Monday, 27 March, Amsterdam: canal cruise and tulip gardens!

Written 1 April 2023

Bûcheron on the breakfast buffet this morning! One of my favorite French goat cheeses. Now let's get this cruise underway!

First up on Monday was a canal cruise through old Amsterdam. As I think I've already said, the river where our ship is moored, which runs behind the train station, is the Ij, pronounced "Eye." As we saw on our way to the canal boat, that leads to bilingual puns like a restaurant called "Ij Catcher."

Surprisingly, by far the most popular little trees to be set out in front of businesses, especially restaurants, were olives! They don't even take them inside during winter. I spotted a single olive on one of them, but the guide said they don't generally bear. This one has been severely pollarded to keep it small.

The buildings behind it are, on the left, the city's main concert hall and, on the right, the Mövenpick Hotel. Our ship was moored just behind them.

We were delighted to confirm that our canal boat was glassed in—as it was cold, windy, and raining. Among the first things we cruised by were these two odd objects in front of the Amsterdam Conservatory of Music. When I asked the guide what they were, her dismissive reply was, "Art." The white thing on top of the left-hand one it not, as I at first thought, snail eyes but a perching seagull.

Written 2 April 2023

At the left here is Maritime House, dating from 1905. Its brickwork, which the guide described as being like embroidery, is typical of the Amsterdam School of architecture, which flourished between 1905 and 1930. It reminded me of bargello needlepoint—bricks turned at different angles, to form patterns in the surface. Now the building is a hotel. Its honeymoon suite, in the top of the turret at the right-hand side, is booked solid for the next year.

At the right is a whimsically painted houseboat we passed early in our canal cruise.

The boat at the left here may not even be a houseboat—it looks equipped to sail. Its bottom is flat, for ease of passage in shallow water like the canals, but the big wooden wings on the sides can be rotated down to act as a double keel to lend stability at higher speeds and in deeper water.

The houseboat at the right is unlikely ever to have been navigable. It's pretty clearly just a nice little house build on a floating platform. Some of these stationary ones even have lower floors, below water, where the bedrooms are.

Remember the detective series Van der Valk, which aired on PBS a few years ago? Its main character lived in a houseboat in Amsterdam. His was a converted canal barge.

This converted canal barge features a roof garden, complete with charcoal grill (currently filling up with rain water).

The guide said you'd pay about 900,000 euros for an ugly houseboat, 2 million for a nice one. Before the city decided to clean up its act, all the water gates were closed at 11 pm and opened again at 9 am to flush the canals, because the houseboats did not have sewer connections. Now the canals are clean enough to swim in.

Houseboats rent their spaces monthly from the city, and it takes about 1,000 euros a month to keep a small boat parked near your house.

Note how close to the edge of the (unrailed) canal this car is parked—not even a curb to help the driver judge the edge. And the streets are narrow, so the car has to be as close as possible to the water to avoid blocking traffic or getting sideswiped! Still, the guide assured us that only about one car per week goes into the canal these days, down from the five before low railings were installed in the busiest streets.

Written 4 April 2023

The guide told us that we absolutely had to take the photo at the left—a real Kodak moment, she said. It's a spot where you can look under the arch of a bridge and see the arches of seven other bridges lining up behind it.

At the right are the "dancing houses," which lean on each other because their piles were allowed to dry out and rotted at some point in the past. They're stable now (these days they don't let the ground water sink low enough to permit rot in the pilings), and just as expensive as the others nearby, but imagine the nuisance of living with permanently slanted floors!

The freestanding former defense tower at the left here is called "Malle Jaap"—Crazy Jack—because, from the time it was built, its clocks were never right, or even consistently wrong, and its bells would go off spontaneously at odd times. It's an office building now, and apparently the occupants pay the city 11,000 euros/month in rent.

At the right is a large Asian restaurant—I'm not sure whether it floats or is on on pilings. Seems to me I've seen others like it in other European cities, also on rivers. Anyway, I think it's the one the guide told us can't get enough staff, so they use robot servers to deliver food from the kitchen to diners' tables.

Written 8 April 2023

As we neared the end of the tour, we passed a huge green glass building, in the shape of a ship's prow—the new museum of science and technology, designed by Lorenzo Piano. A stairway of 121 steps leads to the bar on top, and the building also doubles as the entrance of one of the tunnels to the other side of the river.

