More Holland Days, Please

Metrecht, Utrecht

April 21

This is my third trip to the Netherlands and my first outside Amsterdam.

The train ride to Utrecht takes about half an hour. It is much quieter there and the history much older. It began as a Roman garrison in the first century A.D. when Claudius set up a line of fortifications to mark the imperial border in the north. 

I guess people up here in Amsterdam were off in the wild country, sort of like the Jersey Pine Barrens maybe. I didn’t see any remains of Roman stuff in Utrecht. It has been covered by an extensive and very cool network of medieval streets. 

The old city begins across a major traffic artery from the train station. 

The Tommy Hilfiger store is on the site of a medieval guesthouse that was part of the complex attached to St. Elizabeth’s Church. We looked for the church but apparently it’s gone, along with the guest house and everything else.

We headed for the nearest steeple, which turned out to be dedicated to St. James. Which St. James, I don’t know. It was called Jacobskerk, and is closed on Mondays. 

Not far from there, the Old Canal (Oudegracht) has been preserved as a monument. It is about a dozen feet below street level. There’s a sign at the top of the stairs telling you in Dutch and English that these are the old wharves of the city, and the tree roots have raised bumps in spots. So be careful. If you fall in and get your ass wet, it’s your own damned fault.

According to a sign on a wall, the canal was dug around the year 1000, or in the same era when they were building the dam that created Amsterdam.

The old warehouses are built into the bank and are now used as restaurants and offices, most of which were closed when we walked by. The surface you walk on is paved with brick, a common sight here, but covered with thick moss. It was extraordinary fun to stroll down there.

We followed a narrow street to a corner cafe, where I had a couple of Dommelsch Pilseners. We watched a crew from the town water the saplings in the vest-pocket park across the street. 

We saw some lost Chinese kids, and Joanna spoke to them in Cantonese. One of the girls was from Guangzhou, near where Joanna’s grandfather had a house before the Reds came.

They are students at Utrecht University and were working on a project. They had a riddle written in English that gave a series of cryptic instructions—something about following the hand prints, for instance. 

I didn’t know anything about hand prints, but did know where there was a canal and pointed the way. They were supposed to interview people too.

Well, they had already done that, but apparently they had specific questions to ask, what I did for a living, things like that. They asked my opinion of the queen. 

April 30 is Queen’s Day, always a big deal here, but bigger than ever this year because Beatrix is handing the crown over to her son, Willem-Alexander. She’s 80 and has said, “Enough.”

I’m a freedom-loving guy. If you want to be a queen, you should be allowed to be a queen. You want to quit, you should be able to quit.

But what about Queen Elizabeth? She’s older than Beatrix.

Queen Elizabeth may be the oldest person in the world. Or at least she wants to become the oldest queen. It’s a race between her and Harvey Fierstein to see who gets oldest. (That one nobody got.)

We wandered in the general direction of the biggest steeple, which turned out to be the Dom, or cathedral. This, according to a sign on the wall, is the center of the original Roman town. Cathedrals in Europe, like York Minster and the Geneva Cathedral, were frequently built over pagan sites.

The cloistered herb garden was open. The colonnade that surrounds it contains friezes from the life of St. Martin of Tours, who it turns out, is the patron of Utrecht. It shows him chasing out devils, parting his cloak with the beggar, healing the sick, and interceding after death to do good works.

We managed to get into the cathedral for a while before the bell rang us out. Highlights were the damage wreaked by Protestants on the iconography. An elaborate carving of the Holy Family with St. Anne had all the face knocked off.

The windows were white glass, but not because the Protestants had damaged them, as they had done at Canterbury. The stained glass, the docent said, has to be releaded every 150 years or so, and it’s costly to do that. The original windows collapsed from neglect, not from malice.

The Protestants destroyed iconography because they had decided it was idolatrous. The docent took us around to the quire to show us another form of idolatry that replaced the Catholic imagery.

The quire is the part of the church where the monks would sit and chant. The pews face each other, and the altar is at the end. At the other end was an altar-like marble monument—much like the cenotaphs you can see in St. Paul’s—dedicated to a dead admiral. These were the guys who were protecting and extending the interests of the rising merchant class, who formed the backbone of the Protestant movement.

We took a 6:30 train back to Amsterdam and it was as crowded as NJTransit going to the Meadowlands. We stood all the way back to the city.

We went around the corner for an OK plate of spaghetti.

When we came back to the hotel, I saw this familiar looking man talking to the man at the hotel desk. “Larry Leventhal’s here.”

Larry turns, sees us, and says to the desk man, “This is Harry Hutchinson. How could you forget someone who looks like that?” I believe I have mentioned in the past that my appearance is the reason I had to give up robbing banks.

We made plans to have lunch with Larry, and he took off to get (if I remember right) a felafel sandwich. We’ll meet him for lunch tomorrow.