Trekking Through Amsterdam 1

Where in the world can an opera house have the bronze sculpture of a violinist sinking into the floor? Not a clue? Well, a clog is a hint. I mean the wooden clogs people wear; not that they do anymore. The answer is of course Amsterdam.

I suspect the violinist was sinking because the city is below water level. There is a water column in the city hall showing how far under the water the city would be if they hadn't built the dikes and canals and hadn't taken other measures.

Yet, water makes this city. Amsterdam consists of 90 islands connected by more than a 1000 bridges. Alongside with water come the greenery and a myriad of flowers. Don't think tulips only but all the flowers, due to the rather mild climate though somewhat unpredictable.

At the time I was there the whole country was going crazy over sunflowers. The flowers were everywhere, in markets, in parks, and around the elegantly gabled houses leaning over the water as if to catch their own glimpses.

Buildings, hundreds of years old, have been beautifully restored and preserved in Amsterdam. Their lean and narrow structures lean at odd angles against each other, making their view even more picturesque. Inside, they have low ceilings and steep winding staircases.

Westelijke Elianden (Western Islands), a part of Amsterdam, has the most wondrous waterside views with some inimitable façades of buildings, wooden bridges, canals, marinas, boats that take you on trips along the canals and water taxis.

Our trip to Amsterdam was simple. We got on the plane in Kennedy and got off in Schiphol airport, Amsterdam. As a city, however, Amsterdam is everything but simple. Having two cousins living there also helped us greatly.

Today, I want to walk about in Amsterdam again, in memories though it may be, because I feel I'll be peeking into a Pandora's box again, for the picturesque Amsterdam shocks, arouses interest, and in unexpected ways, opens one's eyes.

With Amsterdam, we broke with our routine of staying away from museums to visit several of them. I loved the Van Gogh Museum, maybe because I have a special bias toward crazy painters. Having opened to public view during the seventies, the museum is rather new. It has hundreds of Van Goghs, several Lautrecs, a few Gauguins, Monets, and also Van Gogh's collection of Japanese prints. Exquisite is the word here for those prints.

The Rijksmuseum was the spectacular one. Rembrandt's Night Watch was its star painting with a throne room of its own; although, I felt many of the other Rembrandts in the museum carried a higher artistic quality. The other Dutch Masters, Hals, Steen, Ruysdael, Vermeer were also magnificent. I can't possibly recall all the painters represented because the museum is so vast. If I go there again, I'm putting aside three full days for this museum only.

The reason Rijksmuseum---its Gothic façade, two towers, and those entrance doors---seems familiar to a New Yorker is because it resembles the Grand Central Station. The reason is both places were designed by the same architect, Cuypers, during the nineteenth century. Maybe because of that, most of the exhibits in the museum are from the nineteenth century, although every age from medieval to modern times is represented to some extent.

Paintings and drawings aside, the most amusing was the doll house collections. Despite reminding me of Ibsen's "Nora, a Doll's House," this collection became a treat. Especially, a seventeenth century life like sex dolls-house with every minute detail was a delight to watch. It made a grown woman resort to little girl dreams.

After the dollhouses, the scales of model ships enchanted us. They dated from the seventeenth century when Netherlands was a naval force in the world, and this collection made the grown man walking around with me turn into a little boy.

Very close to the Rijksmuseum, is the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat, a proud street showing off the city's antique trade. Walking along this street right after coming out of the Rijksmuseum felt like I had entered yet another museum. Actually, some pieces were just as much if not more interesting than those of the museum pieces. The problem was, we weren't allowed in the shops. Their ritual required ringing the door bell and then getting the guided tour, only if we were interested in a purchase. Nevertheless, we had some fun peeking through the windows.

Rain always caught us somewhere in Amsterdam and it came down abruptly, but rain was not the only wet stuff that took us by surprise. My first shock came when I saw the public urinals in the streets where men used them in open view. Can you believe it!

There are, however, in existence public toilets called WC or toiletten. There is a person who sits at the entrance of a WC near a table that has a saucer or a cup collecting entry fees. There's no set amount for this and a few coins will do. Once, I put a nickel among the other coins by mistake instead of their currency and I got really bad looks. Since I don't know Dutch well but just some broken German, I used all the German words I knew to say, "Sorry, I made a mistake," which wasn't much help at all.

The bathrooms in some of the houses are poles apart from what we call a bathroom. The toilet is separate from the bath and in a very small room with very poor ventilation. They also have a strange toilet design with a platform to hold the waste to be clearly seen and examined before flushing it away. All of these things make the WCs stink, I'm sorry to say.

People in Amsterdam have a different understanding of things compared to the rest of us, such as a very wide acceptance of some drugs and paid life size sex doll.

Two other museums in Amsterdam felt odd to me. One is the Museum of Cannabis and Hemp; the other, the Sex Museum. We entered neither, but according to my cousin they house some historical details of thousands of years about their individual subjects.

The drugs are officially illegal but they are not illegal if people carry a certain small amount on them for personal use or smoke the stuff in coffee shops. Yes, you read it right. Coffee shops are for smoking dope, but they are also for coffee and some space-cakes with questionable ingredients. Some people claim to have gotten high from just eating those cakes. For that reason alone, I hesitated to eat or drink anything on the street. It was a good thing a couple of family members were nearby and someone accompanied us while we went sightseeing.

What I also came to learn in time was that the green triangle sign in front of the coffee shops means that they serve both weed and liquor inside.