The Inaccurate Tourist

46. Tulips

My newest guests were oldest friends from sunny Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). I met Dawn back in Grade four at an inter-school violin recital when I took to whacking her on the head with my bow. Who would have thought that nearly twenty years later, she'd travel thousands of miles with her beau to vacation with Bow-Boy? The aforementioned beau is Mike. He's good to be around.

They arrived early in the morning on a Sunday. I went to the airport to meet them and greet their arrival into the city. I was slightly late leaving my house, but ended up being very late at the airport thanks to transit complications. Dawn and Mike had the good sense to stay by the arrival gate, so I found them easily. Hooray for arriving in Paris.

The day was pretty much written off. Dawn had spent a harrowing week writing final exams back in hard-working Canada and had little time to pack or prepare for their trip. As a result, they had little sleep the night before their departure, and didn't manage to sleep on the airplane.

You're supposed to try to adapt immediately to the day and night cycle of your destination, but all the loose clothing and glasses of water aren't going to prevent your body from liquifying under the intense pressure of Monsieur Jet Lag. They managed a short chat before dropping off for some much-needed mid-afternoon sleep.

I forced them awake for a bit of something to eat, and we headed out to see the Eiffel Tower for their first night in Paris. We started with the intention of wandering over to Place de Catalogne, which is just a skip away from my place and has a nice view down a boulevard of the Eiffel Tower. Soon however, the insane desire to visit this symbol of Paris had seized their pliant minds, and nothing would get in the way of their objective.

The officially noted métro stop for the Eiffel Tower is Bir Hakeim, which is still quite far from the tower itself. The walk is sufficiently pleasant if you cross the street and walk along the Seine, but there's a much better route. If you stay on the métro (line 6, light green) until the Trocadéro station, you can walk between through the Art Deco buildings for a spectacular view, and then descend along the fountain and cross the bridge to the underside of the tower.

The rest of the week is a blur to me. I work during the days, so I understand that Dawn and Mike checked out the Louvre, up the Arc de Triomphe, the Musée d'Orsay and probably went to the top of the Eiffel Tower. I sure hope they had fun.

In the evenings, we went on walks and took it easy. One night we headed out to the Moulin Rouge. It's ridiculously expensive to see the show there, and evidently many tickets are sold as part of tour packages, to judge from the number of buses.

Pigalle is one of the naughtiest, brightest and well-visited parts of Paris. There's a curious juxtaposition of many, many sex shops with lurid neon lighting explicitly describing what sort of perversion you may find inside, and elderly couples in blazers walking calmly and curiously. I forced their weary feet to to top of Montmartre, at the Basilique du Sacre Coeur, so they could see the incredible panorama of Paris.

It must have been Wednesday, April 30th, in fact, because the Red Cross was out selling some brins du muguet. The next day (the first of May) is a holiday in France, the fête du travail, which commemorates the day of an enormous nineteenth century protest in the United States, where trade unions managed to obtain a standardised eight hour work day. The brin du muguet is a sprig of Lily of the Valley, a springtime flower. Giving a brin to a lady ensures good luck and happiness for the rest of the year.

We had booked our Fête du Travail in Amsterdam. It was already nearing the end of tulip season in France. Would it be too late to experience the real Dutch thing?

Well, no, not really. Thanks to tech-no-lo-gy, the tulip industry is pretty much year round in Holland, as are windmills. We did pass some tulip fields on the train, however, which basically meant that I would periodically wake up Dawn and/or Mike with a shout of "tulips!" or "a windmill!".

The train takes about four hours to get to Amsterdam from Paris, and it's a very easy city-to-city ride. If you book a round-trip early enough, it's relatively inexpensive -- only about 80€. It's a pleasant trip as well. You get to pass through Brussels and the Belgian countryside.

In order to get the best price on our tickets, I booked some peculiar hours. We arrived in Amsterdam at 8pm on a Thursday and left at about 1pm on the Saturday, leaving us only one full day and a half in the city. Not nearly enough time. In addition, we had some difficulties reserving a reasonable hotel, since the weekend was an international long weekend and we weren't staying Saturday night. We ended up renting an apartment suite with Alexander's Amsterdam Apartments.

Renting a suite would be a particularly good idea if you're staying a while in the city. The suite we had was nice, with a well-equipped kitchen and a little deck in the back. One thing to consider, however, is that an apartment doesn't have a convenient check-in desk in a convenient lobby. I had confirmed our arrival time by email before leaving, but unfortunately Alexander wasn't there to meet us. Dawn borrowed a phone from the bartender in the pub beside the building and made the necessary arrangements. This meant we were forced to sit and relax in the typical neighbourhood pub enjoying Heineken beer.

You should also always check which surcharges will apply to your bill. I had booked the suite online, so of course there was a X% addition that I hadn't initially noticed. Not really too surprising, but not really pleasant either.

In fact, the apartment wasn't really in a great location either. It was a much longer walk from the central square than I expected, which was already a fifteen minute walk from the train station. I had flippantly told Dawn earlier that it was ten minutes total from the station. Whoops.

The verdict? Alexander's Amsterdam Apartments is probably only a good idea if you have longer than a day and a half to see the city.

