Diesel trains in the Netherlands
A recent news article about the start of electrification of an 88 km train route1 in the Netherlands made me realize that diesel engines are still in use here. This came as a surprise to me. Even after having lived here for over 14 years, I haven’t smelled even the faintest whiff of burnt diesel at the stations here. Perhaps because these engines only run on smaller, regional lines. That anyone should have to still put up with diesel engines in a country as progressive and rich as the Netherlands, boggles my mind.
The last time I experienced diesel fumes at a station in Europe was in Scotland in 2018. The wife and I had taken a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow and had disembarked on a platform where an engine belching burnt diesel fumes stood. That, coupled with poor airflow, had made me feel quite sick.
My childhood memory of train stations in India is the odour of burnt coal mingled with the stench of piss from the dirty public urinals. I realised what that ‘train station’ smell really was quite late in life. For the longest time, it was a pungent but not an altogether repugnant smell - for my brain had come to associate it with the excitement of traveling in trains.
Clearly, I’ve grown soft.
Anyway, coming back to the electrification project here - it was originally slated to finish in 2020 but has been mired in bureaucratic delays. To quote the article:
De provincie en het rijk ruzieden over wie wat zou betalen. Vorig jaar werd de aanbestedingsprocedure stopgezet omdat er een tekort aan materialen was.
The province and the government argued about who would pay for what. Last year, the tender procedure was stopped because there was a shortage of materials.
Apparently, it costs Arriva - the operator of trains on this line - some 20-27 million Euros each year to keep these outdated diesel engines running. So they definitely have financial incentives to get a move on. The project will cost 358 million Euros and the first electric train should run on this route towards the end of 2027.
The electrification of this stretch still leaves about 400 km of the Dutch railway network reliant on diesel engines. Worse, as of this year, there are no plans to electrify it.
Used by around 22,000 riders each day.↩︎
500 kilometers
My e-bike’s odometer clocked 500 kms today. The milestone was brought on by two lovely rides we took this weekend to enjoy the unexpected spell of warm, sunny weather1.
The first one was to Het Twikse Twiske yesterday. It’s a small nature reserve just a few kilometers north of Amsterdam. We had discovered it a couple of years ago completely by chance. We were having breakfast at a cafe in Noord one day and were looking for a place to go for a long ride2. I had pulled up the map on my phone, seen this stretch of green surrounding a water body and we had decided to aim our bikes in that general direction.
We started from home around 16:45. We biked to Pontsteiger to try and catch the ferry to NDSM Werf and managed to board it with just 45 seconds to spare3.
By the time we were at Het Twikse Twiske, it was the golden hour. The trees were still leafless and the tall grass that surrounds the many waterways there, was dry and brown. It was a dreamy, monochromatic landscape complete with a windmill and stately, waterside Dutch houses.
The second ride was to Haarlem today. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been to Haarlem since I got my e-bike. It’s a comfortable 20kms (on e-bike) away from Amsterdam and the route the wife has made for us takes us along water bodies and farms and through quiet parks and a vast stretch of nature that the maps label as ‘recreational area’. Part of the route is parallel to a train track and a road. It’s perfectly normal for a train and a car to woosh past us while a plane headed from or to Schiphol zooms overhead. We marvel at the multimodality of traffic in this country and try not to race the other modes4.
We parked our bikes at a bike stand right at the outskirts of the city under the watchful gaze of 14th century Amsterdamse Poort and made a beeline for a place in Botermarkt that serves delicious falafel rolls5.
We love walking through the city that the wife rightly characterizes as “less crazy Amsterdam”. It is at once familiar and new. We walked through the streets and finally sat down for a coffee at a sunny café by Haarlem’s river-canal Binnen Spaarne. The café’s sleepy house cat wasn’t averse to being petted by customers.
I hit the 500 km milestone on our ride home. The wife, who has had her bike for much longer and regularly bikes to work, narrowly missed hitting 2500 km. If her commute doesn’t do it, I am sure we could use this as an excuse for a ride next weekend.
The max temperature was 17ºC. It was still a little nippy in the mornings and evenings but nothing a light jacket and brisk pedaling couldn’t counter.↩︎
This was before the e-bike, so long back then meant 7-10 kms.↩︎
We could have taken one from Centraal Station too but it was bound to be crowded there on a rare sunny March day, so we favoured Pontsteiger despite the slight extra distance we have to bike↩︎
Despite having binged on episodes of Formula 1: Drive to Survive the day before…↩︎
Bangalore Vignettes - Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace
I lived in Bangalore for 9 years and yet never visited Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace. On a trip to Bangalore this year, the wife and I decided to remedy this omission, especially since it was now a convenient metro ride away.
We took the purple line from the M. G. Road station towards Challaghatta, changed over to the green line at the Nagaprabhu Kempegowda (Majestic) station towards Silk Institute and got down at the Krishna Rajendra Market station. From there the palace was a short (5-10 min) walk.
We needed tickets to enter the palace, but there wasn’t a booth nearby selling the paper kind. We had to buy them online by scanning the QR code printed on a placard affixed to the entry gate. There were a couple of liveried guards at the gate who scanned them from our mobile phone and let us in.
