The days leading up to the trip were crazy with passport appointments, ordering last minute money belts online, and one tipsy night over glasses of wine pressing "buy" on our train tickets to Paris. A weekend in Paris. Oh so exciting!!!!
Our big kids were happy and nervous for the adventure. And I was feeling anxiety about the trip and the leaving, and tried to scrub the house clean for our return. Getting on the plane was a bit insane as we settled in for the next 8 hours. We managed to get a good stretch of sleep from Venice on my purse/travel boppy. Yes! She was generally happy and sweet and went with the flow of the sun that rose after the shortest night of her life. After lugging our things through the airport and customs, we were faced with a lot of cargo in our arms and a very well organized Amsterdam transportation hub. Except we had no idea what we were doing and the credit card parts of the ticket machine were not working. Jorge to the rescue with Euros from our last trip! We did ask info and then rushed into an elevator to the platform.
Oh my the hauling of the stuff onto the train was probably the most stressful part of the trip. And we chose to pay a small fortune for a taxi on the return trip to avoid it! There are stairs. And lots of stuff and stairs don't mesh when rushed. Nuf said.
Riding I remember thinking the city looked rough. But so does Chicago. What is it about buildings not maintained, garbage flying every which way, and the silliest thing- laundry hanging from windows of high rises all over the place, that makes you think "what the heck did we decide to do with this trip?"
Well we got there dazed and confused amid bright sunlight in the middle of our night, at Amsterdam Centraal. I was aware of pickpockets and freaked out on some lady trying to get me to buy a photo from her. Not to mention the buzz of traffic. What a cool and amazing place, Amsterdam and all of its modes of transport. At first I was put off by the chaos, but a few days in I fell in love with it all. Everyone going to where they needed to go, with a few simple signs and some unspoken rules about who has the right of way. At one point we were in a busy square and there were police horses running right through the chaos and I was joking with Jorge on the hierarchy of who has the right of way and that the police horses just trumped them all. The local next to us got a good chuckle and nodded.
So we got out a little map Jorge had downloaded that saved our butts more than once and we set out through the windy streets. With the stroller and luggage we just about filled the streets between buildings. The sidewalks are tiny and interrupted. A nice set of restaurant employees really helped us find our way and when we arrived I'm sure we looked worn and weary. A shower and fresh clothes and trying to muster some energy to get through the day, we set out to explore!
Our first days observations were the amazing assortment of bicycles. Being parents I couldn't believe how the kids just fit right onto this mode of transport. In the land of suburbia where the cars are larger just to add more airbags, and the carseats are enormous and heavily armored, with message boards spreading Youtube videos about how horrific things can happen if you so happen to strap the baby in just a bit incorrectly, the level of safety at first frightened me, and then intrigued me. We did see one fall, one. Of all of the crazy riding we saw, only one lady falling off a bike from running over a stick. And plenty of people right there to help her up. Wow. My favorite hilarious one was the bicycle with a "boat" on the front of it. Kids, cargo, and even an infant carseat were seen in these "boats."
You know when you visit San Francisco and find those views that you see everywhere on postcards like the hill with the row of Victorians and the crazy hilly street? And you get all giddy because you're there, looking at the postcard moment? Well, on your way there you find a mix of old and new, twisty turny and hilly and straight and flat. It's not like that in Amsterdam. For miles and miles, it looks like it did the day Anne Frank lived there. It's antique, it's true, it's real, and it's falling forward! As in, the building facades are leaning precariously towards the streets. So instead of tearing them down, they tie them to something behind the facade and add some triangular pieces to keep the rain out. Brick streets, impossibly tiny staircases to basement apartments, bicycles everywhere and the canals. Oh the canals, the wonderment of these beautiful things. The water is not the blue of the Puget Sound. It is flat and brown and reflects the amazing buildings on either side. Wow. It is a great place to be to stand on a bridge in Amsterdam just amazed at that sense of place. My favorite part of Amsterdam.
So add together this amazing setting, picturesque and gorgeous and lively and intensely colored, throw on some flora of people and bicycles and cats and flowers and trees and cobblestone textures everywhere, and then to make it more magical, add languages. Oh the pretty words spoken everywhere we went. The lovely banter in so so many languages. And moms speaking more than one language to their babies. Nothing harsh, nothing intense, just these poetic latin based languages, the dutch language and the softer english than you hear here. People did not speak for the sake of filling the air with sound. On one train ride the car was so quiet I felt bad for Venice's banter.
We definitely fell in love with Amsterdam's charms. And the hotel we stayed at was luxurious, spacious, had a "lift" and a room for us to relax and enjoy morning french bread sandwiches, Cafe Au Lait and pastries to start our days. We packed in as much walking, tram-riding and exploring as we could before we headed to Paris for the weekend.
1 comment:
What an amazing trip!
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