OktoberTrip for my travel companion concluded in the Netherlands. The train from Köln (Cologne) brought us into the flatland littered with extensive kilometers of shallow waterways lined with long grass. We hopped off the train in Utrecht, rode up the escalator, and there was Kristel, our lovely Dutch hostess who completed her half year stay in Houston just two weeks before I left. She even brought a peace offering of stroopwafels - thin crisp wafels sandwiching a thick caramel-like syrup. Mmmm!
After climbing up 509 steps in the tower of the renowned Kölner Dom, we decided to climb the 465 steps in the Dom tower in Utrecht as well. Also, we had to climb down them. To stick with the title of this posting, I won't elaborate more on these easily comparable and contrastible and impressive structures, herein, although I hope to make a collage posting of the dozen or so cathedrals I have visited in my journeys. Great scenery, great company, and great beers marked our time in Utrecht.
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| See how Kristel is bending over and I am stretching and she's still taller. We fought the wind unraveling us and the wah wah weee what a view from the tower! - Photo by Bill |
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Bikes by the River Kwai
Photo by Bill |
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| Canals! |
Hop back on the train toward the coast and in half an hour, you're in Amsterdam! In Utrecht, the canals mirrored their waterfront architecture. In Amsterdam, the canals were slightly dirtier mirrors. Amsterdam has one of the neatest looking train stations and is rich with museums, markets, more canals, day life, night life, and bicycles! I conclude from my experiences in the country that the Dutch are born with ice skates and bicycles.
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| Stayed at Bicycle Hostel, and rented bicycles. I tested this bike sized for a big kid when I thought their smallest adult bike was too large. Turns out I was more comfortable jumping on an adult size Dutch bike than steering like a T-Rex. |
My second trip, just two weekends ago, stands fresher in my mind, and therefore comprises the bulk of this posting. I journeyed on my own to see Kristel again and Saumya, former colleague who first taught me Matlab, and many things about optics. After defending his Ph.D. in Oktober, Saumya has been postdocing with Michel Orrit, a pioneer of single molecule spectroscopy, at University of Leiden. Leiden lies about 45 km southwest near the coast from Amsterdam. After asking to see the lab earlier in the week, I was delighted that they asked me to give a talk during their group meeting time, so I did (!), and had a day of fruitful discussions and tours of their lab, as ~ 5 cm of snow were shaken from the clouds onto the previously bare ground.
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| My academic sibling, Ph. D. since October |
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| Leopard print bicycle |
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| View toward Uni Leiden |
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| View of the other side of the street |
As the snowfall calmed in the evening and I woke from my recovery nap, the temperature outside fell to -10 degrees C, the coldest experienced by my Indian colleague, we voted to cook Indian food (I voted to let Saumya cook Indian food for me) and take it easy by heckling other colleagues.
Two of the most famous landmarks are the Anne Frank House, the house/workshop where she and her family hid until arrested, and the Rijks Museum, a large collection of some of the top masterpieces, a large portion of them by Dutch artists. The centerpiece is Rembrandt's Nachtwacht. My impressions of both run deep, and for now I prefer to make some comments on my observations on lifestyle.
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| We were fortunate to arrive at the Anne Frank House and Museum on a rainy day in October and wait only 45 minutes. A typical wait on a good days is ~ 2 hrs. |
Transport: Bicycles are the superior transportation within cities in Holland - weather dependent of course, but there are always bikers in the well defined and often double-laned bike lanes and they have the right of way over pedestrians. Similar to Beijing, crossing the road requires careful notice of both cars and bicycles, who may not follow the traffic rules.
Heating: In many homes, they turn their heat off at night. Supposedly, you don't care anyway if you're asleep. The among that tenants in Saumya's neighborhood get billed for energy depends highly on an average and distribution. If you are within a certain deviation from the average consumption per unit among your peer residences, you get billed an average rate. If you consume more than a certain threshold above that average, not only do you pay for more energy consumed, you also pay a higher rate. Thus, energy non-conservation can be heavily penalized.
Food: Bread and cheese, most of the time, all of the time. Breakfast, lunch, snack with beer, a little bit with dinner as well. The bread and cheese available are nonetheless very good. Then there are potatoes, Holland is famous for fries with mayonnaise, and other delicious and calorie friendly sauces, like pindasauce, a peanut-butter based satay inspired paste. Regarding spices though, Saumya mentioned to an Indian friend in Houston that he could not locate some of his most used spices in Leiden. Within weeks, he received a huge shipment of spices that he now lives off of.
The above points can also be said of Germany, but Holland takes them to their own extreme.
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| 'Holland's most famous fries' - according to MP, October 2011 |
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| A really good bowl of stew, much like split pea soup with chunks of sausage, potatoes, and carrots. Served with a little sandwich of some hearty seedy non-flexible bread with a thin slice of bacon, between slices of malleable soft sandwich bread . A hearty combination perfect for winter! |
Language: Dutch seems like the middle ground between German and English, which makes a lot of sense geographically. Now that I know a little more German, I can figure out more Dutch (just a little bit though). Dutch is melodic and friendly sounding, a bit less stringent than German can seem at times. To begin: Mrs = Frau = Mevrouw, pronounced like meh-Frau; Thank you = Danke = Dank U; the semblance is strong in
Dutch and
German numbers.
