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I woke up in New York and thought it was going to be a normal day. Then three things happened: 1) A friend of mine in The Hague emailed to say that it was a holiday week in Holland; 2) Another friend in Amsterdam emailed to say he was going away for a few weeks; and 3) Continental Airlines was having a sale on seats to Amsterdam. By 10pm I was on one of those seats. After a few hours of sleep, I was having dinner at a nice restaurant on Prinzengracht, one of Amsterdam’s many canals.
Note to self: “Spend more time in Amsterdam.”
So I did. I stayed two and a half weeks at my friend Philipp’s apartment. When I arrived, it was Queen’s Day, which means everyone is in the streets drinking and buying everyone else’s junk. For one day, the city turns into a giant flea market. Giant fleas are everywhere. The world’s tallest people (more on this later) circumnavigate the canals drinking the local brews (it’s the birthplace of both Heineken and Amstel, among others), plying the narrow sidewalks for new junk to replace their old junk.
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The photos for this journal are at:
(Click on the link and it will pop up a second window so you can see both simultaneously.)
The first week, I did a little traveling. I went to The Hague, a nice conservative small city with 3-story houses set above elegant boutiques. A bike ride in The Hague is extremely pleasant. It’s only a few kilometers to the beach, where you can see the North Sea waves whipped by the near-constant wind. It’s my second trip to Holland’s coast. I’m sure they get a few sunny calm days each year, but all the glass screens around the tourist restaurants keep the sand out of the pancakes the rest of the time.
Next, my friend Anna-Maria and I went to Maastricht, which is at the very southern tip of Holland, just a few miles East of Belgium and a few miles West of Germany. Maastricht is a pretty hip town, where shopping comes before visiting churches on most tourist’s agendas. Unfortunately, it was quite rainy that weekend. We wandered around, shopped, and found warm things to eat and drink. We found a really ugly new museum with really bad art, all except one cool thing: it was a video of what looked like a 15-year-old girl balancing a soccer ball on her head. The video was on and she was doing it when I entered the room, and I watched her balance it for 15 minutes in one take (no cuts), and she was still doing it when I left. The piece was about focus, and you could just see her eyes turned up into her head watching that ball and doing absolutely nothing else. It was intoxicating to watch and I think I could have watched an hour of it. But we had to go.
Note to self: go back to Maastricht when the weather is good sometime, and see if that girl is still balancing the soccer ball on her head. Don’t forget to bring a car – the surrounding area has a lot of interesting places to offer.
I settled into my friend Philipp’s flat in the heart of Amsterdam. I would call it the largest village in the world. Anything built after 1800 looks uncomfortably new. It’s built in the shape of a semicircle around the town center, which includes the train station and several churches. The canals run in concentric semicircles, and they also radiate out from the center. You can walk across the center of town in 15 minutes, so walking is the best way to get around. The canal system is so extensive that a few have been filled in to accommodate heavy foot traffic. The entire city is built on 400-year-old piles, well preserved by the bog-like conditions of the water underneath – if you drained the town, the buildings would likely collapse. Houseboats, barges, and liveaboard boats line the canals, as do trees – there seem to be trees everywhere.
The roads and sidewalks next to the canals are paved with bricks on a layer of sand. This makes it very easy for the city to change or maintain the roads – the only tools you need to open a big hole in the street are a screwdriver and a shovel. Because of this, there are no jackhammers, even though there are plenty of ongoing street improvements. Many parts of the inner city are serenely quiet. It’s so nice to walk the canals in the morning when all is fresh and the birds are singing, or at the end of the day, when the water is calm and people are sitting outdoors at tables on the bridges having drinks.
The Canal Houses
Most of the canal houses are 3-5 stories tall, and most have been standing for 300 years or more. The original buildings were homes, much like New York’s brownstones, but they’ve all been completely renovated at least ten times. Consequently, they’ve been cut up into flats, and many of the staircases are extremely steep – so steep that old people live on the outskirts of town in special two-story communities usually based around gardening.
So steep are the stairs that no couch or bed could go up them, and getting a television set up a set of stairs like this could prove fatal. So most of the buildings have large center windows on each floor and a hook hanging from a beam extending from the gabled roof. To get a couch into or out of your apartment, you wait for a nice day, hang a pulley and a rope from the hook, and haul it up and in through the window. Strange as it sounds, the fronts of many buildings are not vertical – they “lean” out over the street to help keep the furniture from banging windows on the way up. Some buildings actually have bricks that angle up and away a full foot at the top, which can look odd right next to a house whose bricks follow the plumb line straight up (and have longer beams to hang the hooks farther out). In the late 1500s, the city had to pass a law preventing people from building houses that leaned out too far over the sidewalk! It’s a mystery to me, however: I’ve spent dozens of hours prowling the canals on nice days, and I still have yet to see a piece of furniture hanging from a hook in front of a house.
