31st Dec was a typical wintery day in Amsterdam – dank and dreary. Perhaps to liven up the day, people started bursting firecrackers at 3:00 PM. Once the sun set, it was impossible to have a moment when a cracker would not go off somewhere. Sadly, the tales of unruliness were true. We witnessed at least one instance of rockets being fired from the window of one house into the other across a street, had a small firecracker thrown frighteningly close to us, saw a building burning far on the other side of the river and heard the dreaded fire engine siren several times.

We have a shared terrace on the 7th floor of our building. Someone had stuck a hastily scrawled missive on the door to the terrace with this curt message:

Geen vuurwerk (which translates to – no fireworks)

That meant that we could happily watch the show the city was putting up for us from a safe distance. It was still a long way to go before midnight, and while the terrace gave us a great vantage point, it also exposed us to the elements. We eventually retreated to the warmth of our apartment and decided to enjoy the fireworks from our window (which is more of a glass wall that looks onto the river). We weren’t disappointed.

Come midnight and the ships docked nearby started blowing their horns. The fireworks, which were already going strong by now, picked up further.

Their ephemeral reflections in the river made everything magical.

We saw some strange fireworks.

We were quite mesmerised by the variety that wouldn’t go off but just drift in the air like kite-lanterns. At least two of these rammed into the scaffolding of the under-construction building in front of our house but thankfully caused no damage.

Within 20 minutes, the air was so thick with smoke that we could hardly see the fireworks across the river. Just then, a ship which had docked minutes ago, started its onward journey through this man-made fog. It looked ghostly:

I am going to remember this night for a very long time.

P.S. It’s been raining here for the last two days or so and all the paper left by the firecrackers has turned into squishy, red pulp that is probably going to coat the footpaths and roads forever.

P.P.S. Further evidence that some high-caliber fireworks were involved in the New Year Eve’s celebrations

P.P.P.S. Christmas trees stripped of their ornamentation have started appearing near the various garbage bins across the city. It breaks my heart to think that just a day ago they were standing in a bright, warm corner of some house, covered in baubles, lights and surrounded with happy laughter of children and pets and are now vying for space in cold, wind and rain with rotting garbage by the noisy roadside.

[The suction cups have proven to be dodgy and have had to be supplemented with some Sellotape]

The wife was in London to enjoy the build-up to Christmas. She brought a collection of colourful postcards from Tate Modern to put up on the living room wall. The white walls were in desperate need of holiday cheer and I was more than happy to play along. Here is what the collage of postcards on our wall finally looks like:

I tend to doodle a lot – especially when I am told to sit down and listen to someone make a presentation. The “information density” in such a setting is too low for my mind to be fully occupied. It tends to wander off into distant lands of its own invention and has to be shanghaied into paying attention to the matters on hand by doodling. Here are some pages from the diary:

My trusted Pilot V5 ran out of ink during one of these sketches. I had to modify the lyrics of Emilíana Torrini’s Fireheads to suit the situation:

It’s not fair to say I wasted ink
in my view I used it all up

[1] This – Prague – trip.

Czech Airlines’ ads had imagery that felt a bit odd for an airline ad. A commercial flight in which you get to experience zero gravity cannot be a very happy a one:

The in-flight sales catalog had a section dedicated to cigarettes. Dire warnings were plastered in big lettering. If this is the extent of their concern for smokers’ health, I wonder why they bother selling it on the flight anyway?

As our flight entered the Netherlands, we could see green fields with endless rows of windmills wind turbines through the clouds. They are quite a sight from that height:

I wish one could stop a flight mid-air, roll down the windows, and compose that perfect shot. Perhaps this is what the aforementioned Czech Airlines ad was trying to tell me?

We wanted to visit the observation tower at the Petřín hill. By the time we checked out of our hotel, caught a tram and reached the hill, it was already noon. Bells tolled at the cathedral on the otherwise quiet hill and as we started walking towards the tower, their distant echo could be heard.

There were parks on the hill and benches under shady trees. We saw a local climb one of the pear trees there and throw pears on the grassy ground below for his partner to collect. The wife approached the couple, asked if she could pick some of them and returned with four juicy specimens of the fruit. By this time we had realized that we wouldn’t have time to make it all the way to the tower so we just grabbed one of the benches and munched on the pears.

