Autumn colours in Amsterdam
The tree at the intersection of Brouwersgracht and Keizersgracht was one of the first trees in Amsterdam to start developing fall colours. Within no time it sported leaves in every possible shade you would associate with autumn.
Other trees along the canals followed suit shortly. The last three weeks have been an abolute riot of colours in Amsterdam:
Bergen’s Funicular
The wife is addicted enough to Pokémon Go to seek out new Pokémon when we are traveling but still not addicted enough to pay for a roaming data plan for it. Her strategy when traveling abroad is to seek out free WiFi access points, start Pokémon Go and hope that a new Pokémon spawns near her. Sometimes it works. It was during one such attempt in a bogey of Bergen’s funicular train that an asian lady standing next to her asked her what level she was on. I guess the social convention amongst Pokémon Go players dictates that you answer the question with your level and then ask the other person theirs. Which is exactly what the wife went on do. We had barely processed the answer from the asian lady when a middle aged American man sitting opposite her looked at the Asian lady’s sneakers and asked her if those were Onitsukas. When she said yes, the man exclaimed that he couldn’t believe they still made them! He then went on to regale all of us about a comfortable Onitsuka pair he owned when he was living in Tokyo many years ago.
Soon a group of excited kindergarten kids on a field trip boarded the funicular with their teachers. I lost this thread of conversation amidst their chitter-chatter and used the opportunity to scribble the brand name of the sneakers into my diary.1 As far as Funicular smalltalk goes, this had been few notches above surreal.
Our ride barely lasted 5-7 minutes but in that time we gained considerable elevation. The view from the viewing gallery just outside the Funicular station on the mountain was beautiful. There was a little hut just below the lookout point and two white goats were living there.
There was a playschool just off the funicular station. Around here, we came acorss stumps of trees that had been carved into trolls complete with signs telling us not to feed them.
We took a random marked trail that got us a little deeper into the woods - amidst tall pine trees and close to small, placid lakes.
Animals carved out of wood were placed throughout. This made our walk feel like real-life Pokémon Go - A wild vulpus had just appeared:
After a few hours, instead of taking the funicular back, we simply walked all the way to the city center.
The next day, we had some time to kill before our afternoon flight back to Amsterdam. We wanted to spend our time walking through nature and decided to take the funicular to the mountain again. At the ticket counter, they warned us about there being poor visibility from the top owing to fog. Since we weren’t going there for the view, we took the funicular anyway.
When we reached there, the view wasn’t actually all that bad. This time, we also noticed signs forbidding witches on flying brooms from entering the forest.
A few minutes later the whole area was blanketed in a thick fog. We could see why they’d warn you about it when getting tickets - if we were here for the view of the city from top, we’d be pretty dejected.
However the sort of views that we had come for, had actually been enhanced by the fog:
p.s. Had we heard Come Wander With Me by Bonnie Beecher playing here, we would’ve been very spooked.
I hadn’t heard about Onitsuka before and wanted to look them up online later. I am at an age when memory is beginning to be an increasingly dubious ally. At that moment I would be certain beyond any doubt that a name like Onitsuka would stick in my mind forever. However just a few days later, as I would sit down to write a blog post, all manners of details would pour out but the name of the brand would elude me.↩︎
Winter’s footsteps
Summer this year in Amsterdam has been so warm and so long, that the cooler autumn temperatures of the past three days, quite normal for this time of the year, seem too sudden too soon. The temperature outside in the morning is around 8-9°C, while inside the house, the thermostat is beginning to read below 24°C after many days. The days of blankets are still far, but a thick throw is a must for a good night’s sleep. The pedestal fan will definitely need to be disassembled and stowed away one of these weekends.
Autumn here makes me nostalgic about my childhood in Delhi because the autumn temperatures in Amsterdam are in the same range as winter temperatures in Delhi. Once it gets colder though, I lose that frame of reference and the only memories that come back are the ones I formed here.
The days are getting shorter and soon my 35 min walk to and from work will be in the dark. For now, the light both in the morning as well as in the evening is gorgeous. I especially look forward to my walk in the evening. Even if I miss the golden dusk light or a dramatic sunset, lights getting switched on inside old, historic buildings of Amsterdam create opportunities for pictures that, when processed by programs like Prisma, look like a cross between works of Vermeer and night-time impressionist paintings of European cities.