So steep are the stairs that it’s a pain to go down and see who’s at the door. Because there was no closed-circuit video for most of Amsterdam’s history, many people have attached auto mirrors outside their windows so they can conveniently look at the doorstep without opening a window. It’s funny to look up at the buildings and see all the mirrors hanging on.
The steps in the houses are so steep, you wouldn’t think of hauling a bicycle up or down them to go about your business in town. Instead Amsterdam, like all Dutch cities and towns, is full of functional, sturdy, but not particularly valuable old-fashioned bikes. You leave your bike locked to the canal railing and you don’t worry if it gets stolen. The bikes are so disposable that my guidebook says around 10,000 bikes end up in canals in Holland every year, along with hundreds of cars (remember, beer is the national beverage). It’s common to see two people on a bike together, or a parent with two small children fashioned onto the handlebars and rear wheel. Cars are clearly third-class citizens here. They seem horribly inefficient amidst the bicycles whizzing by, tinkling their small bells to keep pedestrians out of the streets.
Auxologists – people who study heights of people – tell us that the Dutch are the tallest people in the world, with the average Dutch man standing six feet tall (3” taller than the average American). You feel it when you’re in Holland. At my height – 5’ 10” – I’m often dwarfed by a group of Dutch women walking down the street. In addition, the Dutch have a very distinct look. I can’t define it exactly, but I believe they have tall heads, leading to long cheeks, and these long rosy cheeks are everywhere. They’re easy to distinguish from the round Danish cheeks and closer, in my opinion, to Swedish cheeks. I don’t know what you call a person who studies cheeks, but in Holland you become one.
Here’s an interesting observation. In Paris, where most buildings date from the 19th Century, the key to your apartment does also. It’s usually a cylindrical piece of steel with odd-looking flanges. A French key is a medieval piece of equipment that in many cases actually has moving parts on it. The keys are heavy, make excellent weapons, and are extremely expensive to reproduce. In contrast, in Amsterdam – where most buildings are at least 200 years older – the locks are modern, with keys to match. This pretty much exemplifies the difference between France and Holland.
A Place for Birds and Birders
You don’t have to be a bird watcher to notice that Holland is full of birds, and so is Amsterdam. The winter of 1963 was so severe that many of the gray herons died. The few that survived had grown habituated to humans and were able to steal or beg scraps through the harsh winter. In the following years, the brazen gray herons multiplied. Now they roam the canals in packs, practically demanding handouts with their scowls and stoic stances. It’s not uncommon to see half a dozen of them standing on a few cars waiting for some old person to arrive with lunch or a snack. A mature gray heron stands about 70 centimeters high and has a wingspan of close to two meters. Their long sharp beaks can spear a good size fish – or sausage, depending on what’s being served. They wing their way along the canals like small aircraft, rarely rising above the rooftops, looking for their next meal around the corner.
One weekend I took the train to visit my friend Siegfried, who lives in Giethoorn, a small village on the edge of a large marshland preserve. There are no cars or roads in Geithoorn; people drive their boats through the network of canals. Siegfried and his wife Katja have a beautiful spacious home with an incredible view of nature on all sides. As soon as I arrived, we went out on the boat for a tour of the neighborhood, and Siegfried knows all the residents. There were marsh harriers, cuckoos, swans, ducks, great crested grebes, bittern, bluethroat and Savi’s warblers, purple herons, cormorants, coots, curlews, black-headed gulls, and others I can’t remember. Siegfried knows these birds and behaviours so well, he can tell you a story with every call and whoop. It’s really great to go birding with someone who knows so much about nature.
One thing that fascinated me was the thatched roofs of the houses. They’re made of reeds collected from the marsh and dried out. They stack the reeds on the rails of the roof and then shear them to a thickness of about 20 centimeters. That’s it. The reeds are waterproof and keep out the fierce weather while insulating the house. (See www.roofthatchers.com/Photo.htm for some nice photos.)
Siegfried promised me that when the water freezes I can come back and he’ll teach me to skate with the long-bladed boots we would call track skates. He showed me a pair of carbon-fiber clap skates that made my mouth water. In fact, in Amsterdam you can even buy clap-rollerblades! Skating will be another story, but here’s a preview of canal-skating in Holland.
