Gouda
Gouda is famous for cheese of the same name. But that’s not what we were going there for. We love cities. Especially the resilient ones that retain a bit of their character after hundreds of years. When we read about Gouda’s 15th century town hall, we knew we had to be there.
And it didn’t disappoint. It’s a structure that looks right out of a fairy tale…
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…one with not necessarily a happy ending.
The bright red panes attached to the otherwise monochromatic facade try to lend the building a jovial air. They kept reminding me of the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland.
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For € 1.5 you can take a tour of the town hall. You are handed a printed sheet of laminated paper with details about the different rooms inside the hall. You can then walk around at your own pace and soak it all in. It’s very life affirming to see these buildings in use even today. In one of the halls dry-run for a wedding was taking place - with two photographers and the fully dressed bride and groom in attendance.
We were free to use the loos too - thankfully they were fitted with 20th-century fixtures and didn’t cling on to the 15th-century past of the building.
The meeting rooms upstairs were even more modern but the stairs leading up to them were so worn with use that you could feel a depression right in the middle of every single one of them where hundreds of thousands of steps must have trod on. Framed posters with insignias of important personages over the years decorated one of the walls near the meeting rooms.
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From the balcony of the town hall we could see the 17th century Kaaswaag or the cheese weighing house. The building now houses a cheese and crafts museum.
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I don’t know how we got to the street behind the old church - just glad we did. One of the buildings there had a beautiful color relief above its entrance.
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With an entrance like that, you have to go in and find out what awaits you inside. Just like with the town hall earlier, we found ourselves in another time. There were more reliefs…
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…beautifully detailed life-sized statues….
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…a gargoyle…
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…the bust of a soprano frozen mid-aria…
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…and a garden that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland for the second time in the day…
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…inside which we found flowerbeds…
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…and a coat of arms…
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All in all, a place full of things guaranteed to pull a fantasy author out of his writers’ block.
The magic didn’t leave us for the rest of the day. We kept running into one beautiful building after the other…
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…often decorated with colourful reliefs.
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It seemed that for each such building we would see, there would be a park or a garden to match it…
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…and a reminder that we were still in a town famous for its cheese.
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Geen Dienst
Geen Dienst are two of the earliest Dutch words that we picked up. They translate to ‘no service’ but we took them to be name of some station because we would see a tram or metro train occasionally display these words on the electronic sign where it would otherwise show the name of its final destination. Yesterday was a 24-hour transport strike in Amsterdam and the sign was in vogue. The employees of the company (GVB) that runs trams, buses and ferries here, were protesting against deep cuts in government spending on public transport. The bells and the whirring electronic motors of the trams are such an integral part of the aural landscape of central Amsterdam that it felt eerily quiet without them. And there is no way I could have stood in the middle of the tracks and snapped a picture of Centraal Station like this on a regular day:
Geen Dienst
I am a big fan of the public transport here - it’s clean, fast, affordable and very punctual. It would be tragic if the budget cuts brought down the service to a point where people lost the incentive to use it.
The New Home
Central heating, faux wooden floor, water you can drink straight off the tap, hot running water 24 hours a day etc. are just some of those things that the developed world takes for granted but are nothing short of luxury for someone from middle-class India moving abroad. I am divided between enjoying it all and not getting too used to it.
Our house faces east which means that one day we’ll wake up around 5:00 AM and see a beautiful dawn. We are up by 6:30 - 7:00 AM these days and on a cloudless day the sun is already in our face by then.
The thing we love most about our new place is the view of the waterfront. We are practically at the bank of the IJ (pronounced like egg with both gs silent) - a water body that was once a bay but is now a river that connects to the North Sea. Since both me and my wife grew up and lived in land-locked cities all our lives, the fascination with large volumes of moving water is probably not unnatural.
The New Home 1
Hundreds of boats, ships, ferries and all manner of things, which must have a proper noun in the naval dictionaries but are merely man-made fast-moving floating objects for us, cross the IJ every day.
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The New Home 3
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There are vessels of both the sea-faring and the sea-fearing kind.
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Once in a while a large cruise ship would pass us by. The people standing on the decks of these ships look down on (in the most literal sense) our 5th floor apartment.
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The New Home 7
The New Home 8
[These pictures convey the scale of things poorly. A 100% crop of a small section of the ship will probably do a better job.]
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Needless to say that sitting on our couch and looking out into the river takes a considerable amount of our time these days. The charm of the view is magnified during the evening when the sun is in the west and lights up entire stretch of water and illuminates every ship passing with a golden-orange light. But the magic of the river is strongest at night when the lights come on at the other side of the river and the ships gently drift across the water, their lights reflecting in the water.
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While our apartment was fully furnished - right down to a fast internet connection - it was missing a bookshelf. Those handful of books that we count among our worldly possessions, had to lie packed in the guestroom for a few days. Then on one weekend we took a metro ride to the nearest IKEA and got ourselves a small wooden shelf. We were constrained not by the number of books we wanted to keep, but by the weight we could lug home in a small trolley in the metro. Assembling it at home was a lot of fun too. The material is exactly what we paid for (all of 20 €) and yet it has the sort of fit and finish which we would struggle to find for double the price at home (I am looking at you Infantry Road).
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The New Home 12
The journey from a house to a home is now complete.
Rough Draft: House-Hunting in Amsterdam
The only thing more distressing about moving to a new country; other than the financial insecurity of the early days, is not having a place to stay.
