Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

Amsterdam is very bicycle-friendly. There are dedicated lanes, plenty of parking and traffic rules that favour the cyclists. That also makes it the worst place to learn cycling. Let’s start from buying a bicycle – the shopkeepers assume you know exactly what you are looking for and cannot offer much advice. The one or two other customers we tried asking for help gave us a hurt, offended look – as if we had asked them to teach us how to use toilet paper.

The wife and I ultimately settled on a foldable bike that would allow her feet to reach the ground (in a city where you are shorter than 9.5 out of 10 people, it’s a tall order) and would allow the seat to be raised for me to pedal comfortably.

The wife used to cycle years ago and once she found her rhythm, my evening cycling tutorials began. Every other day the wife would come to the station to pick me up, get me a coffee and a croissant from the station Albert Heijn and take me straight to the empty lane behind our building for our 30-minute cycling sessions.

I had tried learning cycling in Delhi years ago. Though my parents supported me every time I tried to learn cycling, they never egged me on the same way they would to finish my school homework. After a couple of falls my heart wasn’t in it either. I suspect the parents were only too relieved once their bespectacled, disaster-prone son discovered computers and started spending more and more time in geekier pursuits.

Here in Amsterdam curious neighbours looked at me trying to acquire a skill as basic to them as using a knife and a fork and wondered which rock I was living under. They regaled us with tales of how their children, after a few months with their scooter (essentially a bicycle without the pedals – a must-have toy in the Netherlands), picked up a bicycle one fine day and were merrily pedalling away just like that. They tried to demonstrate what they thought was a sound technique for beginners (never having been in that situation since they were 3 years old), and even went so far as to declare our bicycle “difficult” to start learning on.

The wife, however, never lost patience with me. The lane behind our building has a slight incline – enough to allow me to tumble down without pedalling but not steep enough to let the bicycle speed out of control. There were days when I would struggle to go down a few feet and there were days when I would roll down without touching the ground with my feet for a long stretch. Once, I lost my balance and fell hard. Fortunately, with a cycle this low, all I got was a bruised knee and a slightly sprained wrist. In the past, I would’ve given up at this point. Part stubbornness, part encouragement from the wife and I was back at it in two days.

This morning I woke up from a dream in which I was cycling along the sea in Marken (we had spent a day walking there just yesterday). Something in my mind had clicked. When we went out to the street today I could suddenly pedal without losing balance for long stretches. The wife had always said that it’s a very liberating feeling to be able to propel yourself so fast. I understood today exactly what she meant.

It’s early days yet. The bicycle still feels like it has a mind of its own. I can barely cycle a few meters without wobbling and putting my feet down, but I think the foundations have been laid. All I need to do now is to put in the hours it takes for a new physical skill to become second nature.

I must pass on the advice I got from various sources – at least the parts that worked for me:

1. Get a bicycle that doesn’t intimidate you when you walk it along with you.

2. Get a bicycle with adjustable seat. If both your feet touch the ground and your knees are bending a little it’s ok. You can raise it when it’s time to pedal.

3. Don’t pedal from the word go. Find a slight incline from where you can gently roll down. It helps you get a feel of the bicycle and get your balance right. Look straight. Don’t look at your feet.

4. When you can roll long stretches without falling or having your feet touch the ground, move to a flat ground and try pedalling there. Raise the seat a little now. Push the cycle with one foot and once it picks up a little speed, pedal. Again, remember to look straight ahead.

5. Give it a few days. Take it 30-40 minutes at a time. The mind is a wonderful thing. It eventually clicks one day.

A lot of places are known by their cliches. The word “Dutch” evokes tulips, cheese, delftware, clogs and windmills. While we had experienced the first three, we hadn’t yet seen much of the other two except as souvenirs and postcards in shops that dot the area around Centraal Station. We were told that the deficiency was easily cured at Zaanse Schans – just a 20-minute train ride away from Amsterdam. On a rainy Saturday morning, we were there. After walking barely a few hundred meters from the Koog-Zaandijk station (the station closest to Zaanse Schans), you find yourself at this very modern bridge, crossing which is like crossing a bridge across time. The place is almost like an open air village-museum with some really quaint but very well preserved houses, small cheese and bread factories and even a clog museum-cum-workshop.

Albert Heijn is a big retail groceries chain in the Netherlands (their logo looks like the Devanagari ‘क’ and used to make me homesick during our early days here). Our first stop was a small replica of the first Albert Heijn store. It looked a bit like your average small-town neighborhood grocery store in India. They were selling prints of their vintage advertisements which we postponed buying for our trip back but never could make it in time.