Frisian
The next day, I took the train to Leeuwarden, the capital city of Friesland. I have wanted to go to Friesland for about eight years. Since the weather on the island of Texel – home to Holland’s major skydiving center – was looking terrible (what a surprise, huh? Dutch skydiving is a conflict in terms), I decided to take a tour of this enchanted place. Friesland is the northernmost area of Holland and by far the most isolated. There are few tourists here, save for the Dutch who come to visit relatives or enjoy boating. Friesland is mostly water, more water than even the rest of the Netherlands. And I have wanted to come here for years because in Friesland they speak Friesian.
The area between Amsterdam and Denmark has been inhabited since about 1700 BC, when a small group of Germanics splintered off from their solid-ground-loving cousins and inhabited this clay-rich (a nice way of saying “waterlogged”) region. By 200 BC, an ethnic group of Frisians separated themselves from Germans to the East and Dutch to the South. During three periods of sea-level rise they built their villages on large mounds, called terps. By 12 BC these people became – unwillingly – the northernmost inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Tiberius eventually taxed them so severely that they hung the tax collectors and chased the Romans down to the Rhine. From 250 – 400 AD, the sea level rose and the Frisians had to leave the area. Some of them broke off and formed the Franks, a group that would move south and inhabit France after the Romans self-destructed. Around 400 AD the sea level stabilized and the Frisians returned to build bigger terps so they could live without fear of the water flooding their homes. In the 8th century, the Frisian language was born, and by the 18th Century, it took its current form. Today, about 400,000 people (in Holland as well as a few isolated areas of Germany) speak Frisian; it is recognized as Holland’s second official language.
If you have ever met someone with the last name of “deVries,” or “Frieslander,” you know his/her ancestors spoke Frisian – the closest living language to English. Both are Germanic languages (as are Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Yiddish, Dutch, Afrikaans, and others), but Frisian is closer to English than Dutch. I wanted to hear it. So Siegfried turned on the radio for me, dialed in a Frisian station, and I listened. The words are short; many of them are one-syllable. The accent, to my ears, is heavily Dutch. So to me it sounded like a chopped up German with a Dutch accent. To look at it written, I can’t see much relation to English. It is closest to Old English, and its next closest relative is our English.
Here’s a tree for the Germanic languages that tries to put it in perspective:
softrat.home.mindspring.com/germanic.html
Interestingly, the reason that English has so much French influence (and much less of other Romance languages) is that French originally started as a Germanic language (Frankish), which then mixed with the Latin of the Late Roman Empire. Frankish, Old Frisian, and Old English were three buds on the same branch of the tree.
Friesland
Leeuwarden is a lovely modern city, with a charming mix of 17th-century buildings and sleek modern structures. I enjoyed just walking around, seeing the stores, parks, and neighborhoods. I took a photo of an old church that seemed to be leaning like the Tower of Pisa. I saw modern stores and happy people (Frisians are known for being stoic). Then I took the train to Hindeloopen. The cool thing about taking the train to Hindeloopen is that you pass through Friesland’s second-largest city of Sneek. It not only looks like a cool name, but it’s pronounced “Snake.” I have a rule that I can’t say I”ve been to a place unless I’ve actually walked around in it, so I haven’t been to Sneek but I did get to see it from the train.
At 14:25 the train dropped me at Hindeloopen. I knew by looking at the map that the station wasn’t in the town. After the other two people got on bicycles and rode away, I was left alone. Nothing to do but start walking. I had a backpack and a hat, and it was muggy so I soon became sweaty. A few cars passed me. I couldn’t see the town, but I could see boat masts, so I headed toward them.
The land here is perennially green and soggy. This is where wooden shoes were invented – not for tourists, but for walking in the mud. Hundreds of years ago, leather shoes got wet and stayed wet, so the original Frisians carved shoes out of wood to work in the fields. And today they still wear them. I saw a guy wearing jeans and a work shirt pedaling his bike in a pair of well-worn wooden shoes.
Finally, I arrived in the small shtetl of Hindeloopen, a haven for sailors. People leave their boats here, on the inside of the sea break, and then on the weekend they come to sail in the North Sea. They stay overnight in little huts arranged in the grid of streets and canals that make up the small village. A few tourist shops and pubs line the lanes. I saw a group of children playing with boats. I knew the train would arrive at 15:25 and that if I missed it I’d be there for an hour, so I asked about a taxi. The woman who runs the tourist office came out of her garden long enough to tell me that they don’t have taxis, but that she could call one for me from a nearby town. I looked at my watch. It was 15:06. She told me that it was a 20-minute walk to the train station. “I know,” I said. I had timed it coming in. Nineteen minutes later I was panting, breathing hard, sweaty, and waiting in the cold wind for the train, which showed up a few minutes late.
