Paris-Amsterdam
I arrived at Gare du Nord at about 7:30 in the morning, swigging Orangina from a two-liter, carrying a stale half-loaf of french bread, and kicking myself for leaving a small wheel of camembert in the fridge at the hostel. I got in line to get my rail pass validated, then sat and waited for my train.
While I was waiting, a small, middle-aged man, clearly a street person, came up to me. He was carrying a beer. He said something to me, which of course I didn't understand.
"Je ne parle pas francais," I said.
Neither did he, as it turned out. He figured out that I spoke English about the same time I figured out he was English.
"If you don't speak French, why were you speaking French?" he asked.
"I was telling you I don't speak French."
"In French?"
"Right."
"But you don't speak French."
"Right. But I learned how to say I don't speak French. In French."
"Oh."
He didn't ask for anything; he just wanted someone to talk to. His story was that he had two brothers who had come to France to work on a farm, and then suddenly disappeared without even collecting their last paychecks. He had come to find them, and had run out of money months ago, so he ended up living on the street in Paris.
"And I know what you're thinking," he said. "About the beer. I shouldn't, I know, especially not this early, but it's hard."
After a while, he stood up, wished me a happy Christmas, and wandered off.
My train arrived a few minutes later. It was a sleek red Thalys, the high-speed train that would take me to Brussels. There were only a couple other people in my car, so I had plenty of room to spread out.
Across the aisle, a 40ish man in a suit was reading a paper. On the front page was a huge photo of some sort of civil unrest; all I could figure out from the headline was that something big had happened in Argentina, but I couldn't quite piece together the words to figure out what.
As the train got further out of the city, we picked up speed. I don't know exactly how fast the train goes, but the trip to Brussels takes slightly over an hour. We sped along a highway, farmers' fields to our right. It was in this field that we gently rolled to a stop. An hour later, just at the time my connecting train from Brussels to Amsterdam was getting under way, we finally started moving again.
At Brussels-Midi station, I came down from the platform, found the Thalys desk, and asked what I needed to do about my connection.
"Oh nothing," the woman at the desk said. "The next train for Amsterdam leaves in 30 minutes. Just get on that one."
"I don't need another ticket?"
"No, the one you have is fine."
I imagined what would have happened if I were trying to take the train
from Indianapolis to, well, anywhere, and missed my connection in Chicago.
The American train system is a mess. Except in the Northeast, service
is infrequent, trains late by as much as 12 hours are not uncommon, and
the train from Indianapolis to Chicago leaves at 3am and travels at an
average
speed of 35mph.
The train station was cold. The lower level was enclosed, but
the cold air blew in from the platforms above. I found a spot out
of the wind to wait where I could keep an eye on the announcement board
so I could see when the arrival platform was announced. I wanted
to buy a cup of coffee, but had only francs, and it hardly seemed worth
changing money just for coffee. Too bad I was going home before the
Euro came. Throughout the station I noticed No Smoking signs helpfully
affixed to every ashtray. The ashtrays were used, the signs ignored.
|
| At Brussels-Midi. |
When I boarded the train, this one bright yellow, not particularly sleek,
and not of the high-speed variety, there was a newspaper in my seat.
I stared at the front page, hoping if I just tried hard enough, I could
will myself to read Flemish and figure out what the hell was up in Argentina.
Other than determining that Flemish uses the letters J and K far more often
than English, I learned nothing from the endeavor.
This train was more crowded than the last one. A young woman sat on the bench facing me. She read a French novel and smoked Marlboro Lights. The guy next to me studied a computer programming textbook in English. At one stop a rotund man in Orthodox Jewish dress boarded the train. He sat across the aisle from us, opened a book, and his lips moving silently, rocked back and forth in prayer. I looked out the window.
I was first certain we were in the Netherlands when the train stopped at the Hague. We appeared to be on the outskirts of what is by most accounts a sleepy city, but the view from the window made me wonder if the closer one gets to Denmark, the more the buildings look like Lego. There was one building in particular, simultaneously tall and squat, that reminded me of nothing more than when my brother and I, in a prophetic architectural vision that preceded the Petronas towers, built two seven-story skyscrapers out of Lego, connecting them with a sixth floor bridge. It wasn't quite as garish as our construction, where each floor was a different color, but it was a blocky, high-contrast building with oversized white windowframes jumping out from the dominant brick (I didn't take a picture of it, but I managed to find some photos online--its called the Castalia).
At our next stop, the guy sitting next to me asked where we were, in English. I guessed Rotterdam, though I hadn't really been paying attention and I couldn't see the signs out the window. He was going to Schiphol.
As it turned out, we were all going to Schiphol. The conductor made an announcement in a number of languages, finishing off in English: "Ladies and gentlemen: this train is having technical difficulties. Please disembark at Schiphol Airport. Another train will come in 15 minutes."
