgracht in a wide loop before I entered Centrum or Jordaan by one crossing or another. I was sort of vectoring rather than following a route.

I came back across the Golden Age grachts to the hotel, where I decided a nap was in order.

I met Larry at Barney’s Uptown at 7. Fortified by an espresso and a Hartog Jan, I was ready for the ride back to the Museumplein to Sama Sebo, a packed Indonesian restaurant that serves rijsttafel. That translates as “rice table.” 

It is a Dutch invention. The colonialists used to serve this to their guests in south Asia, and maybe in Suriname too. It kind of shows off what the cook can do.

The restaurant serves the food family style, an array of Indonesian dishes and go-withs—coconut, fried bananas, various spicy vegetables, beef, chicken, and pork. There were so many serving dishes, the waiter had to balance some on the edges of others. 

I tried a little of this and of that, along with a Heineken, and it put me over the edge. After dinner, I was done in. I pedaled back to the hotel and hit the sack. It was 10 p.m. and I didn’t even know where my children were. But I had a trusty feeling they were OK.

Catching the Spirit

May 1

I’m getting bolder and have a knee to show for it.

I spent the afternoon biking the area south of Centrum. Part of the time, I was off my map. And I found my way back.

I stopped first at Bush Docter for a space cake and espresso. I followed Reguliersgracht south and then picked my way across Singelgracht into De Pijp. This is a newer part of the city anchored by the Heineken Experience, a former brewery converted into a museum and amusement park. According to one review online, you should get drunk before going there. Among the attractions is a 3-D film of a man bathing in Heineken beer.

I was up and down streets, some of them familiar, others not. I ran into Sarphati Park again.

It’s near the Albert Cuyp street market. I had walked the bike through there on Monday so this time I circumvented it. It’s not the Temple Street Market in Kowloon, but it is kind of colorful. But I wasn’t looking to buy anything, and there is no performance from the opera.

The neighborhood does have some charming, well-kept streets.

I headed back toward the hotel around 4 for a nap. I hadn’t had any beer, but the space cake and this congestion were tiring me out. 

I forget where I was, some public square where the maximum number of people could see me, when I stopped, threw my leg over the seat, got caught on the seat, and promptly fell onto the sidewalk sideways. 

It is hard getting up off the floor at my age. But I did it. I stood there leaning on the bicycle for a while, until I could remember what it feels like to ride instead of fall. A guy from a construction site came over and told me that I couldn’t continue to stand where I was because it was the access for trucks coming to the site. He apologized, because he had seen me fall, but had to ask me to move.

That was all right, because I was ready to go. I mounted up and took it slow and easy the rest of the way to the hotel. I lay down for a couple of hours. When I stood up, I could feel it. My knee and calf give me hell whenever I put weight on them. It was a bitch last night, but is not so annoying now.

Pedaling the bicycle gives me no problem at all.

So far, this has been a very successful trip. I have pushed it, taken a fall, and am still going. I was probably lost for a couple of minutes now and then.

Larry was working during the day, so I met him at Barney’s Uptown a little before 7. We biked over to a spot called Van Beeren (which may mean “of the bears,” but I don’t know). It’s on Koningsstraat, not far from the Nieuwmarkt and De Bekeerde Suster. I had a steak with a Leffe blond, a Belgian golden ale, and then a De Koninck, which I had expected to be Pilsener. It is top-fermented like Pilsener, but it is a full-flavored amber brew, tasting like an old-style ale.

I can’t tell about Leffe. That may be the same thing: top-fermented, too, but flavored like an ale.

At some point, we stopped at a coffee shop called Basjoe on Kloveniersburgwal.

The next stop was the ancient tasting room at the Wynand Fockink distillery, which is on Pijlsteeg, just off the Dam Square and literally in the shadow of the Hotel Grand Krasnapolsky.

Merle from the Hemp was going to meet us there. Merle’s family owns the Hemp Hotel, and he usually takes the late shift at the bar.