French Fries
Soon I was in Stavoren, a small fishing village with a ferry dock, where I got on a boat to cross the IJsselmeer – Holland’s large inland lake created in the 1920s when the Dutch built a huge system of dykes in the north to hold back the North Sea and expose new land. This one-hour trip was uneventful except for the fact that I was starving and had to eat something. Being a ferry, the choices were limited. Almost everything on the menu had cheese or butter or ground-up animals of some kind. Finally, I ordered “potatoes,” and was somewhat surprised to see the waitress push a plate of hot, salted French fries at me across the wooden bar.
French fries. I haven’t really had French fries in about 20 years. But I was starving. I had to eat them. To the average person, this is food. To prove that it’s food, you can find French fries served in hospitals and schools. To me, it’s more like toxic waste.
Americans consume about two million pounds of French fries a day, or about four servings per week per person. A large Burger King order of fries contains 590 calories – half of which come from fat – and roughly your entire week’s recommended allowance of salt. In 1990, all the large fast-food chains switched from frying their potatoes in beef tallow to a more healthy vegetable shortening. But is it more healthy? Unfortunately, these Crisco-like fats are hydrogenated, making them stable at high cooking temperatures so they can change the oil about once a month, rather than once a day. Hydrogenated vegetable oils contain “trans fats,” and they are at least as bad for you as beef fat. According to the McDonald’s web site, French fries contain:
partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural flavor (contains beef), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (to preserve natural color). Cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil and/or corn oil). TBHQ and citric acid added to help pre- serve freshness. Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an anti-foaming agent.
Trans fats are probably more responsible for the increase in American obesity than any other single ingredient. We get trans fats in everything from cakes and cookies to cereals and crackers. The average American gets 11% of his/her calories in this form. When you see the word “hydrogenated” – partially or otherwise – you know it’s every bit as dangerous to your health as eating bacon.
After switching to Crisco, McDonald’s had to add the taste back into their fries, so they dunk them in a vat of special flavors made in a laboratory in New Jersey. Not surprisingly, these special additives come from beef extracts, returning to McDonald’s fries their good-old comfort-food flavor. (McDonald’s doesn’t use these flavors in Muslim and Hindu countries.) Even though the fat companies could make a more healthy vegetable oil for frying, almost all fried foods you eat today are fried in trans-fat oil. Think of it as eating candle wax and you may want to reconsider your order of calamari.
Here’s what you need to know about fat: if it’s solid at room temperature, it’s solid in your arteries. This goes for fish fats, animal fats, coconut oil, palm-kernel oil, margarine, frying fats, etc. There are still some studies out there that may change how we look at saturated fats, but this is still a good general rule to follow.
What? Fish has saturated fat? Of course it does. If you enjoy eating fish and feel good about it because “fish is more healthy,” then you may not want to read this.
I ate the fries, but I wasn’t too happy about it. And I don’t expect to eat fries again for another twenty years or more. They made my stomach upset. But I forgot about that when I arrived at Enkhuizen, a charming seaport town where I was able to find a health-food store. A few hours later I was back in Philipp’s comfortable flat in Amsterdam, listening to the obnoxious quarter-hour chimes of the Western Church across the canal.
The Dutch Way of Birth
One night I went to an excellent lecture by Naomi Wolf, discussing her new book, Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, and the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood. The church where they held the event was packed, mostly with women but with a few well-dressed men. It was part of an ongoing American lecture series by the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam (www.john-adams.nl). Although the talk started at 8pm and was supposed to end at 9, it ran until 10:15. The subject was the differences in birthing methods between the US and Holland.
When it comes to birthing, the two countries are on extreme ends of the spectrum. In the US, birthing is extremely medicalized and institutionalized. The United States, with the highest per-capita expenditure on health care of any nation in the world, now ranks 25th among Western industrial nations in infant mortality. Almost every other industrialized nation in the world has better infant survival rates than we do. The reason is that doctors, insurance companies, and legislators have conspired to McDonaldize childbirth in America. Why? For the same reason that McDonald’s opens a new store ever 9 hours – profit. There aren’t enough good books on the obstetrics scam in America, but I’m not going to write one here. I’ll limit my discussion to a few facts and point you to more resources that might be worth following up.