Other things the guide told us:

• The whole city center of Amsterdam is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
• In 1899, the station was still on an artificial island
• The Zuider Zee was formed in the 13th century when a disastrous storm broke through a band of dunes to a preexisting inland lake, creating a huge arm of the sea that extended 100 km inland.
• In 1916, they got tired of floods, so they built a dike across the mouth of the Zuider Zee (finished in 1932( and gradually converted it into a freshwater lake. Twice a day, at low tide, they would open the gates to let the water inside the dike flow out. The lake was continually replenished with fresh water from the Rhine and other rivers that flowed into it, so eventually, there was no salt water left. A second dike across the middle of the Zuider Zee now separates the Markermeer (the "inner" part of the lake) from the Ijselmere (the "outer" part).
• St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors and of Amsterdam. St. Nicholas's cathedral is catholic.
• "Dam" means dike or lock, so any city with "dam" on the end was the site of such a feature. Amsterdam was the lock on the Amstel.
• Spain gradually took over the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th century. The Spanish imported foods from Asia and sold them to the Dutch, who sold them on to the rest of Europe and were prosperous.
• In 1548, the Dutch embarked on the 80-years war to rid themselves of the Spanish. After that date, they therefore had to find their own way to asia. In 1602, they founded the Dutch East India Company, which made Amsterdam the economic power of the world. Cuyper's the world's first stock exchange was built here in 1602.
• After about 11` years of war, William of Orange united the seven provinces, who were all fighting Spain separately, to form the Netherlands. That was the treaty of Utrecht. In 1584, William was assasinated by Burgundian catholic Balthasar Gerard.
• Before the 80-years war, all the houses in Amsterdam were wooden, but with the new prosperity, people started building in stone.
• In 1621 they founded Dutch West India Company, which brought more prosperity.
• But in 1673, England slowly started taking over.
• Houses in the city center are low, because the peat soil is soft. Each house rests on an average of 33 wooden piles, for a total of about 11 million piles. They're limited to 5 stories, because taller ones would be too heavy. The pilings go down 33 m down to solid ground. Heavier and more modern buildings must be built on concrete piles. All the natural forests in the area wer cut to make all those pilings. Much of the wood was oak barged in from Germany.
• Because wood was scarce and expensive, stairways are too steep and narrow for furniture movers, so each house had a hoisting beam protruding from the attic—furniture and other goods were hoisted into the house. Façades were therefore built to lean out slightly, so that the piano wouldn't scrape its way up the front of the house.
• Because the Netherlands also doesn't have natural stone, many buildings are built of brick (made from river mud).
• Near the end of our canal tour, we passed an old "turning bridge," a bridge that used to open sideways like a gate. It's out of use now, so it remains permanently open and has been made into a restaurant.
• The Dutch beer culture developed because drinking water came from the canal, which also served as sewers, so drinking beer was much safer.
• The North Church is a protestant reform church. A market surrounds it on monday mornings; mostly second-hand clothing.
• By 1678, the whole city became protestant in protest against Spain, with which they had been at war for 10 years by that time.
• The Anne Frank house dates from the 17th century, but in the 18th an illegal addition was built on the back, and that's where Anne and her family were hidden.
• Rembrandt is buried somewhere in the Western Church, in a pauper's grave. The current king's mother was married there.
• Maxima, the current Dutch queen, comes from Argentina and is "super nice."
• "Gracht" means canal. Kaisergracht is the most beautiful and the most expensive. The Anne Frank house is on the Prinz canal (that's prince William of Orange). The guide recited a wonderful velar-fricative tongue-twister saying "we have 888 beautiful canals."