We spent most of our time walking around the waterfont looking at the cute houses, tiny bridges, small gardens, open fields and of course the windmills.

Then it was time to check out the various shops and museums. The most remarkable shop here was the one selling antiques. An old lady was the proprietor and she looked like Miss Havisham had walked straight out of Great Expectations. There were two rooms full of all kinds of fascinating old things – from toys to porcelain vases to old table lamps to coat hangers of questionable taste.

In the second room inside there was a small closet with very old dolls. I must say it did get a little spooky.

The facade of the clog museum-cum-workshop leaves you in no doubt as to where you are and what you should expect inside.

The museum’s collection of intricately wood-carved clogs is not big but it still worth a look. But the part that fascinated me most was the live demonstration of how the clogs are made these days.

The machines are simple and ingenious, and if you have one clog, you can “clone” another one from a block of wood within minutes. The wood is soaked in water beforehand for a few days to make it soft. When the clog was ready, the boy giving the demo held it next to his mouth and blew into it loudly. A stream of water came out of the clog to loud, cheerful applause from the small gathering of tourists watching the demonstration. The clog would be left to dry for a few days before being painted and sold in the workshop. Or you could buy a freshly-made one for just €2.

Finally, it was time for that walk back to the station over that bridge across time. We kept looking back, vowing to visit again. Zaanse Schans might be a little contrived and a little over-the-top in its touristiness, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s beautiful.

Epilogue: I’ve often wished for photographs to communicate some sense of the smell of the place where they Were taken. Not here. The smell of fresh, wet grass on getting down at the station, was soon overpowered by the aroma of chocolate. There is a cocoa processing factory in Zaanse Schans and thanks to the fumes it spews, the smell of chocolate just doesn’t go away from the air. While it initially causes strong chocolate cravings (without any shops selling chocolatey things in sight), after a couple of hours it turns into strong revulsion. It’s the olfactory equivalent of replacing every article in a fat book (say A Suitable Boy?) with the word chocolate. Worse, the smell is only about 90% chocolate – there is a 10% element of wrongness – like old French cheese gone bad (if such a thing is even possible). The next time I go there, I will be a little more generous with my deodorant.

I don’t know if I can trust the ground beneath my feet these days. So many times what seems like a perfectly normal road turns out to be part of a drawbridge. You’ll be walking in quiet contemplation when suddenly loud alarms will jolt you back to reality and two cylindrical beams – much like train crossing gates – will start coming down on both sides of the road. The road will then begin to rise to make room for a large boat or a small ship to pass.

When you are living on a patch of reclaimed land, you feel cut off each time a major road connecting you to the mainland behaves like this.

I recently saw a ship called Gandalf waiting for the bridge near Westerpark to open and wondered: if bridges could talk, would this one say “You shall not pass.”

Pictures from a visit to Utrecht in June:

The façade in the backdrop is a printed facsimile. I had seen something similar 5 years ago during a visit to London when they where they were carrying out extensive repairs to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

It was a pretty warm day so we spent a lot of time around the Dom Tower.

The fountain in the garden of Dom Church carried these icons to warn people of the “non-drikability” of the water there:

The thing about potable water from every tap is that you need to call out every time you don’t want people drinking water from an outlet. Never mind that the water doesn’t smell remotely drink-able – but then neither does beer.

A sky like that…

with tea like this…

The house is finally stocked with 3 kinds of tea:
1. Twinings English Breakfast
2. Lipton Earl Grey
3. Lipton Gold

Lipton Gold is a blend we had never tried before coming to Amsterdam but it has wormed its way into our hearts since then. It’s from Sri Lanka (update: and Vietnam) and has a slightly spicy (clove-like) edge. Plus, it goes very nicely with Dutch Speculaas. The supporting cast of other teas (which has been put together after many false starts) keeps things from becoming monotonous.

So while things haven’t been better on the tea front, those azure skies are becoming harder and harder to come by. I’ve spent more time in the rain in the last 3 days than all my days in Amsterdam combined. I don’t like being cold and wet – especially in the socks. A sturdy umbrella – the sort that doubles up as a walking stick – had to be summoned from a dusty corner of our store room, where it had been generously left by the last tenant. It did well against the strong winds but there is nothing it can do to keep me from stepping into a puddle of water.

Still, there is a certain romance about rains which this sun scarred boy from the subtropics refuses to lose. And I don’t know of a more legitimate excuse for a cup of hot tea on coming home.