Architecture: Houses are stereotypically narrow, the staircases are steep, and the steps are narrow - I can't even fit my whole foot on a step sometimes (not facing up the stairs, at least).
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| See how he can reach the top from standing almost at the bottom? Now imagine four flights of these babies, late at night. |
Ice skating (!!): Ice skating can be the daily recreation and even transportation once the temperatures drop below 0C for long enough periods of time. The extensive waterways become extensive ice paths, and just 10 cm is enough of a solid layer to skate on. Kristel drove us to her family who had an extra pair of skates from the times when they're daughters were younger and therefore shorter. The Dutch are some of the tallest people in the world. Another 10 minutes into the countryside took us to the head of a frozen stream where I skated on natural ice for the first time! Natural ice, unlike our rinks, is not zambonied once every hour or two, or ever. Brave volunteers may bring out machines that push the snow off the surface to expose the ice, but the surface retains natural roughness that depends on both the contents of the water and the conditions of the air while it formed. According to Kristel et al, this ice was good ice. Kristel, and most skaters there, wore speed skates, significantly longer than the figure skates that I wore. In addition, many skates basically looked like a shoe that did not rise above the ankle with a blade attached - they must have really strong ankles! Many skaters went the whole length of the canal - about 5 km. I chose to turn around where the path was no longer uncovered from the snow, at about 3 km, as I was just de-rusting from more than a year off the ice. After a round of hot chocolate and apples, we repeated. The second time, Kristel's boyfriend and sister accompanied me on my slow and short trip to release Kristel all the way to the bridge at the other end.
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| Get yo skates on! |
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| You can skate further than you can see! |
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Weee! Yay for my first 10 km on natural ice...Kristel et al went 75 km the following weekend....
photo by Kristel |
The most anticipated even is Elfstedentocht - a 200 km tour on ice in Friesland, a northern Dutch city. The weather rarely allows this much ice to freeze at once, and therefore the event does not occur so often. The last occurrences were in 1963, 1985, 1986, and 1997. When the weather falls to these temperatures, the country is abuzz with anticipation. Will it happen? Will it stay cold enough? The ice must be 15 cm think along the entire course. In addition, registration is limited - that ice can only hold the weight of so many people. If it happens, organizers expect almost 2 million people to travel to the region to watch. The winner is a national hero for years to come.
Trains: Despite temperatures falling to -10 C and below each year, train failures remain common in Holland. I say this based on my experience and those of others. This past weekend with only ~ 8 cm of snow on the ground, Kristel waited more than an hour and a half to get on a train that would connect in a small town and then continue to Amsterdam to meet me, when normally direct trains between the two cities run every 10-15 minutes, taking ~30 minutes each way. That gave me time to buy and write a postcard. Holland is expensive - it costs more to send a postcard from Holland to Germany than it does to send one from Germany to the US. Nonetheless, joy (!) when we finally met in Amsterdam Centraal, one of my favorite looking stations of the ones I've seen in Europe.
After ice skating on Sunday, Kristel and I loaded up on fries with pindasauce in Utrecht station before I boarded the ICE International train. As I passed through the aisle, I recognized one of Saumya's new colleagues I had just met on Friday, on his way to perform an experiment at another lab in Germany for several weeks. After sitting still at the Dutch - German border for more than 10 minutes, an announcement informed us that they would need more time to switch from Dutch power to German power. This was not necessary when I made the same trip back to Mainz in October. 15-20 minutes later, they informed us that they would need to reboot the train's computer. During this time, they said, the lights would go out, the WC's would not work, and the doors would not open automatically. Indeed, the lights went out for a few minutes, came back on, and we continued to sit. After another length of time long enough for me to walk 3 cars to the Bordbistro (dining car), purchase a 0.5L Franziskaner, and drink most of it, another announcement stated they now needed to perform a 'full reboot'. Again, the lights would go out, the WC's would not work, and the doors would not open automatically, for 5-6 minutes this time. Everyone remained in good spirits though and laughed at those and subsequent announcements, like the detailed one in Dutch, followed by the German translation, followed by 'Ladies and Gentleman, caput is this train and we do not know yet.' silence, followed by laughter. Eventually, they were in touch with Holland. The train moseyed back into Holland to the nearest stop, called Venlo, where all passengers alighted from the train and waited on the platform in -15 C for the next ICE International. Deutsche Bahn offered one free hot beverage as compensation from the snack stand there. The line was too long for most of us to take advantage of this offer. Eventually, the next train arrived, and we took advantage of all the open first class seating. Many passengers would not complete their connections to their final destinations that night, and would have to find hotels in larger cities, like Köln instead and then take the train in the morning. I was lucky to catch the last train toward Mainz in Frankfurt and arrive in Mainz around 1am, a little beyond 22:30, as originally scheduled. I was just in time to check in on the neck-and-neck Giants - Patriots match up, way to go Giants, thanks for making me as happy as I was the last time you beat the Patriots. Too bad I didn't stay up til 4:30am to watch it.
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| Sunset from the train, before it broke :-) |