We went to the Leidseplein to an American/English breakfast place. This is an area south of the historical centre, filled with restaurants and night clubs. The breakfast was small, expensive and I'm pretty sure the waitress was still high on whatever she had been doing the night before. She was pleasant and her English was impeccable, but I have seldom seen somebody so confused and distracted.

After several attempts to get and then pay our cheque, we set out along the canals to the Anne Frank house. Along the way, we stopped in the Westerkerk, a Protestant church constructed in the early 17th century. Rembrandt is buried in one of the renter's graves underneath the church, but they don't know which one.

The line for the Anne Frank house was incredibly long. I chose to separate from Mike and Dawn and go check out the other churches of Amsterdam for a couple of hours. Many of the churches were closed, and the famous Oudekerk had a special exhibition going on inside that didn't particularly interest me. Sint Nicolaaskerk is a Catholic church and therefore relatively recent, since Catholicism was either forbidden or simply frowned upon for much of Amsterdam's history. It was built in the late 19th century, and has an interesting neo-Gothic exterior, but an incredibly detailed and darkly colourful neo-Baroque interior.

Before I rejoined Dawn and Mike, I got to wander through the daytime naughtiness of the red light district, I saw some neat hidden canals, went through the inner court yard of the city museum, walked by the opera, saw a cool building labeled Indochine, saw a futuristic jungle gym in a school yard and checked out a metro station and chatted with the security guard. She was cute.

Apparently, while they were waiting in line (40 minutes), they got propositioned by a young fellow who told them all about a great and wacky form of theatre called 'Improvisation' being performed that night, and he gave the poorly chosen example of SCTV. He didn't realize that Dawn and Mike are both highly active in the theatre community, that Edmonton has a world-renowned TheatreSports company and that SCTV is, in fact, sketch comedy, not improvisation. Plus he repeated the same spiel up and down the line, losing any spontaneity or credibility he might have had.

Mike and Dawn told me that the Anne Frank museum was emotionally moving, knowing that you were in the exact tiny spot where her family hid from the Nazis for three years. Thinking about this, we walked towards the centre of the city and passed the Homomonument. Homosexual men and women were targeted alongside the Jews, the disabled and other undesirables. An estimated fifty thousand men were imprisoned, and several thousands died in concentration camps -- a small number compared to the millions of Jews imprisoned and exterminated during the Holocaust, yet still more than the population of my hometown. It wasn't until the eighties that this monument was built in the heart of the city to mark the persecution of homosexual men and women by the Nazi regime.

The Homomonument is composed of three triangles of pink granite, each 10 metres on a side and aligned to form a larger triangle. Each triangle has a different height -- one is at street level and forms part of the busy square, another is just the right height to be a comfortable seat, and the third steps down to the canal waters.

For a bit of a rest and a lighter atmosphere, we went to take the canal tours. I highly recommend these tours -- the boats are comfortable and frequent, and the multilingual soundtrack is well done and interesting. The canals of Amsterdam and the houses alongside are highly charming.

We were just about ready for lunch at this point, and were down by the flower market. I was pretty obstinate about avoiding fast food chains, and Mike and Dawn were tired of walking and paying through the nose at restaurants, so we separated again to find something to eat. I think I got the better deal -- I found a little cafe down in the flower market where I was served a generous meatball sandwich and a coffee by a charming waitress, all for 3€. The self-righteous moral of this story is that one NEVER needs to settle for convenient, yet undelicious food.

Most of our day was reasonably sunny, and it was pleasant out when we entered the flower market to look for souvenirs. I discovered that export controls mean it is impossible to buy ANY tulip bulbs to take back to Canada.

A couple of stalls down the market, however, and it began to rain -- hard. Surprisingly hard. The market stalls were sturdy and the proprietors fetched in their goods with ease, as if this happened all the time. The rain let up slightly, and we decided to head back to the apartment to rest.

We popped into the supermarket beside the apartment to check out the interior and buy something to eat on the train home for the next day. When we got out, there had been a disturbance outside of our hotel -- cop cars and a crowd of gaping pedestrians. We didn't have any idea what happened, but it was exactly outside our door. At first the police didn't want us to approach our building, but when we explained that we were staying there, she grunted "nice hotel", grabbed me by the arm and walked us to our door.

We still have no idea what that was all about.

That night, we went back to the Leidseplein to eat at an Indian restaurant. It was delicious. Then we head to the red light district to gawk at the working girls. They were also delicious. We stopped at one of the Irish pubs that Geoffrey and I had temporarily drowned our Amsterdam sorrows in, and eventually made our way back to our hotel. I have to compliment myself on my excellent sense of navigation.

We took the next day pretty easy, and did a bit of shopping along one of the more commercial streets. We were at the station in plenty of time, and ate some curious deep fried foods that were kept heated in a giant vending machine. At first, it was a dare and a joke, but they weren't that bad, so we kept going back.

The rest of the train ride home was uneventful, except for meeting Mary, who ate our coffee biscuits.

So, how many more times should I get down to Amsterdam? That depends on how many more Canadians come to visit, of course!

Posted by The Inaccurate Tourist at May 2, 2003 12:00 PM