Sometimes memories of things completely unrelated to the place that you are visiting linger the longest. One such memory that’s still with me is of an old man walking past us with a loud radio. The song on his radio was familiar – Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire – but in a language I didn’t understand (given where we were, it must be Czech).

On our walk from the hill to the nearest tram station we came across some fascinating buildings…

…street cafés…

…and other interesting things.

We stood for a few minutes staring at this ornate gate of the German embassy:

At the tram stop we turned around for one look back at the streets we had been walking through.

All along our stay in Prague, the light had either been too dull or too harsh. On the tram ride back to the hotel I saw Charles Bridge illuminated by the most perfect light that a photographer could ask for. Pity it wasn’t our first day here!

The little Nijntje dolls on the bed looked like they were waiting for the Nijntje lamp to perform some divine act.

I came across these beads while looking for something to post on India’s Independence day. Back home, I would go to the Lal Bagh flower show or just step out on the road and click all those autos in Bangalore sporting the Indian tricolor. There’s nothing special about 15th August in the Netherlands, so I had to be content with digging for India-specific material in my archives. It turns out that I had shot these two frames at the Dastkar handicrafts fair two years ago in Bangalore on Independence Day. The realization that I could put them together and get a stereoview dawned on me only yesterday.

Aachen is just a 50-minute bus ride away from Maastricht, which in turn is a 2-hour 30-minute train ride away from Amsterdam. On a Sunday that promised lots of sunshine and little rain, we packed our bags and set out on our maiden voyage across the border. The railways here carry out a lot of repair work during summers. In order to minimize the inconvenience to daily commuters, some of the more disruptive repairs are scheduled over the weekend. Our trip happened to fall on a Sunday when extensive train re-routing lengthened our journey to Maastricht by an hour.

From Maastricht, we caught the international bus that goes to Aachen every 30 minutes. The crossing of the border itself was event-less: I wasn’t expecting a Checkpoint Charlie, but there ought to have been something more to crossing into a new country than noticing that urls on posters now ended in .de rather than .nl. The other sign was the occasional appearance of the German flag that a patriotic soul or two displayed from their houses.

Gradually, the view from our bus window began to change. The architecture became grander, the roads wider and the cars on the road got bigger. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, but it has not been conceived on the same scale as, say, London. After two months in Amsterdam, we felt a little intimidated by a town in Germany.

By the time we got down at Aachen, it was well over 1:00 PM. In an unfamiliar place, no familiar sight exercises a greater power over hungry tourists than McDonalds. They had a veggie burger on their menu, to order which we had to resort to an awkward mix of sign-language and broken English. The apparent belief amongst the people manning the counter there was that “Bitten” is that magical German word, which, if spoken with the right intonation, can bridge the gap between any language and German.

We had almost forgotten that English is not ubiquitous in Europe. The Dutch, especially in bigger cities, probably speak the best English in all of continental Europe. While the programming in TV here is meticulously subtitled (to the point that whenever an American soap refers to 911, it’s subtitled to 112 – the emergency number in The Netherlands), it is rarely dubbed. Sure there is plenty of original programming in Dutch and sometimes the narrative in shows like Master Chef USA is redone in Dutch, but most other programming – from cartoons to soaps to movies – gets aired unmolested. So while the formal English education here does not start in kindergarten, the ambient exposure to the English language begins at home at a very early age.

We ran into the language barrier once more. We were looking for a way to the main church and asking a passer by on road got us:

“Judge? I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know judge.”

Asking for “the Dom” worked, though it took great effort for the person to string together sentences that would register as English on our ears. A building that still stands after 1200+ years is impressive for just being there.

But whoever said about looking for inner beauty probably had this church in mind. The intricate and colourful mosaic work on the walls and roof will make sure that you step out with a crick in your neck.

Also, looking at the predominant use of blue and gold, it’s hard not to think of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and Starry Night.

Most smaller cities in Europe seem to be remarkably similar in their planning. The townhall and the main market are a few minutes walk away from the town’s main church. This being a Sunday, most shops were closed. You can still window-shop and take away memories (and in my case, pictures) of things cute and strange.

This mannequin, for example, looked like an unfinished commission for Hillary Clinton at Madam Tussauds.

After a few hours of walking in the market, we took the bus back to Maastricht Station and braced ourselves for a long train journey back home. As the sun set, our train rushed pass small towns and tree-lined roads bathed in golden sunlight.

We are a big fan of journeys by train but a train ride in silence, especially after a day of walking in a new city, is a wonderful thing.

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.