• The neighborhood of the Anne Frank house is called Jordan. The streets there have botanical names, so the Frnech called it the "Jardin" (garden) neighborhood, and that word was corrupted to Jordan. Now the rich and yuppies live there in small but expensive apartments.
• The houses were taxed on the width of the street façade, so houses are very narrow and deep.
• During the canal cruise, we passed a funeral boat—a converted canal barge with a funeral service going in inside.
• Roots from the trees that line the canals tend to push the walls of the canals from behind, so some canals have had metal reinforcing layers added.
• The 17th century houses like he Anne Frank house are now mostly divided into 20 or 30 apartments each or are banks, or offices, or consulates.
• Gables that extend upward to form rectangles are called "neck gables." Clock gables are curved over the top, like mantle clocks. Stepped gables have steps up the sides.
• The gray building stone is imported from the Ardennes in Belgium, the beige/tan stone from Germany.
• The people of Amsterdam are proud that the bicycles in their city are the ugliest in the Netherlands. Most have no handbrakes; you brake by backpeddling—apparently, a good bike will last 50 years, but handbrakes wear out and have to be replaced every few years. Around here, they ride touring bikes, not racing models, and sit upright. Hunching over the handlebars isn't good for your back. And bike riders generally wear no raingear; you just get wet and then dry out.
• About 195,000 bicycles were stolen last year (and those are just the ones announced by the police).
• The city doesn't have school buses, never has; children walk or bike to school.
• The lord mayor, Femke Halsema, is not universally liked. Our guide said that during tours she restrains herself, but at other times, whenever she passes the mayor's house (which she pointed out, but I didn't get a photo), she takes the opportunity to shout, "Femka we don't like you!" and similar abuse.
• In the middles of blocks are beautiful gardens, hidden behind the houses. Periodically, during periodic open garden days, about 50 of the nicest are opened to the public. A garden in the front is very unusual.
• When the houses were built, having stairs up to the front door was a status symbol. The richest houses had double staircases climbing almost a story to the front door. The door at ground level, between the staircases, was for the servants.
• A museum called the Hermitage used to be an old-folks home.
• A memorial lists the names of about 104,000 Jews deported during WWII. The city had about 110,000 Jewish inhabitants (about 1 in every 6 or 7 people), but only 30,000 survived the war.
• About 70% of all churches in the city have been decommissioned; membership and attendance are at historic lows. But around here, old buildings are never destroyed; they just get converted to new uses. Some are now apartments, some rentable party venues, etc.
• Old warehouses with single large doors on the canal are now residences and apartments, but they are large, cool, and deep.
• In 1928, the Olympic games were in Amsterdam, and the Olympic fire was inaugurated on that occasion; Amsterdam was socialist and wanted to add something symbolic; red is the color of fire and of socialism.
• The canals are 10.5 to 15 feet deep (one guide told us, "three feet of peat muck, then three feet of bicycles, then a few feet of water to sail on). They are cleaned/dredged every 3 to 4 months.
• The Netherlands has about 17.8 million inhabitants.
• I asked about a skeletal metal outline of the Arc de Triomphe that stood in one of the canals. It's apparently left over from an illumination festival they have from November to February each year.
• Streetcar 26, under the clock tower at the station, is considered especially good for touring and for going into the city center.
• Five tunnels run through the train station: 3 and 5 for travelers, 2 is "not so nice," 4 is lined with nice shops.
• The Mövenpick and its surrounding building were built in 1986 on a brick base on cement piles
• The last disastrous floor was in 1953; 1000 fatalities in southern netherlands
• The city experiences no tides because it's now on the freshwater lake, and the influence of the sea is blocked out.
• The Dutch prefer natural gas, but using too much domestic gas was causing subsidence, so they switched to importing gas from Russia. Now that that option is off the table, they've gone over to electricity, but they don't like it.

