Wanderung 34

Voyage to the Emerald Isle

April - May 2018


 

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Tuesday May 8, 2018: Amsterdam, Holland, The Netherlands

Monika arose quite early and watched the Zuiderdam enter the locks between the North Sea and the canal system that criss-crosses parts of the Netherlands. She reported it was interesting although less impressive than the Panama Canal locks as the ship only moved a couple feet up in the process. I was at first surprised that the ship moved upwards as most of Holland is below sea level, but upon reflection, I think the lock functioned as a tidal gate so that when a ship entered at high tide it would be lowered to the level of the canal system, but when a ship entered at ebb tide it would be raised to to the canal water level.

I awakened at the end of a lock because I groggily saw that the ship wasn't moving and just assumed that we had already docked in downtown Amsterdam, so I went back to sleep for a while. When I roused myself again we were proceeding at a good clip along a very wide canal towards downtown Amsterdam. I had a great time out on our balcony taking pictures of the countryside flowing by and the other water craft that came our way.

The countryside varied from factories such as concrete plants to farmland, and included small towns and housing developments. But there were just some things I could not understand such as a row of buildings shaped like airplane hangars that rambled up the side of a hill in the middle of a farming development. Twice, however, I was super-impressed when this big, deep, wide canal had an underpass with a 4-lane or 6-lane Interstate highway going underneath it in a tunnel. Can you imagine how hard it is to do that and make it all so watertight that the water does not leak through and flood the roadway underneath?

The watercraft were also quite varied. The regular barge traffic mostly seemed to carry bulk cargoes such as sand, gravel, or clay, I think. But in addition I saw ferries at regular intervals and a few pleasure boats already out for the day. Once even another cruise ship, the TUI "Mein Schiff 1" very carefully passed us outbound from Amsterdam while we were coming in.

Due to congestion at the North Sea lock, we arrived in Amsterdam an hour late and had to quickly debark and hoof it over to the meeting point for our walking tour that was near the National Monument. Finding your way around a city for the first time is never easy, and doing it under time constraints makes it even more difficult, but collectively we did manage to make it to the monument by exactly 10 o'clock, which was the designated meeting time.

Our "free" tour (donations accepted afterwards), was in English although we heard a nearby one being conducted in Spanish and I suspect other foreign languages were available. Our guide was quite good and gave a thumbnail synopsis of the history of the Netherlands including the flip in official religions from Roman Catholic to Protestant, and the flip in government from Republic to Monarchy under Louis Napoleon, and finally to a constitutional monarchy under the House of Orange. The current King enjoys an approval rating of 85%, something most politicians can only dream of, so he must be doing something right--our Captain told me that the very popular Queen Maximilia, an Argentinian, has had a lot to do with that approval.

We stopped near the old headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, and the site site of the first stock market where the collective capital to finance the fleets of trading ships going to India and the East Indies was raised. The Dutch East India Company had a huge effect on the rise of the Netherlands as a sea power and the enrichment and development of the city of Amsterdam in particular. Our guide also mentioned the less well known Dutch West India Company that had imported African slaves to the New World and profited by that ugly commerce, although to a much lesser extent than the Dutch East India Company.

The religious toleration of the Netherlands, including the non-persecution of Jewish folks such as those expelled from Spain, was covered at our third stop at the old Jewish quarter. The Portuguese Synagogue is the only one remaining in that section, and the vast majority of the Jewish population was deported and killed during the Nazi occupation in WWII. But even before that war, the local Dutch folks put a Protestant church (designated by a rooster as a weather vane rather than a cross atop the steeple as on a Roman Catholic Church) in the middle of the old Jewish section. I don't know about you, but to me that seemed to be a rather "in-your-face" statement to the local Jewish population about the Protestant folks who were ultimately in control in Amsterdam.

