Sanctuary Of Random Keystrokes

One of the many reasons that my wife and I were excited about our move to the Netherlands was that our visas would allow us to travel freely within the EU zone. We lined up a trip to another European country the very week our visas arrived. Going to a relatively obscure German city might not be as grand an occasion as flying to Paris, but the fact that it would entail doing something that was forbidden just a few days ago was the only justification we needed.

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.

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 noticed these dolls at a shop near Dam Square during our visit to Amsterdam in January. It’s been 3 years since Obama was elected, but he continues to capture an entire generation’s imagination. He was everywhere – from Madame Tussads to Matryoshka Dolls.

And oh, a few changes to the blog:

1. Larger images
2. No watermark
3. Creative Commons (Attribution, Share Alike) license