The ground beneath my feet
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.
The ground beneath my feet 1
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.” 
The ground beneath my feet 3
Utrecht
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.
Utrecht 1
It was a pretty warm day so we spent a lot of time around the Dom Tower.
Utrecht 2
The fountain in the garden of Dom Church carried these icons to warn people of the “non-drikability” of the water there:
Utrecht 3
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.
Happiness is…
A sky like that…
Happiness is… 1
with tea like this…
Happiness is… 2
The house is finally stocked with 3 kinds of tea:
- Twinings English Breakfast
- Lipton Earl Grey
- 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.
Vintage cars
While Alonso, Vettel and Webber were gunning for the top spot at the Silverstone Grand Prix this Sunday, a small vintage-car race happened somewhere in Amsterdam. I was standing at the window of our 5th floor apartment looking down when I started seeing cars that are not exactly your routine fare. Some pictures of the cars that whizzed passed the window that afternoon:
Vintage cars 1
Vintage cars 2
Vintage cars 3
Vintage cars 4
Vintage cars 5
In which Harry Potter takes over Antwerpen Centraal
Spent a lovely day in Bruges today (the clock reads 12:09 so technically it’s already yesterday). We were dog tired and therefore in no mood for breaking our journey in Antwerp but our 8:00 PM Amsterdam connection was cancelled and so we found ourselves killing time at the Antwerpen-Centraal station. It’s the grandest and the most beautiful station I’ve seen so far. While I was busy clicking the architectural details, the wife discovered this exhibition of pictures from the Harry Potter movies:
In which Harry Potter takes over Antwerpen Centraal
She and her camera’s battery are not on talking terms these days so she had to compose this shot for me in her head and call me to realize it. Harry Potter goes nicely with this station. The events in the books could have actually unfolded at a place like this.
Harry Potter and Bruges have always been linked in my head. Ralph Fiennes, who plays Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies, plays a character called Harry in the movie In Bruges. The first time I heard about Bruges was when I watched In Bruges. And for Harry Potter to become a part of of our Bruges visit…
The School for Scandal in Amsterdam
When I would tell friends/colleagues/acquaintances about my impending move to Amsterdam, their reaction would often invlove the following:
- A significant wink followed by
- The words Oh Ammmmsteerrrdammmm… spoken in a conspiratorial tone
The Hangover
The cliché is that people come here to either get sloshed somewhere in the Red Light District or to smoke pot at the ‘coffee shops’. A city is what you make it to be and you can have a perfectly jolly time without doing things people typically associate with Amsterdam.
Western Classical music is a language of its own, and given my fondness for it, every performance at Concertgebouw here is one I could potentially attend. My wife loves drama but there the language comes in the way. She hadn’t watched a single play since coming here. When she found out about an upcoming performance of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal - a play she had read in college - she promptly brought the tickets.
There was a little confusion about the start time of the play - the tickets mentioned 7:30 PM, the posters 8:30 PM. We erred on the side of caution only to find ourselves at a pre-play briefing (the play was part of the larger Holland Festival) which a lot of officious looking people sat listening to patiently. The proceedings thus far were in Dutch and the only thing we caught was the name of the director Deborah Warner mentioned multiple times. We went around the theatre admiring the portraits of important personages from the 18th and the 19th century that decorated the walls. The wife at this point was beginning to panic - did she pick the tickets for a “dubbed” version of the play? I joked that perhaps they play was still in English but surely they would have sub-titles in Dutch.
Before the play began, the members of the cast walked on stage holding placards that described their characters - first in English, then in Dutch. And before we could be mistaken that the placard business would go on throughout the play, we noticed strategically installed green LED displays all around the hall - every dialogue said on stage, was indeed sub-titled in Dutch! My joke wasn’t a joke at all!
The performance at the stately Stadsschouwburg was a fairly modern interpretation of the work but they kept enough of the period costumes around to leave the period feel intact. The evening has been carefully put away in the piggy bank of memorable evenings in Amsterdam
P.S. Diverse pieces of music played in the background during the cast’s placard introduction. The last piece before the play began was Rahman’s Jai Ho. Hearing it in that setting was spooky.