When the next train, a double-decker, arrived, I found myself standing at the end of a car, wedged between a one-speed bike and a low window covered in a fine mist from the rain. It was another half-hour to Amsterdam Centraal.
While the interiors of both Gare du Nord and Brussels-Midi managed to look ultra-modern, Amsterdam Centraal still looks old. I descended from the platform, out through the crowded hall, where signs warned to be on the lookout for pickpockets, and out to the broad plaza in front of the station. It was raining. Streetcar tracks crisscrossed the plaza. I walked, keeping an eye out to keep from being the latest in what I imagined was a long line of inattentive tourists meeting an ignominious end courtesy of Amsterdam public transit.
I smelled pot.
 |
| Amsterdam Centraal. |
Finally reaching the street, in the distance I spotted my first destination, the American Express office. The wait was long, not because it was crowded, but because the one person in front of me in line kept changing his mind about precisely what he was attempting to accomplish. By the end of it, the clerk's patience was clearly beginning to wear thin, but he never quite cracked. My transaction took approximately 45 seconds, and I was back out on the street, trying to figure out where the hostel was.
I hadn't made reservations, which was perhaps unwise, but I figured
I'd try the City Hostel Vondelpark, which is just outside the rings of
canals that run through the central city. I knew I needed to head
south, then west. It ended up that I went a bit too far south, but
it was easy enough to get back on track once I got outside the canal belt,
where there's a major road that circles the center city. I just headed
north on that road, until eventually I saw a sign for the hostel.
I should note that even if you walk here
without error, it's a good 1.5-2 miles from the train station.
There is a streetcar track that runs to within 1 block of the hostel, so
that is a potentially easier option.
By the time I reached the hostel, I was soaked. There was an empty bed. I checked in, climbed the four flights to my dormitory, and dropped my backpack. The room was great, actually. It probably had about 20 or so beds, but the ceilings were high, and skylights flooded the room with light. I changed into dry clothes, then went out to get a feel for the city.
As usual, I had no particular destination in mind; I just struck out for whatever looked interesting. I headed back into the canal belt.
"Hallo!" somebody shouted. I turned and a bike skidded to a stop. I had the hood of my jacket up so the bike was out of my field of vision.
Pardon," I said, remembering the instant I said it that I wasn't in France any more. The biker continued on.
I crossed a bridge and descended a staircase to a walkway between a
canal and a casino. A few turns back toward the center, and I found
myself in a residential neighborhood walking along another canal, with
the classic view of closely packed high-gabled buildings. A tiny
bar on a corner flew a rainbow flag; I filed it mentally for future reference.
 |
| Canal view. |
I was hungry. After a while, I found a sandwich shop, and walked in. As it happened, this sandwich shop was staffed by perhaps the only non English speaker in the city. I examined the menu. All words, Dutch words. I picked a menu item at random in the price range I figured would be reasonably filling, about 8 guilders.
"Taartaar Special," I said. From the outside this place looked kind of like a kebab shop, but since I didn't see any kebabs on the menu, taartaar sounded Central Asian to me. I hoped for the best.
The man pulled out a hamburger bun, opened up the fridge and put a raw beef pattie on the bun, topped it with a sliced boiled egg, onion, and black pepper, and handed it to me.
"Taartaar Special," he said.
My stomach did a flip. I couldn't really say this wasn't what I ordered, because it was what I ordered, so I paid him. "Danku," I said. I sat with my raw meat sandwich and looked out the window, suddenly realizing that were I a smarter person, I would have connected the Taartaar Special with steak tartare to begin with and ordered something else.
I ate it. I tried not to think about mad cow disease. It really tasted ok, but my gag reflex kicked in a few times anyway. Psychological block. I chased it with some horrible locally produced apple soda that tasted like a carbonated cough syrup. I left the store certain that vomiting would commence within a few hours.
I kept wandering around, turning here and there across canals and down crowded shopping streets until night fell and I headed back to the hostel. Some of the bridges were lit with Christmas lights that reflected off the still water.
Back at the hostel, I had dinner in the restaurant on the ground floor. Salad, fried fish, potatoes, pudding, and Heineken. The man sitting next to me had a newspaper.
"So what happened in Argentina?" I asked.
"They've run the president out," he said. "De la Rua's out, too."
"The dollarization guy, right?" My office has a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, and I'd read an interesting profile on the state of Argentina's economy shortly before coming to Europe.
"Yeah. It's a disaster. They can't pay their debts any more."
I finished off my dinner, ordered another beer, and tried to figure out what I was doing tomorrow. I hadn't done any Christmas shopping back home, so I'd have to take care of all of it in Amsterdam, since Sunday I would be on a train to Berlin to meet my family, and Monday was Christmas Eve.
I called my parents. They were at a train station waiting to board
an overnight train to Berlin, where they would arrive tomorrow. I
told them the taartaar special story. Five hours had passed and I
hadn't yet experienced any adverse effects. After hanging up, I wrote
a few postcards, and exhausted, went to bed.