Amsterdam
When I got up Saturday morning, I finally decided to shave for the first time since leaving Indianapolis. My beard grows very quickly, so this was a pretty painful experience, but at least I looked presentable when it was all over.
Instead of going Christmas shopping immediately, I decided to go to the Van Gogh Museum, a pretty easy walk from the hostel. Positioned a little beyond the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh is an attractive, if blocky, modern building. The ticket counter will take nearly any currency you're prepared to give them, though the Euro now renders that convenience obsolete.
Instead of going directly to the paintings, I went to a nearly deserted exhibit of Van Gogh drawings. While the drawings don't have nearly the vitality of the paintings, in a few places I could see in pencil the same style of facial representation that's so distinctive in The Potato Eaters. There were a good dozen or more of Van Gogh's studies of the Venus de Milo, one including a top hat upon the statue's severed neck.
The painting galleries upstairs are vast, as though the museum is leaving room on the walls in case Van Gogh produces something new or a curator goes on a reacquisition spree to grab Starry Night from MoMA or Landscape at Saint-Remy from my own Indianapolis Museum of Art. As I walked through the gallery, I continually got the sense that I had seen not just some but nearly all of these paintings before. When the Van Gogh exhibit was at the National Gallery in DC in 1998, several friends and I took a roadtrip from Indiana to see it. What I didn't realize at the time was that that exhibit was not just a selection from the Van Gogh Museum: the entire collection of paintings had been moved to DC while the Van Gogh Museum was undergoing renovations.
Even so, this was really pleasant. The exhibit at the National
Gallery was a mob scene; hundreds of people were crowded into five or six
relatively small galleries, and we were being rushed through because our
tickets were for late afternoon and we had to get out before the museum
closed. Here in Amsterdam, the museum was spacious enough to accomodate
far more than the modest crowd there today, and I could spend as much time
as I wanted looking at the paintings. The thing that strikes me about
Van Gogh, which I had noticed in DC but never before, is that he often
sculpts with the paint, laying it on so thick that the brushstrokes rise
off the canvas like the Himalayas off a relief globe. Even more than
the color, it's the rise and fall of the paint that gives some of his paintings
their power, in particular View of the Sea at Scheveningen, which is less
painting than tricolor relief (here's a picture).
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| Ice skating at the Rijksmuseum. |
After the Van Gogh Museum, I walked toward the Rijksmuseum. There's a plaza between it and the Van Gogh, and I watched skaters in the ice rink there for a while before heading on for lunch at a kebab shop.
After lunch (pretty good, though the lamb was a little tough), I started in on the Christmas shopping. Central Amsterdam has a street that probably has a name, though I don't know it, that is basically a vast outdoor shopping mall. I started off wandering in an out of record stores looking for something for my brother, before finally deciding that my interest in indie rock was completely incompatible with his in hip-hop, so I gave up on that endeavor. After entering a number of stores and rejecting nearly everything in sight, I managed to make a few small purchases and wrapped everything up at a department store eponymously called DEPT.
Bags in hand, I walked over to the plaza where the oddly unimposing
national monument stands. A large church, presumably somewhat famous,
was having an exhibit on Dutch royal weddings. A bagpiper played.
There were street performers everywhere, actually. The most interesting
was a man in silver robes, a silver turban, and silver makeup, standing
perfectly still. If you dropped a coin in the box at his feet, as
I did, he made a stiff, almost mechanical bow, and resumed his stillness.
It was eerie, like the moment the statue first moves in Don Giovanni, and
maintaining this pose for hours on end must take incredible force of will.
 |
| Street performer. |
Up the street towards the train station a little bit there was another
statue imitator, but this one appeared to be dressed as a space pilot,
like the other, decked out in silver makeup. His costume concept
struck me as a bit fuzzy, though, since contributing to the verisimilitude
of the first man was the fact that his getup made him look like something
you might actually
see a statue of, whereas the costume undermined the trickery of the
latter. The state of his coin box, however, made it look as though
most critics are not as harsh as I.
I stopped in a store up by the train station I'm hard pressed to describe
at all. It was kind of like Big Lots, I guess, except the merchandise
wasn't total shit. But it was certainly varied. It ran the
gamut from furniture to cleaning supplies to snack food--kinda like if
Pottery Barn and 7-11 had a baby. I picked up a few miscellaneous
items, including several bags of Indonesian peanut crackers I'd last eaten
a decade ago and with which my mother was particularly enamored.
I figured
she'd appreciate them for Christmas.
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| Christmas shopping in Amsterdam. |
Around five, I started heading back to the hostel, and I passed by the
same little bar with the rainbow flag I'd seen the previous day.
The flag wasn't flying today, but it had gotten dark, it was snowing, and
sitting down with a beer sounded good, so I went in and ordered a Heineken.
Not long after I had settled in with my beer, two American women came in
and sat at the bar next to me. The younger one knew the bartender,
and introduced the woman with her as her mother. I ordered another
beer and introduced myself to them. Sarah (names have been changed
here), the younger woman, lived in
Amsterdam and made her living as a corporate consultant; her mother,
Roberta, was visiting for Christmas. We talked for a while and bought
each other rounds of beer.
Sarah explained that this wasn't a gay bar so much as a gay-friendly bar, though, she said, "I'm single, and some nights I come in here and walk right out--so many of you gay men around I just know it's hopeless."
The bar itself was very small, dim, and old. The bartender told
me that it had been operating continuously as a bar since the late 1600s,
and it was thought that Rembrandt possibly drank here. Its location
was then on the outskirts of Amsterdam, and Rembrandt was known to paint
landscapes in the area. Aside from electricity and plumbing, the
place didn't seem to have
made many concessions to the modern world. The bathrooms were
in the basement, down a flight of stairs so steep it might as well have
been a ladder.