A musical street in Istanbul
While walking through a popular street in Istanbul my pace slackened as my ears caught strains of music and singing. There were a lot of restaurants and bars in that street that were getting ready to open for the evening. Pretty much every one offered live music. The singers were strumming their guitars and rehearsing in their full, energetic voices. The singing was in all likelihood in Turkish. Even if it were in a language I understood, it would’ve been hard to make out individual words in the general hubbub. As I would move past each restaurant, the melody and the voice would change. It was like turning the knob of a radio and tuning into a new station momentarily. Mesmerised by the effect, I took out my phone and paced up and down the street to make these two recordings:
From Bergen to Flåm and back
The wife and I love train journeys. While planning for our trip to Bergen in Norway, the wife had read about how beautiful the train ride from Bergen to Oslo was. However, that would’ve been an 8-hour one-way trip and thus would’ve probably involved looking for an overnight accommodation in Oslo. Instead, we settled for a shorter 3½-hour train ride to Flåm.
On Sundays, the train leaves at a peculiar time: 9:59 AM. The train was mostly empty and naturally, we sought window seats in anticipation of picturesque views.
The views of placid lakes surrounded by pine trees and mountains that shortly followed our departure were stunning indeed. Given the mountainous landscape along this route, most of the track lies inside long tunnels bored through the mountains. The moment we would switch on our phone cameras, the train would roll into a long, dark tunnel. The noise of the engine would reverberate and would be joined by a strange whistling sounds as the air inside the tunnel would rush through gaps between our train compartment’s doors and their frames.
I lost myself in my book (Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies). I also had my headphones on, but given the din the train was making, had to strain to hear the music. I would occasionally raise my head from the book to take in the views as the train would transit between two tunnels.
The first half of our journey ended at Myrdal station. Here we walked to the platform across the tracks to board another train that would take us to Flåm.
This train was quaint - with wooden benches and a decor that harkend back to the glory days of the steam engine. It was quite full and getting a window seat was out of question.
The train moved slowly and passed through more tunnels and over bridges that offered breathtaking views of the deep valleys below. It even made a 10-minute stop near a waterfall where everyone could get down and take pictures.
When we finally reached Flåm it was clear that it was a very popular tourist destination - a little too popular for our taste. We avoided the busy restaurants near the train station and grabbed a couple of cheese sandwiches and coffee for lunch from a small bakery. It was a clear afternoon and we sat down on a wooden platform by Flåm’s small harbor to enjoy our meal. We saw several boats leave from here for a tour of the fjords. Shortly a large ferry bound for Bergen docked here. Neither the wife nor I had particularly enjoyed the journey by train. The wife wondered if we would be allowed to use the ferry on our train tickets. I found the idea a little far-fetched but she decided to try it anyway. Turns out, it was possible in a somewhat roundabout way. We could cancel our train tickets for a fee of 100 NOK (approximately € 11) and by adding another 20 NOK or so to the amount we got back, buy the ferry tickets.
It was 90 minutes to the ferry’s departure and we killed time by taking a short walk through the village. Our plans to go see a church in the old village center were thwarted by the weather - it was too warm for a long walk without any trees shading the way. We returned early and stocked up on snacks from the bakery for the trip back.
When we entered the ferry a few minutes before the departure, the whole boat smelled of bacon. Clearly the pantry was well stocked for the 5 hour-long journey. The ferry was relatively empty when it started from Flåm, but it would pick up more passengers along the way.
Unlike the train, the boat was clearly not going to seek passage through tunnels. The entire journey was through Norway’s majestic fjords. We kept trying to take pictures by pressing our phone cameras to the grimy windowpanes of the ferry but when it stopped near a waterfall, we realised that the ferry’s upper deck was open to passengers. We found seats next to the staircase that led there and kept moving back and forth between the comfort of the warm, air-conditioned lower deck and the cold, open upper deck.
From a distance the cliffs surrounding the water looked like rocks covered in moss, but as the ship would draw closer, it would become evident that the rocks were bonafide mountains and the moss proper forests.
The ferry made a handful of stops near small towns and villages along the route. Some of those stops must’ve taken impossible feats of engineering to build:
while others looked like scenes from a fantasy novel:
At this time of the year, the sun in Norway sets around 8:00 PM. Our ferry was leaving the fjords and entering open waters. The spray its bow raised as it zipped through the turbulent waters turned golden. The clouds that lingered in the sky, did so not with the intention of obscuring the sunset, but merely to add a bit a drama to the event.
Once the sun went down, we settled into our seats till the end of the journey. The ferry docked at the Bergen harbor (a short walk from the city center and our hotel) around 9:15 PM. We stepped out beaming - thoroughly pleased at our decision of having swapped the train ride for the journey by ferry.
p.s.
- It got very windy on the upper deck, at one point my glasses flew off my face!
- Waltz from Angels and Insects kept looping through my head during our stay in Norway.
- As we followed our ferry’s route through the map, we couldn’t help but wonder if children in Norway had to draw the map of their country from memory in their geography class.
- The exhaust vents of the AC were a popular spot to stand against on the upper deck because of the warm air from the lower deck they were constantly pumping out.