Facts:
In 1970, 5% of US births were by cesarean section.
Today, 23% of US births are cesarean.
Today, 81% of US women who have had c-section births also have them for subsequent births.
16 US hospitals had Cesarean section rates of 45% or higher in 1994.
106 hospitals had Cesarean section rates of 37% or higher in 1994.
The US cesarean rate for mothers using midwives is between 5% and 12%.
US cesarean sections account for over $1 billion dollars in revenue to hospitals annually.
In 1991, the US national average was 8.1 infant deaths per 1000 births.
The rate for midwives was 4.1 per 1000
In the US, over 60% of women have epidurals during childbirth.
The rate of epidurals has tripled in 20 years and continues to rise.
90% of American women receive some sort of pain medication during childbirth.
In Holland 30-40% of births still take place in the home under the care of a midwife.
Holland has a cesarean rate of 10%.
92% of Dutch women give birth with no pain killers or medicines.
95% of Dutch mothers say they would use the Dutch system again for a second birth.
Holland has the lowest perinatal mortality rate in the world.
Obstetrics Links:
Many of these sites have further resource lists and book recommendations:
www.ounceofprevention.org
www.lamaze.com
midwiferyinformation.homestead.com
www.childbirth.org/
www.naturalchildbirth.org
www.birthingthefuture.com
www.waterbirthinfo.com
www.aqua-baby.nl
www.healing-arts.org
http://www.joannedozor.com
www.birthlove.com/anatomy.html -- photos of a c-section (not for the weak)
www.pregnancy.org
www.pregnancytoday.com
www.gentlebirth.org/
The Flower Market
One day I decided to go to the famous flower auction outside of Amsterdam – the Aalsmeer flower auction, where 55% of all Dutch flowers and plants are auctioned every day. The facts are staggering. Here over 2 billion cut flowers are auctioned every year – about 19 million flowers and 2 million plants every day. The place employs 1,800 people and has over 100,000 visitors every year. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this is the largest commercial building in the world, with almost 1 million square meters (10 million square feet), most of it refrigerated. Roses are the number one product sold, followed by tulips and chrysanthemums.
Astonishingly, the 19 million flowers sold here each day are sold by the stem. The “dutch auction” takes place in a large room that’s about the size of a small wide movie theater. Buckets of flowers come in on automated trolleys, then an employee takes a bunch of stems out and shows them to the buyers, who sit in rows of seats with telephones and buttons. There’s a huge electronic “clock” on the wall that starts at a high price and swings down until someone presses the “buy” button and indicates how many stems he/she wants (almost everyone working here is male). If all the stems are purchased, the clock resets for the next group of flowers. Otherwise, the board shows how many stems are left and the auction continues, with one trolley floating through the room every 30 seconds from 7am until closing time.
Almost all tourists here are women, and they come to look at the flowers and marvel at the efficiency of the auction. Not me. I am dumbfounded. I can’t believe all these people wake up early in the morning to bid on commodities. No one’s really looking at the quality of the stems; they seem bored and pay more attention to their cigarettes and cell-phone conversations. With few exceptions (like the Tokyo fish market), most of the world’s large perishable-commodities markets operate electronically, with just a computer network and servers rather than thousands of employees. It’s easy to quantify the condition of the flowers and then make sure you receive what you ordered. I can’t understand why such an inefficient system has been allowed to stand, especially in Holland, unless of course the tourist dollars support it.
If you want to see flowers in Holland, don’t go to the auction. Go to Floriade, the outdoor spectacle:
www.floriade.nl/opmaak/uk/frameset.html
I had a great trip to Amsterdam. I’ll be back, because I still haven’t spent enough time there. You can be sure you’ll hear more about this magical city in my future journals.
Safe travels,
David Siegel
If you’re going to Amsterdam:
Here are some useful links:
Stay in a nice hotel:
www.pulitzer.nl
www.dikkerenthijsfenice.nl
www.blakeshotels.com
www.designhotels.com
Museums
www.annefrank.nl
www.amsterdam-museums.com/
Vegetarian restaurants:
www.happycow.net/europe/netherlands/amsterdam/
The Hip Guide to Amsterdam:
www.hiptravelguide.com/amsterdam
Finally, I’d like to take you to Rotterdam, the world’s largest port. I spent a day there and walked on the Erasmus Bridge, designed by the talented team of Van Barkel and Bos. They’ve designed award-winning projects around the world, and this is their portfolio page. Click on “Erasmus Bridge” to see breathtaking photos of this stunning bridge:
