07 Apr Nether-Netherlands

Gentle Reader(s), Your Humble Narrator reports to you from the Nether regions of the Netherlands, currently abroad the good ship Skirnir sailing the river Rhine betwixt and between the towns of Nieuw Lekkerland and Lekkerkerk on our way to dock up at Kinderdijk. Quite the adventure it has been thus far, escorting the Inky Mum through the paces of international travel and visiting with Brother JB and the Warrior Princess in lovely Amsterdam. The cultural offerings have been coming fast and furious, the food and drink has been coming even fasterer and furiouser, and—generally speaking—a lovely time is being had by one and all. Amsterdam is a extraordinarily vibrant and beautiful city—not exactly a news flash—and Bro JB and the WP are prospering, I am glad to say. As for YHN, I have been prospering too, especially today after having achieving that most elusive commodity of international travel, the Full Night’s Sleep.

 

Things got off to a rather frantic start with inclement weather impeding the flights to and from Detroit, from which our adventure was to launch. We made our departure by the skin of our teeth and settled gratefully into the business class cabin aboard our Delta clipper. Having never ventured anywhere at home or abroad in anything but steerage, this was a a new experience for YHN. The food was plentiful and quite good indeed and the ability to achieve full horizontality while in transit was very welcome. I did manage to doze fitfully for an hour or perhaps two but I had the odd sensation that I was being lightly microwaved the entire time. We arrived in Amsterdam around 10:00 AM local time and were met by red jacketed Viking Cruise minions who escorted us to our hotel, the lovely Movenpick (a Swiss chain, apparently) down at the waterfront, not too distant from the Central Station and the river cruise ship docks. What I had thought was a jazz club next door turned out to be a large music venue and cultural center called the Bimhuis.  I think they had some musical offerings while we were there but it wasn’t quite the candle lit snug that I had imagined.

 

Brother JB and the WP appeared in short order and we had a lovely four days wandering the city, visiting the museums and sampling the local cuisine. The Rijksmuseum, which had been in the midst of a massive renovation when last I was in the city, was now available for perusal in its full glory. It is a world class institution but, with all modesty, I have to say that the Metropolitan in New York certainly gives it a run for its money in terms of numbers of first-rate examples by Rembrandt and other masters of the Dutch school. But the Rijks has The Night Watch which trumps (I really shouldn’t be using that adjective these days) pretty much everything else. Plus they’ve got some magically lovely Vermeers which put them a step or two ahead of the Met on that count. Anyway, it is a fantastic place and I could have easily spent another day wandering its hallowed halls. The Van Gogh Museum, just a stone’s throw away, was on the following day’s agenda. It presents an interesting conundrum: Though it was founded by the great artists’s family in concert with the Dutch government and has an exceptional quantity of its namesake’s artwork covering the entirety of his all-too-brief career, it does not possess the greatest examples of his work. Though Vincent sold either one or none of his paintings during his lifetime, his artwork began to attract substantial interest not too long after his untimely and tragic passing and many of the very finest examples ended up in collections other than that of the family. Once again, the Met in New York has an exceptional group of Van Goghs, any of which the museum in Amsterdam would give their eye-teeth for. Be that as it may, it was well worth it to visit the Van Gogh but I must take them to task for their gift shop, which is a bit of an embarrassment. Van Gogh is one of the most widely known and reproduced artists in the world but the cheap knick knacks, gee gaws and gimcracks in the museum gift shop are not worthy of his legacy. One would hope the museum bearing his name would try to set a higher standard, perhaps in the manner of the O’Keeffe Museum Shop in Santa Fe which is very tasteful in an appropriately minimalist O’Keeffey way.

 

Having bade farewell to Amsterdam (where good things come in threes, according to Richard Thompson) on Monday evening we launched into the Markermeer—a former bay of the North Sea which has been converted to fresh water by the building of a dike—and sailed to the fishing village of Hoorn, northwest of the city. Hoorn is rather absurdly picturesque and has some splendid examples of 16th and 17th century Dutch architecture in the old town which is centered around a small square with the requisite church, statue (of Jan Pietersz-Coen, a rather sketchy chap who worked for the Dutch East India Company and was reportedly not terribly kind to the indigenous inhabitants of its extensive colonial holdings), and a dream of a 17th century cafe that used to be the house where the official measuring and weighing of various commodities took place. YHN toured through the town once with a group (led by the very lovely and charming Alette) and then later on my own. The prior visit included a quite awkward but interesting ‘house visit’ with a local lady named Margaret. I give kudos to Viking for arranging these things but it is undeniably quite a forced and artificial sort of situation. Margaret was a gracious if overly formal hostess. A local lady of a certain age, either divorced or widowed, she was a voracious joiner of clubs and amused herself by sculpting, doing needlework and beadwork, riding her two bicycles (someone after my own heart!), reading with a book club, walking, and engaging in to-the-death wrestling matches with giant mutant sturgeon from the formerly briney depths of the Markermeer. Well, most of those things anyway.

 

Structure is given to life shipboard primarily by the meals which are delivered in great quantity and with clockwork regularity, all masterminded by the vaguely fiendish chef who announced on the first evening that it was his goal to get each and every one of us to gain ten pounds over the course of our trip. Odd thing, it seemed to me. ‘So you’re trying to kill us?’ I thought. The Programme Director is a Brit named David—a professionally cheerful person who manages to have a pithy quip on hand for every occasion. He’s very good at his job but I can imagine a beleaguered version of him being played by Ricky Gervais in a film version of life aboard one of these floating high-dollar senior centers.  I’m going to follow up on that, so in the unlikely case that you’re actually reading Gentle Reader(s) (whoever you may be), don’t be stealing my shit maaaan. The good ship Skirnir itself is German-built and the craftsmanship is impressive to say the least. My tiny state room is actually handcrafted—not some modular unit—and it is immaculately assembled down to the tiniest detail. I’ve been searching about the cabin looking for some flaw in the execution and I cannot find one. The crew is international and they are constantly cleaning the ship, tidying up behind the passengers, straightening up the staterooms. I leave my room for ten minutes to get a cup of coffee and by the time I get back someone has snuck in and hung up the towels, tucked in the sheets on the bed and returned the decorative fold to the end of the roll of toilet paper. My stateroom is in steerage, on the lowest level, and the water whisks by outside at eye level—a rather disconcerting sensation at first.

 

The most difficult aspect of YHN’s European sojourn has been acclimating to the harsh reality of being part of a tour group. I consider myself to be moderately well-traveled and I have always undertook to comport myself as a traveler than than a tourist. I live in a tourist town and I have spent the last 26 years gritting my teeth during the tourist-heavy seasons when confronted with baffled gaggles of overfed, under-informed, obliviiods staggering about the streets or driving massive SUVs and luxury sedans up and down the thoroughfares at five miles per hour. But it’s part of the price one pays for living in a beautiful place where the local economy is not based around the town’s iron smelting plant or abattoir or whatever. Therefore it has been a rude awakening indeed to find that I have become One Of THEM. My motivations have been largely altruistic, the Inky Mum not being quite capable of undertaking such an excursion on her own recognizance, but just the same I find myself shrinking in shame beneath the contemptuous glares of the locals. I feel like waving my arms and yelling ‘I’m just doing this for my MOM!!’ I do manage to sneak off on my own every now and then and retreat into the anonymity of the solitary traveling aging hipster. Cafe society is my home away from home. I wish you were here to sit with me, Gentle Reader(s), and watch Life’s Rich Pageant, European version, unfurl before my very appreciative eyes. Stay tuned for further updates.