"So you should come with us for dinner," Sarah said unexpectedly.
"It's all right," I said. "There's a restaurant back at the hostel."
"No, don't eat hostel food. Come on home."
"Well, ok." I must've unintentionally been putting on some kind of poor lonely American tourist puppy dog act. I wasn't trying to wrangle an invitation to dinner.
After finishing our beers, Sarah led the way through the slick streets back to her apartment. Judging from its size, location within the canal belt, and its view, her work must provide her well. She sat Roberta and me in the living room with glasses of wine, and went to work in the kitchen alone.
"Does two liters of water sound right to cook two cups of rice?" Sarah called from the kitchen.
"No!" Roberta and I both said.
"Don't get up," I said to Roberta. "I'll help."
I went into the kitchen and offered to take charge of the rice. Sarah seemed suspicious of my contention that less than a liter of water was necessary.
"If the rice is fucked up, it's your fault," she said.
"I'll take full responsibility."
Dinner was excellent. The rice was fine, but Sarah had done a masterful job with chicken stewed in a slightly spicy tomato sauce. There was salad on the side, and wine whose quality I couldn't evaluate because I'd had enough to drink by that point that it was all tasting the same.
9:30 rolled around, and not wanting to outstay my welcome, I offered to help with the dishes (an offer vehemently declined), and made my farewell. Sarah accompanied me to the door.
"You know how to get back?"
"I can see the Marriott out your window. The hostel's just south of there."
"Are you going to the bars tonight?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm going to change and rest a bit, but I'll be back out around 11 or so."
"Well, be careful if you get laid."
"Yes, mother," I said. "But I'm not going to get laid tonight."
"You might get luckier than you think. Be careful if you do."
"I promise I'll be careful."
"Good."
"So should we exchange contact information or just let this be a one night stand?"
"One night stand," she said. "At best we'll just send each other Christmas cards anyway."
This was true. "Well, merry Christmas, then. And thanks for dinner."
I walked back to the hostel, dropped off my shopping bags, and changed
clothes. After a quick beer in the restaurant downstairs, I headed
out. I selected a bar called Soho, recommended by Lonely Planet,
as my starting point. It was an attractive place, and packed.
I got a beer. The bar has two levels; the second a loft overlooking
the first floor bar. Packed
though it was, this place was uninteresting--it reminded me of a less
friendly version of a bar called Metro in Indianapolis: nothing ever happens
there; people just start off there to see who else is going to be out that
night.
I left Soho and went across the street to April. It was considerably less crowded up front, though it got thicker toward the back. After doing a surver of the place, I picked a spot at the bar relatively near the front and ordered a beer. I wasn't aware of this till the bartender handed me two, but at least that night, you get two for the price of one between midnight and 1am.
The bartender was talking with a small group of women from Brazil, informing them that though he worked in a gay bar, he was straight. Intent on proving it, he looked out the window in front, and saw an apparently attractive woman (I never saw her)--"Come to papa!" he yelled.
I laughed.
"You understood that?" the guy standing next to me said.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm American and my Dutch is nonexistent."
"I'm Michael," the guy said. "My friend is Rob."
Michael was my senior by about 10 years, Rob probably by 15 or so. Both were from Amsterdam. "Rob's on the hunt tonight," Michael told me. "He went to a fortune teller who told him he'd meet the love of his life this week, and that he'd be blond."
"We're on day 7 now," Rob said. "So I have to find him tonight."
"I'll stay on the lookout."
Rob and Michael took it as their mission to make sure I had a good night in Amsterdam. After a while, we left April and walked to another bar whose name I don't recall. It was tiny, crowded, and was playing 80s music. At 2 it closed and I followed them to another bar called Montmartre. It was still smaller and even more crowded.
"Where's your wallet?" Michael asked. "You'll want to be careful of pickpockets here."
"It's safe," I said. Rob came back with beer. His mission wasn't going well.
"You seem to be doing rather well, on the other hand," Rob said, nodding toward a good-looking man who'd been holding my gaze for a few minutes now.
"I guess, but why bother? I'm leaving for Berlin in the morning."
"Just talk to him," Michael said. "We want to see what happens."
"Fine," I said. I had nothing to lose.
I waded through the crowd toward the man.
"Do you speak English?" I said.
He nodded.
"I'm Brendan."
"Willie. Where are you from?"
"The States."
"You don't seem American."
"What do you mean?"
He shrugged.
Willie worked in Amsterdam for Swiss Air, but was getting laid off in a month. He seemed unconcerned. "I think I'll just travel for a while before I start looking for work again."
Michael came up. "You two seem to be getting along great," he said. "Rob and I are leaving. Have a good night."
"You too," I said. I waved to Rob, standing by the door, sans blond.
Willie and I kept talking until the music suddenly got really strange. "Traditional Dutch music," he said. "It's closing time."
Outside we regrouped with Willie's friends.
"Come on, one more bar!" one of them said.
"Are you up for that?" Willie asked.
"Sure."
If memory serves me correctly, which by this point it may not, we went to a place called Mixx Bar, also mentioned in Lonely Planet. Another tiny crowded bar with an odd selection of music. It all sounded like an alternate universe where Aqua had achieved a level of influence on par with the Velvet Underground. One of Willie's friends started singing.
This bar finally closed at 4. Willie and I had both had it for the night. He accompanied me in a cab back to the hostel.
He gave me a kiss. "Good night," he said.
"Good night." The cab sped off and I went inside.