Wynand Fockink serves spirits in tulip glasses. The pour uses the tensile strength of the liquid to fill the glass over the rim. You start your drink with the use of no hands. You bend down like one of those old toy drinking kiwi birds and sip from the glass on the bar.

The bartender took the photo of the day. It shows Merle on the right, Larry in the middle, and the top of my head on the left as we’re getting started on a spirituous liquors pub crawl.

The liqueur is Bierblomme, a distilled liquor made from beer. The beer chasers are the same type of beer from which the spirit is made, from the De Ryck brewery in Belgium.

Wynand is a beautiful place of dark wood, old glass, sagging shelves, ancient crocks, and newer bottles. The tasting room is open from three till nine, so we were there at closing time.

We went to another ancient pub, In de Olofspoort, which is on Nieuwebrugsteeg (New Bridge Alley) about three short blocks from my hotel. The saloon is named for a long-gone city gate, which stood by an also long-gone chapel dedicated to St. Olof, the patron saint of cities.

Sir Michael caught up with us at the Olofspoort.

We had a flight of three types of genever, the original Dutch drink that became gin in England. One was made with peat, perhaps burned to malt the grain, and tasted much like Irish whiskey, although it struck me as a little sweeter. 

The three-year-old genever was good, and the five-year-old was better. I like spirits now and then, but they are potent, so I go easy on them. I sampled the three shots and had a couple of half pints of Pilsener.  

By the time Sir Michael showed up, we were listening to the owner of the bar and a companion singing various folk songs. This is punishment for Larry, but I find it very amusing. 

They asked Michael where he was from, and he said “Scotland.” So they sang “Loch Lomond” for him. 

When I said the U.S., the best they could get from the songbook was “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” There was also a sing-along of “Danny Boy.”

I had to call it a night at 11:30. I found my bike with Larry’s help and he pointed me in the direction I needed to go. 

I put the bike and then myself away. I lay down and didn’t move until 8 in the morning. After that, I went back for a nap.

I leave you with words of wisdom found along the way.

Queen’s Day, Ouch

April 30

From what I could see of it, Queen's Day is an event to be missed in the Netherlands. It seems to consist of everything being overpriced, orange, or both.

The beers were smaller and more expensive. The street food was OK, but overpriced. There was no hope of riding a bike yesterday, so we had to pick our way through crowds of drunks. See? There’s Larry. He’s the sober one.

The streets were empty around the hotel because the police had put up fences to keep everyone on the sidewalks. There were designated crossing points. The only traffic was a convoy of buses taking Marine Band members to the Dam, where the coronation was to take place.

We tried to take the bikes to an outer ring to move around the city. The intention was to reach the east side, Utrechtsestraat and Frederiksplein, where we were told the festivities are not as intense. Alas, we found we couldn’t get there from here. We couldn’t find a way to take a bicycle outside the warren of fences.

So we locked the bikes back up and hoofed it. As it turns out, we would have had to walk the bikes farther than we would have gotten to ride them. There were a few mounted bikers over by the Amstel and the Hermitage.

I know how to get there, but today we had to take small detours because of the crowds. It’s a good thing Larry was leading. We passed through the Old City and somewhere along there, I lost all sense of bearing. It just fell out of my pocket, and don’t know why. I hadn’t touched anything stronger than English breakfast tea. 

Part of the reason is that I am used to taking the long way around by following one of the Golden Age canals, usually the Herengracht or Keizersgracht, in a loop back to the neighborhood of the hotel, so I think of Utrechtsestraat as being east of my hotel. When I look at the map, the head of the street, which begins at Rembrandtplein, is almost due south.

All the streets are crowded not only with people wearing orange clothes, but also with stalls set up by restaurants, stores, bars, and people selling stuff from their closets. Apparently this is the only time of year that the Dutch can hold garage sales.

There is booming canned music everywhere: from boats, on street corners, inside bars. 