From the gate, a footpath with two small lush green patches on either side of it leads you to the palace. The airy, arched hallway we stood in front of was grand. A man at its entrance had just poured some water on the floor and was scouring it with a broom with the fervour of Lady Macbeth trying to rid herself of her imagined bloodstains.
We were visiting on a working day around 10:00 AM. It was a good time to visit. We pretty much had the whole palace to ourselves.
Behind the palace was a small courtyard that housed a defunct fountain. At the moment it was merely a big, dry, rectangular, concrete hole in the ground a foot or two deep. It wasn’t particularly well marked. Someone walking without paying attention could fall in and hurt themselves, but I am probably letting my newly acquired European sensibilities come in the way here.
Just past the palace’s perimeter was a decrepit building that houses a school. The school was in session. Despite the din of the traffic, we could hear a chorus of children learning something by rote in one of the classes…
I retreated back into the palace hallway to admire the rows of ornate, wooden columns supporting the scalloped arches.
There are staircases at both ends of this hallway that you are allowed to climb. These led us to a small, brightly decorated room that was connected to a gallery on the first floor.
A couple of arched openings on either sides of the gallery lead to balconies. Access to them had been blocked by a wooden barrier. It had been tied to the columns from two sides so that people won’t move it aside and try to step onto the balconies.
While Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace is definitely grand, it is not very palatial (say like Mysore Palace). Meaning, after spending a few minutes, we had seen everything there was to see here.
I was glad that I could finally visit a longtime favourite of Bangalore tourists and yet I also left feeling a little sad. There were signs of wear and water damage throughout the palace. Could the restoration and upkeep be better? Sure. Though to be fair, wood can be a notoriously difficult material to maintain and restore - especially when it is exposed to the elements all year round. Short of building a climate-controlled superstructure around it, what are they to do?
2024: My year in music
Another year, another playlist - Spotify | Youtube Music
I start each year with a silly and irrational fear of not discovering enough worthwhile music to fill a playlist of 50 or so tracks. I end the year with a playlist that’s thrice as long and requires careful culling.
It also feels a little surreal to think that this is now the 9th iteration of a ritual I started in 2016. That said, for the past few years, I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to compile detailed liner notes like I was doing till 2019.
I am now in the 3rd year of learning Spanish on Duolingo1 and if I am to trust their grading, about to start approaching CEFR B1 proficiency. This has allowed me to appreciate the lyrical beauty of a lot of Spanish songs I heard this year. And so the 2024 playlist is a tad heavier in music from Spanish speaking parts of the world than the years before.
While algorithmically created playlists by Spotify - both their discovery weekly as well as the newly introduced ‘daylist’, were a big source of new music, I continue to discover new music and artists through other sources, like TV shows2 and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.
Lastly, there are a couple of songs in the playlist that I want to give a special nod to.
Ryan Downey’s ‘Running’ (track #1 in the playlist) got plenty of play in our house - what a stunning voice. For some reason, he reminds me of Leonard Cohen.
The other one is Plantar un Bosque (track #12 in the playlist) - mostly for the quirky lyrics that could well be an exchange between me and my wife about me bringing in too many plants into the living room:
Yo te voy a plantar un bosque
I am going to plant you a forest
Ay, si lloras, por si lloras
Oh, if you cry, just in case you cry
Tú me lo riegues
You’ll water it for me
Y poco a poco
And little by little
Gota a gota
Drop by drop
Los ruiseñores vendrán a cantarte
The nightingales will come to sing to you
An unbroken streak of 878 days as of today.↩︎
The Peanut Vendor in this year’s playlist was featured in Boardwalk Empire↩︎
Ganz kleine Nachtmusik
A previously unknown work by Mozart was discovered in a library at Leipzig last month. Within a couple of weeks, multiple high quality recordings were available on YouTube. Here’s one I enjoyed:
A couple of decades or so ago the news of such a find might still have reached me within a few days, but I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to access a recording in India till months later - if at all.
A somewhat related episode from that time comes to mind.
I was in my twenties and living in Bangalore. I had just begun to recognise my love for reading and western classical music. I remember having particularly enjoyed Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. This being a book about members of a string quartet1, was full of references to Western Classical music. At one point in the book, the protagonist struggles to locate the recording of an obscure work by Beethoven. Apparently, there weren’t any easy to find recordings of Beethoven’s Op. 1042 - neither in the book nor in real life. Fortunately for me, due to many requests by other readers of the book, Decca had already issued a 2 CD set with a compilation of all the pieces from the book in 2000 - including the elusive Op. 104.
Cover of the CD companion to An Equal Music
For all the toil it took to obtain the recording, I had mostly forgotten about it. I am not sure where I bought the CD. A search of my Amazon order history from those years turned up nothing. Amazon wasn’t in India then but I would routinely get things3 shipped to friends living in the US and pick them up whenever I’d visit them. So the CD might have come from a physical shop. Either one of the many CD/DVD shops at Schiphol4 I used to visit during those long layovers on the way to the US from India or the shop on Church Street in Bangalore that specialised in Jazz and Classical recordings. I no longer have the CD with me. I gave it away (like all my other CDs) when we left Bangalore. 1-04 III. Menuetto_ Quasi allegro [String Quintet in C Minor, Op. 104].mp3 dated 06 Feb 2011, is now playing in the background as I write this post.