The area of the Waterlooplein is a large plaza that held the old Staathaus which has now been converted to an opera house and is called the "Stopera". I was fascinated by the fact that there also was a flea market being held on the open area of the plaza near the canal, and that looked really interesting. I would have liked to have visited the flea market, but it was across the canal from us and much too far from the end of our walking tour to justify going back to it later. You never know what you find at flea markets in foreign countries. (I was hoping for an old pair of those heavy wooden shoes that the Dutch really used to wear.) Sigh.

Crossing back through the old, central section of Amsterdam, we paused 15 minutes for a bathroom-and-drinks break at a local bar. We were all starting to get tired of walking and were quite happy to rest our feet for a bit. We continued westward past a formal gate, possibly an old city wall gate, into the Canal District of Amsterdam. At the top of the gate was the official coat-of-arms for the city of Amsterdam with symbols around the edge. The center of the coat-of-arms is a column of three white "X"s. Our guide explained that each "X" represented a different issue for the city: floods, fires, and plague, all of which played a role in the city's history. Amsterdam lies about 3 meters below sea level, so clearly the system of dykes holding back the North Sea is critical to its existence. Similarly, fire nearly destroyed the town in its early days, and after the largest such conflagration the city fathers decreed that henceforth all the new houses would be built of brick or stone. Plague was a problem across Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and I presume it hit Amsterdam as well.

But nowadays, the coat-of-arms for Amsterdam should really feature the bicycle! Bicycles were everywhere, and truly in all of the older district of Amsterdam that I observed, far more people were getting about by bicycle than by car, and probably getting there faster, to boot. We tourists were unused to looking out for bicycles everywhere, of course, so there was much ringing of bells and veering around us on the part of the bicyclists, and much jumping out of the way on the part of startled pedestrians. Bicycles in fact outnumber the population in central Amsterdam, which just over 900,000 or so inhabitants and well over a million bicycles. Apparently when inebriated, the local youths tend to throw old bicycles into the canals just for fun, so the bottoms of the canals apparently sometimes are dredged as they are only about 10 feet deep, and these old, rusted-out bicycles are dug up and discarded.

But the canal network in Amsterdam is really pretty, at least everywhere we walked. The canals were and still are are a functional way of getting freight around the central district. If you take a close look at a map of the canals in Amsterdam, you will see three concentric half-rings of canals that are interconnected to form something like a spider web of canals for water transport, which was a fantastically advanced idea for the 1300s, when the first canals were formed by damming the river Amstel (Hence the city name: Amsterdam).

The variety of watercraft on the canals was really intriguing, ranging from the stationary houseboats and the ever-present tourist boats on the larger canals, to many small utility craft like rowboats and dinghies on the smaller canals. Amsterdam has, in fact, many more canals than in Venice, but the views you get of the water with the mix of boats in it and the pretty old buildings along both both sides is both astonishingly varied and just as fundamentally pleasant as is viewing the canals in Venice.

Our guide spent a lot of time discussing the houses lining the canals, many of which were quite old but ornate and very pretty. He explained the narrowness of some of the houses by a taxing system that assessed the linear feet along the canal. Just as in Alexandria, Virginia, which had an identical taxing system in Colonial times, the result was very narrow townhouses that were built to be 4 stores high, and built quite deeply back from the street front.

All of these houses were built on wooden pilings driven deep into the wet, soggy, subsoil of the old sea floor in Amsterdam, just as was done in Venice, Italy. Even the Royal Palace was built on wooden pilings, 13,659 to be exact! But the problem is when the water level drops, the wood can rot or sink further, making the house sink, sag, or tilt. The old houses that had ended up tilting together were called "dancing houses", and they reminded me of some of the houses from the 1600s that I had seen in Lauenburg, Germany, that also suffered from sagging and tilting to the side, sometimes to a rather alarming degree.

Our final stop was a church with a curious crown on top of the steeple, which was located around the corner from the Anne Frank house. The crown represented the real royal crown given to the king of the Netherlands by the king of Austria, or more precisely as Monika reminded me, the "King of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations".

A far more recent monument was a set of 3 triangles set in the plaza in front of the church. One triangle pointed to the National Monument and commemorated the soldiers lost during WWII. The second triangle pointed to the Anne Frank house and represented the Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust. The third triangle point to a little shack on one side of the plaza with a tin roof that was decorated with rainbow flags, and commemorated the gay and lesbian victims of the Holocaust, which is a less well known but equally persecuted group, along with the Gypsies, Communists, and anybody designated inferior by the Nazi ideology.

After that powerful but somber wrap up of our walking tour, we were hungry and desperate to eat, so we repaired to a local restaurant for a belated lunch with our guide. Although the meal gave us some energy, we were still tired and decided to just follow the most scenic of the canals back to the train station at the main port area, and then cut bck over to our ship.

I revived enough to really enjoy walking along the side of the canals and taking pictures of the unique boats, bicycles and occasional oddball cars as we followed the canal back to the port area. We also took time out to stop at a cheese shop that had a really good collection of locally-made cheeses with VERY distinct flavors. But buying a big block of cheese to take with just didn't make sense as we have to travel lightly. However, Monika did buy a couple of Delftware ceramic coasters she found at that shop as we can pack those flat rather easily in the bottom of a suitcase.

We did also pass through a corner of the Red Light district of Amsterdam, which our guide had said was formed in the 1600s when the Church allowed the prostitution in the port area because the sailors would first pay the prostitutes but then have to go to the local church to make a penance for sinning and then pay the Church! Profit makes strange bedfellows, I guess. But I found the sex shops to be basically silly rather than risque, and the bars with the guys lounging around zoned out or drunk I found to be pathetic and sad. What a waste.

As we passed through the large and very ornate train station, Linda got a free Wifi signal, so we immediately stopped to take advantage of that and once again rest a bit. From there it was just a short hop along the quay to the dock with the Zuiderdam. We stopped at the tourist-oriented boutiques set up inside the cruise ship terminal, and I was rewarded for my feeble attempt at shopping by finding a tie with a section Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" painting reproduced on it! Yay! It joined Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam in my serious, subdued collection of classic men's ties.

With that, we all slogged back on board to rest. Monika and I had a snack of tortilla chips, salsa, and guacamole, plus some of the really good Coca-Cola (real sugar!) that I had bought in Horta, Faial, Azores on the way over. That tided us over until dinner up in the Lido deck buffet, after which the Zuiderdam departed the Amsterdam harbor. As we glided out of the harbor area, we saw 6 river-cruising boats moored right next to our berth as well as 3 more moored on the other side of the train station. River cruises up the Amsel and Rhine Rivers, like the cruise we took on the Danube River in Wanderung 32, must be big business!

As our ship headed back up the canal to the North Sea, we saw a great number of oil storage tanks on shore, and tankers and bulk barges with all kinds of cargo passed by us. Despite the huge number of oil tanks, I did not see any sign of a refinery, so perhaps the tanks contain the already refined oil products. We also saw a lot of bikes parked next to the ferry docks. The ferries themselves seem to be stricly for pedestrians, so we think that a lot of people have two bikes, one where they live to bike to the ferry and one in town to bike to work. That would also help explain the extremely large number of bicycles owned by local folks.

However, all the while we were passing the petroleum products, we continually saw lines of huge windmills generating power even in the light winds we had that day. We also saw solar electric panels on many buildings, although not as many as we have seen before in Germany. But clearly the Dutch are also trying to heavily exploit renewable power sources.

The extent of the industrial area lining the southern bank of the canal northwest from Amsterdam was astonishing. But the one lock going out to the North Sea had a technical problem, so our scheduled exit from the canal system was delayed until well after dark. We continued to watch until the sun set, but after that we turned in for the night because it had been a long, exciting, but also exhausting day.



Copyright 2018 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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