After the canal cruise, we went back for lunch on the ship. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, Viking has discontinued the appetizer buffet at lunch. Now they provide what I call the "fine print" appetizers, little munchie-sized salads that they bring around on trays so that you can pick and choose—you can have one, two, or all of them if you like. The choices this time were eggplant caponata, barley salad, and a miniature caesar; I had the barley, which was particularly good.

The regular appetizer was red bell pepper soup with jalapeñ salsa.

Meanwhile, on the pier side of the ship, guys with brushes and squeegees on long poles were washing the dining room windows. (The waiters pulled the curtains.)

Viking asks in advance, when you make book your cruise, whether you have food allergies, and in addition I checked in with the maître d', as they recommend, and he warned me that the tuna tataki poke bowl had avocado in it, even though the menu didn't mention it. I therefore specified carefully to the waiter that I'd like the poke bowl without avocado—no problem he said, and brought me the Scandinavian shrimp sandwich instead. I sent it back, again specifying poke without avocado, and he brought me a poke bowl with a neat heap of avocado on it. On the third try, I got one without, and it was quite good. Meanwhile David was enjoying the veal schnitzel.

For dessert, I had an excellent caramel sundae. David chose the vanilla rice pudding with strawberry sauce, which he said was very good and creamy, not set up like concrete as on last fall's cruise.

Meanwhile, on the ride, we learned that, in 2019, Amsterdam (1 million residents) had 19 million visitors. As we passed the university, the guide pointed out beehives that are monitored as a check on the health of bees in the city, but I didn't spot them or get a photo.

As we passed through the Piet Hein tunnel, one of six under the city, he told us that buying an apartment costs 5,000–10,000 euros per square meter. In North Amsterdam, his son pays 1300 euros/month for 400 square feet.

He also mentioned that Rotterdam was bombed in May of 1944 but that just one stray (allied) bomb fell on Amsterdam. <1-- we're on highway 8 and about 16 miles to go Rem Koolhaas hotel with three triangles on top of each other a small orchard, but the trees were bare; plums maybe one great gray heron flying near the ship in the parking lot, magpies -->

As you can see in the photo at the left, by the time we got there and were greeted by two young women in traditional dress, the sun had come out. Our guide led us on a short walking tour before turning us loose to wander at will through the plantings and to visit the several pavillions.

The first planting we encountered was this mound just inside the gate that is apparently layered and time-staggered carefully to ensure that all the flowers bloom at once, in waves. The photo at the right is a mixture of three colors of crocus and red tulips. The garden has only just reopened for its rather short season, so this is the first shift.

Between the flowers you can see tulips at much earlier stages that will grow up and take the relay when the red ones fade.

I love grape hyacinths, so I was delighted by this planter full of them, punctuated by tiny daffodills. It was early for tulips, but everywhere we went, the daffodils were in full cry, from tiny ones like this, to huge ones, to doubles, two-tones, all sorts.

Some tulips, especially the shorter-stemmed ones, weren't waiting for the season.

According to our guide, tulips came to Holland from the Himalayas via Turkey, along the silk road. Keukenhoff has 2700 trees, of 85 different kinds. About 11% are oak, 37% plane tree (what we would call sycamores). He even claimed they had sequoias, but I didn't see any. The gardeners use 800 kg of grass seed every year to plant all the lawns. Actually, they plant the main parts of the lawns, but in strips along all the sidewalks, where people are always stepping off the edge, they lay sod, of a tougher variety of grass that can take the punishment.

Every year, they plant six million flower bulbs, and at the end of the season, they're all pulled up and used as cattle feed or pulped for paper on which to print the garden's brochures and maps.

Hyacinths were blooming, as well, some loose like these and others in the tight, stiff cylindrical stalks I remember from my childhood.

Many of the trees were tightly pollarded and pleached, like these. As the season progresses, they will leaf out and be trimmed into elevated hedges.

The guide took us along a winding route from the entrance toward the central (and largest) William Alexander Pavillion. Along the way was a set of rust-colored whimsical animal sculptures (this camel is one) with sections cut away to show clockwork inside.

In front of a smaller pavillion that seemed to house mostly gift shops and a snack bar was this "thistledown" fountain. In its forecourt, an old-fashioned street calliope was playing (audible for a quarter mile around). Peeking behind it to examine the many stacks of punched "Jacquard" cards available to drive its mechanism, we cracked up to see "Beach Boys" and "Glen Miller" among the mix.

Here are a few of the gazillion daffodills we passed. No kidding—they were everywhere, not just in the gardens but along the roadsides, in clusters at the feet of electrial poles, everywhere.

At the right is a bed of tall fritillary lilies, with small hellebores blooming beneath them. By this time, the sun had gone in again.

And just then, as we passed the fritillaris, the hail abruptly started again! I pulled my little camera up into the right sleeve of my rain coat, and to protect my binoculars and pocket recorder, which were hanging around my neck, I shoved them inside the right side of the raincoat and used my left hand to hold the coat over them. The photo at the left is of my left sleeve a few minutes later when its creases had accumulated a collection of the little hailstones. Our Tilley hats, fortunately, kept the hailstones from going down the backs of our necks.

At the right is a little forsythia. Around here, forsythia is pruned and trained into either stiff, upright clusters or neat globular shapes, not like the leggy fountain-shaped bushes we get at home.