I don’t think I particularly enjoyed the work or even listened to it more than a couple of times. I did use to enjoy the piano trio the work is derived from. It had certainly been novel to listen to it rearranged for a completely different ensemble. I was also going through a Beethoven phase in my life. I was compiling a playlist of all his works one opus at a time. In 2010, I even registered beethovenfans.com with the intent of featuring my favourite recordings of each opus. Both pursuits remain unfinished.
These days you can just stream the entire CD on Spotify and I am sure on any other streaming music service of your choice. Freeing music distribution from the constraints of physical media might have been one of the best things that the internet did.
I only have a vague recollection of it after all these years. I just reserved a copy at the library so I can read it again.↩︎
A string quintet rearrangement of Op. 1 No. 3 piano trio↩︎
Books, CDs, and at one point blank mini discs during my brush with that format.↩︎
Funny that this is my local airport now.↩︎
Mallorca April 2024, days 0 and 1
March in Amsterdam this year was quite rainy. In order to get some reprieve from the oppressive weather, we booked a vacation to Mallorca. I caught a flu few days before we were due to fly, but I managed to recover enough for us to not have to cancel the trip.
Mallorca is a popular tourist destination so there are several direct flights from Amsterdam. Upon landing at the Palma de Mallorca airport we realised that while Ubers are not banned outright, there is a 30 minute cool off period before you can order one. The wife quickly spotted a bus that’d go close to our hotel and ordered me to use my newly acquired Spanish1 skills to get us the tickets. I ran, assembled Spanish words into some semblance of a coherent sentence, repeated it twice in my head and blurted:
Me : Boletos para dos adultos por favor. (tickets for two adults)
Bus Driver : Si. Paga en efectivo. (yes, pay in cash)
Me (thrilled at having been understood and having understood what the driver said): ¿Cuanto? ¿Diez euros?
Bus Driver : Takes my money and hands me two tickets.
Now I am sure a driver assigned to a route that busses hapless tourists from the airport into the city would have managed that interaction in English just fine. But still, a frisson of excitement ran through me at having pulled my first real-world task off in a new language. The wife had already boarded the bus and found us a spot to stand with our suitcases. I walked to her - tickets proudly in hand, beaming cheek to cheek.
Mallorca has some picturesque beaches but we are not beach people. As in we don’t fancy lying in the sand and taking a dip in the sea. We were staying at a hotel in the beach-y neighbourhood (Playa de Palma) for the first three days only to be able to take long walks along the coast and catch some sun.
We were at our hotel by 5 pm. The sun wouldn’t set till around 8:30 pm. This left us ample time to grab a quick bite and go for a walk along the beach. The sunset that evening was beautiful.
We woke up next morning to the sort of clear, sunny day on which they hoist a green flag over the boxy, yellow lifeguard stations at the beach in Mallorca to signal that the sea is safe for a swim.
After the breakfast at our hotel, we followed the beach south - always keeping left to the short perimeter wall along the beach built probaby to keep the sand from blowing over onto the footpath. When the beach ended at a marina, a road took us to higher, rockier ground. Several pine trees were growing here. The view of the Balearic sea from here was stunning. Many sailboats lingered here simply enjoying the day.
Lunch was at an Italian restaurant the wife looked up. We sat outdoors enjoying the sun. After all the cold, rainy days that had led up to this trip, it was a novel feeling. The houses in the neighbourhood were painted in earthly shades of ochre and peach. Their slanting terracotta tiled roofs, window overhangs and arched entryways created a mesmerising effect that reminded me of the Monument Valley games I was so taken in with several years ago.
On our way back the sun was shining brightly and this small church on the way to our hotel looked made it look a little other-worldly. But then churches do cocern themselves with all things other-wordly.
This was all the exertion my body could take so it was time for a siesta. We slept a couple of hours and woke up feeling rested. We stepped out for another walk along the beach, this time in a north-westerly direction. Not surprisingly, most of Mallorca’s main beach - Playa de Palma, is lined with beach resorts and hotels. Their architecture is more or less similar. It is all about maximising the view of the ocean and parcelling it into tiny lots you can rent to tourists from sun-starved countries such as ours.
There were also these semi-permanent numbered structures spaced along the entire stretch of the beach that would turn into popup bars serving juices, cocktails, beer and coffee during the day. They definitely add a festive feel to the beach.
The air was a little hazier than yesterday so we were expecting the sunset to be less spectacular than yesterday but when the moment arrived, it still left us stunned.
A while ago I put myself on a social media diet. I was appalled at how much time I was losing idly scrolling through Instagram. I vowed to do a Spanish lesson on Duolingo each time I’d feel like opening Instagram. Before long, a year had flown by and I had acquired enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to communicate basic things in Spanish.↩︎