I was lucky to have my wife take over the house-hunting project. She got in touch with the estate agents, did background work on the places listed on the realtors’ websites and even got a few first-person leads from craigslist. During the day, while I would wrap my head around work, she’d go with the estate agents from one apartment to another - conscientiously going through all the rooms, kitchens, bathrooms and fixtures. She’d scribble down the address, the asking rent, the possible move-in date and any other special conditions that the landlord might have. And she’d record a video walkthrough of each apartment she’d think we’ll both find livable for us to pore over during our evening tea.
When looking for a place to stay in a new city, usually you’d be disappointed for the familiar reasons of the place being too small or too expensive or being the right combination of the first two attributes but in a neighbourhood with not the most savoury reputation in town. In Amsterdam we had to add another reason to this list - the staircase. Most of the charming, old buildings in the heart of the city are notorious for their very steep staircases - or rather they have ladders who dropped out from the college where they teach them to grow up into responsible, sturdy stairways. Apparently it is so, so that the houses take lesser area in front of the canals and thus save on heavy taxes. There are no elevators in most of these buildings. Going to see a 3rd floor house that has a steep staircase with a perfunctory footing and is carpeted with a fabric that’s so worn with age that it’s slightly lustrous and slippery, is as hard on your knees as it is on your adrenal glands.
Getting anything into these houses other than a medium sized suitcase is also a logistical nightmare. You’ll need to hire someone to pull things over through the windows.
GettingThingsIn
And at some point during our stay in Amsterdam, we’d like our parents to visit us - even if our knees can take this grind for the next 20 years, none of our parents’ can. This cut down our choices in Amsterdam by more than half. At this point we knew that we’d need a week’s extension to our temporary accommodation but were also beginning to worry about having to eat into our savings for paying for our stay beyond the 3 (2+1) weeks allotted to us.
Then one afternoon my wife called me from a pub across the road from my office to see the video of an apartment she had just seen. It was a spacious, one-bedroom flat in a modern building (hint - with an elevator and a spacious fire-exit staircase) just a 15 minutes walk from Centraal Station. There is this unwritten rule of apartment-hunting - don’t let the estate agent know that you like a place too strongly or it’ll be the last decent place he’ll ever show you. If I remember our reaction upon visiting the apartment that evening correctly, the estate agent must have seen two kids in a candy store.
Things moved swiftly from here (though there was enough time for doubt about having made the wrong choice to gnaw at us a little) and on one sunny April morning, we arrived in the house we presently call home, to collect our keys. Things in The Netherlands are done a lot more thoroughly than what we are used to from our days back in India. The fixtures were inventoried, the condition of the house and the furniture documented (our real estate agent went around taking pictures to support what was written), the gas, water and electricity meter readings were put down and two sets of neatly bound lease agreements (in Dutch with English translations) signed on every page. Once the estate agents left, all we did for some time was stare at each other in utter disbelief at having done what we had both done in India at some points in our life as individuals, again - we had found a place to stay - together and in a new country.
Delft
Each weekend we try to find a new place in The Netherlands to visit. There have been weekends when something interesting in Amsterdam has kept us back, but with days as long as they are at this time of the year1 and with our newly acquired off-peak hour discount passes bringing in big savings on train fares2, the incentive to get out is very strong.
Two weeks ago we went to Delft. We see a lot of shops selling Delftware in Amsterdam and were quite keen to see the place where it all began.
Most cities here are very similar in their planning. The city center is a short walk from the train station. This is where you’ll typically find at least one centuries old church, an equally old (or older) town hall and the main market. While the high streets are unapologetically homogenous with the same handful of big-name brands, on weekends, the farmers’ markets in these cities make things interesting.
We started our trip with a relaxed brunch. It was a sunny day but the wind was a lot stronger and cooler than we had anticipated. Still, a tepid cappuccino is a small price to pay for a meal outdoors under the trees.
Delft 1
The stray notes of a string quartet practicing inside the town’s church pulled us in. The acoustics of a church are an integral part of its architecture. While they favour choirs and organs, they are often kind to bowed instruments as well. I could have sat there listening to the quartet ready their piece measure by measure all day long.
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Delft 3
Delft, much like other Dutch cities we have seen so far, has a network of canals that run through the streets. But canals (lovely as they were) weren’t what we were here for. We had come to Delft hoping to find hundreds of small shops in every nook and corner selling the signature blue-on-white porcelain. Either our expectations were bizarre or we were looking in the wrong place because we didn’t see very many of those.
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We looked up the street signs to the official Royal Delft museum. On the way we came across some beautiful houses some of which had tiny lawns in front while others made do with rows potted plants along the perimeter. We saw roses that were cared for, matched on every step by tens of species of tiny flowers that seemed to revel in the fact that they didn’t need caring for.
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The Royal Delft museum’s shop had some very fine Delftware. There were a lot of pieces in colours other than blue too. Goes without saying that it all cost so much that I wouldn’t want to be the proverbial bull in this particular china shop. Perhaps one day we’ll visit again with the means and the intent of buying something - but then the chances are if we had the means, they’ll be diverted to the family travel fund.
p.s. Since coming back, the world “Help!” in The Beatle’s song “Help!”, gets replaced in my head with “Delft!” - “Delft! I need somebody!”
The Book Fair at Dam Square
We were at the second-had book fair at the Dam Square today. While English was rather poorly represented, it didn’t stop us from spending time in the company of some beautiful old books.
Dam square book fair
And yes the irony of English paperbacks selling cheaper than Dutch comics wasn’t lost on us either.
Dam square book fair
I was a little surprised to see the amount of mainstream popular Western culture that has been (and is) accessible in Dutch. Back home, if you know just your ‘native’ language, you can almost be sure you are cut-off from the world at large.
I am not sure if it was the weather, but it felt like the book fair must have seen better days. I wonder for how many years will it continue to have legs - given the general decline of reading coupled with the rise of the e-book.