When we got to Utrechtsestraat it was pretty jammed. The uncanny thing was that we could turn into a side street, or even onto one of the canals, and suddenly the noise died. Except for a Dutch flag with an orange streamer, you couldn’t tell the city was under siege.

We stopped at a shop and bought something medicinal for Sir Michael to smoke, because we were heading to his house for a while. We had a snack of little pancakes called poffertjes.

We bought a four-ounce beer on the street for three euros. One euro was a deposit on the cup to discourage people from dropping them everywhere. The streets are already littered with trash and broken glass from the Queens Night celebrations.

This photo was taken not far from Bush Docter, where we stopped on the way to Sir Michael's.

This is bizarre, too, because this is generally a clean city. Except for occasional deposits of dog shit on the sidewalks, usually to be avoided early in the day.

We stopped in at the Cafe Krom for Pilsner Urquell, which was served in a half-size glass for 3.5 euros. They were charging people off the street and customers at the bar a euro to use the toilet.

Other observations: Airhorns are very popular here for raising senseless noise. Frat boys and jocks are identical the world over.

One boat on the Keizers(or maybe the Herren)gracht had a reveler holding an orange flare.

When we got to Sir Michael’s, he was entertaining four women. Sir Michael is a charming, well-informed man of my generation who surrounds himself with young women. Nothing wrong with that, right?

One of the women there was a friend who looks after him. Two others may have been a couple. I'm not sure. 

The fourth was dressed for the holiday, in an orange vest and an orange derby, suggesting a Bob Fosse production in which the colors had gone strangely awry.  

We sat in front of the TV and watched the end of the coronation ceremony. This was a rite where everybody from parliament had to stand one after the other and individually affirm or swear loyalty to the constitution. Maybe to the king, too. I don't speak Dutch. 

The king and everyone else had to file out of the Nieuwe Kerk and perform very slow and dignified stroll back to the palace, maybe 50 yards. There was a carpet and canopy defining the way so none of them would get lost. 

The king was probably best off. It is a cold spring here. He got to wear an ermine cape against the breeze.

Sir Michael’s apartment overlooks the Prinsengracht, and although there were boats in the Herrengracht and Keizersgracht, the Prinsengracht was clearly the canal of choice for Queen’s Day.

After we left Sir Michael’s we headed back in the general direction of Haarlemmerstraat. We crossed the Skinny Bridge over the Amstel, and came through the Nieuw Markt.

I only saw one fight between drunks, and that was on the way back through the old city. One guy was so drunk he could hardly stand straight. He wound up staggering backwards into me as I went by.

When Larry and I got to Barney’s Uptown on Haarlemmerstraat, I was fairly bushed. We had some Hartog Jan beers and I finished the last of the spacecake I had started the day before.

I wasn’t overly hungry, but we were able to polish off some nachos and hummus, along with a couple of beers more.

The street vendors were clearing up as we sat in the window. One family had been selling sunglasses and belts and began to break downs their display tables.

Another family had pulled up in a car (don’t know how they got it there) and started to cover it with tablecloths. No, not tablecloths. They were scarves, and they had ball fringe. 

A lady was helped from a wheel chair by another couple. She sat on a bench on the sidewalk. She is clearly a familiar and well-liked figure in this neighborhood. People young and old, including Barney’s bartender Woody, went up to speak to her and to sit with her for a while.

One of the men selling scarves came over to her. At first, I thought he was taking advantage of her and trying to intimidate her into buying one. But no, he gave it to her.

The family hawked their scarves for the best part of an hour and then packed it in.

The wine store across the street was overrun by a crowd of kids. Every once in a while one would open a bottle of sparkling wine and the jet of spray would rise over all their heads. Sort of like New Year’s Eve in Barcelona.

But eventually the crowd thinned out. Slow processions of sore and injured people were trooping home or somewhere. By this time, I wasn’t in much better shape, so I headed back to the room for some rest.

As Sinterklaas says on Queen's Day, happy birthday to all and to all a good night.