These "zombie" variety tulips were in full bloom and attracting a lot of attention from passers by. Note the unfortunate one in the middle, second from the bottom, that has accumulated a handful of hailstones in its center.

At the right is a multicolored bank of camelias. Rhododendron bushes were everywhere, but I only saw one that was in full bloom, well ahead of its neighbors.

It was cold enough that the hail persisted for quite a while in the grass.

Eventually, we reached the William Alexander pavillion, where tulips had been brought along under glass and were blooming profusely. I couldn't stop clicking the shutter.

Gorgeous color of tulips at the left, double daffodills on the right. Wow.

At the left here, "parrot" tulips, with the fringed petals. At the right, the sort of two-tone apricot colored ones are among the three-footers that the Dutch brag about. They were huge.

And at the exit, when we left to move on to the orchid pavillion, astilbe.

These little bitty orchids greeted us at the orchid pavillion.

The orchids also went on forever, all blooming for all they were worth!

At the left here, lady-slipper type orchids.

At the right, at the exit from the orchid pavillion, a wall of epiphytic bromeliads.

On our way to the next pavillion, we passed this planter, surrounding a tree trunk, full of mature, fruiting English ivy! Long-lived plants have two life-cycle phases, immature and mature, and the two often look rather different. Most English ivy we see is in the immature phase, kept that way by frequent trimming and transplanting; you never see it in flower or fuit. If you leave it to grow undisturbed for long enough, though, under good conditions, it will transition to mature phase and produce flowers and fruit. This is what it looks like!

The next pavillion proved to be less to our taste, featuring as it did, use of flowers in "art," running to giant vases, tulips growing upside down, old Volkswagens full of flowers, etc., so we walked through it quickly and went on.

The gardens were full of rhododendron bushes, but the one at the left here was the only one I found in bloom.

Written 15 April 2023

The last pavillion we visited before returning to the buses was devoted to education. At the left here, a docent demonstrates techniques for vegetative propagation of bulbs. Tulip bulbs spontaneously produce little side bulbs, so at the end of the season, they can be pulled up and the side bulbs broken off to be replanted on their own. To produce more hyacinth bulbs, though, you can "core" a parent bulb from the bottom, leaving a conical crater in it. Then if you keep it under good conditions, it will grow a whole cluster of little baby bulbs in the crater, which can then be broken off and grown on their own.

The panel at the right is one of several about Carolus Clusius, the individual who actually brought the first tulips to the Netherlands.

Nearby, another panel illustrated the value of a single particularly choice tulip bulb during the 17th century period of "tulipomania." In today's currency, it would have bought a sports car, a nice RV, or 300,000 of today's tulip bulbs.

At the right, a bed of cute little purple irises we passed on the way back to the bus. In the course of the day's outing, we spotted a great grey heron, wood pigeons, and magpies.

Things the guide told us on the way back to the ship.

• Because tulips are so demanding of nutrients, each field is used for tulips only once in seven years. In other years those fields are used to grow other crops that, e.g., demand different nutrients, replenish the soil's nitrogen, or have different pests.
• And periodically, each field is left to lie fallow for a season. Sometimes, it is even flooded and left under water. That not only replenishes nutrients but drowns all the nematodes and insect pests.
• Lisse, Hillegom, and Haarlem are big centers for bulb-growing.
• The soil of this region is a mixture iof sand and clay and even has a trace of salt left from the sea. Flower bulbs like it.
• Some very small number of families make up the bulb growers of the Netherlands. I didn't catch the actual number.

Back aboard the Freya, we both started supper with the cream of pumpkin soup, laced with crispy pumpkin seeds and drizzled with pumpkin-seed oil.

I then had the pike perch (zander, Lucioperca lucioperca) from the regional specialties menu, and David ordered the rib eye (no photo; you know what a steak looks like).

With some trepidation, we both ordered the bread and butter pudding. On a previous cruise, it had been gummy and leaden, but hope springs eternal and in this case was justified—it was light, tender, warm, and delicious.

The after-dinner entertainment was provided by The Shanty Men from Hoorn (tomorrow's stop). David skipped it and went to bed, and boy did he miss out big time! They were 12 older men, a guy with an accordion, and a lady fiddler, all dressed in salmon-colored jeans and shirts reading "Shanty Men," and they sang sea shanties—wow, were they good.