Sex, drugs and bicycles
Trip Start
Feb 10, 2008
1
36
45
Trip End
May 13, 2009
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
"The people of Ghent are headstrong and obstinate." are the opening words of the Ghent Visitor's Guide - continuing on "If we were not so proud of these labels, we would regard them as faults."
I had entered Belgium about 100kms earlier and initially was going to stay in Bruxelles my first night, but it was busy and modern and the traffic was so bad that I drove on to Ghent. I did drive past the main European parliament buildings and other EU related buildings, but as I was trying to find my way out I got lost and drove through an area in which I saw a completely different side to the modern, rather sterile centre - rundown, small colourful shops, full of immigrants (mainly North African), narrow streets. with a slight hint of menace, etc.
Back to Ghent - there is a fortress in the middle of the city, but it wasn't built to defend it, but to protect the authorities from the people of the city. Are you starting to get a picture of how they see themselves? They are also known as noose-wearers, as they were forced by the Emperor Charles V to walk through the streets barefoot, wearing a noose around their necks and ask for mercy, after they got particularly insubordinate one time.
Anyhow, after reading all this, and getting myself mentally prepared to deal with these difficult sounding people, I found the people I did have interactions with to be very friendly and helpful. I was only in Ghent for a day and but managed to fit in: St Bavo's Cathedral where there are 2 fantastic works (among many others): The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a beautiful altarpiece by the Van Eyck brothers, and the organ, which when it was completed in the 1700s was the largest organ in the world - it has been played by Mendelssohn, Händel and Mozart (who played it when he was 10 years old).
I particularly enjoyed the Museum of Beaux Arts, which had a special exhibition of Piranesi prints - cabinets and cabinets full of drawings which are amazingly detailed - he must have been incredibly prolific and seemingly worked day and night every day of his life, such was the volume of his work.
The food was a bit of a change from the German & French areas I had been in for the past 2 weeks - for lunch I had carrot mousse & pheasant patè as an ameuse-bouche, 3 oysters (from NZ), fried fish with witlof and mashed potato, and an overly rich & heavy chocolate tart.
So then it was a quick nip a few kms down the road to Bruges where I stayed at a buzzy hostel called the Bauhaus. Bruges, like Ghent, is a small city with a well-preserved centre and it's wonderful to walk around and soak in the atmosphere. I wrote an email to my son Michael patronisingly mentioning I was there and did he know where it was (expecting him not to know), and he wrote back saying he'd just seen the film "In Bruges", so yes, he did know where it was, thus wiping the smirk off my face :).
An interesting sight in Bruges is the Holy Blood chapel, which contains a bottle of rock crystal, supposedly containing some of the blood of Jesus, and which is paraded around the city on Ascension Day. It's a never-ending fascination to me the religious objects in Europe that are venerated, and I have now seen a good number of them - Jesus' blood, fragments of the cross, the Turin Shroud, bodies of dead saints, etc.
While I am wandering around town I notice posters advertising a beer festival next day, so I decide to stay another day. Can you believe I've been in Europe nearly 1 1/2 years and haven't yet been to a beer festival (not that I'm much of a beer drinker, but at least I'd like to go to one as a sociological study). So next day I head down to the centre of town and join the small throng waiting for it to open. As I said I haven't been to any other beer festivals so I have nothing to compare it to, but I think this is vastly different to such events as the Munich beer festival. Everybody is very well-dressed and behaved, they study the beers intently and talk to the brewers, take a sip and swirl it around their mouths, etc - it's more like a wine-tasting. There is a large array of beers and I don't know where to begin - I don't have a big capacity for beer and I don't want to get drunk, so I buy a 6-tasting ticket. Fortunately at the very first stand where I decide to try a beer, I start talking to the man behind the counter asking what they are (there are lambics, krieks, etc which I've never heard of), and one of the other customers decides to adopt me and give me a crash course in Belgian beer. He orders different beers for both of us so we can taste each others, so I end up tasting 12 beers (small glasses only so didn't get drunk). All the beers at the festival were made made by small-scale brewers, amongst which were a number of Trappist monasteries, and even a beer made by the methode champenoise (the brewer sent it to a champagne house in France where it was treated exactly like champagne - it was probably my favourite beer), and there were also a number of "Christmas" beers, which they specially produce only at this time of the year.
After this very pleasant diversion I drove up to Amsterdam, and amazingly the night I arrived there was a tango concert at a beautiful theatre on the edge of the central district, followed by a milonga in the grand foyer. The group was called Tango de Astillero and they were from Buenos Aires and were fantastic - their music was dramatic and contemporary but very much infused with the traditional tango feeling.
By a lucky co-incidence my cousin Claude (who lives in London) was in Amsterdam doing a course at the time I was there. He had emailed me saying it would be fun staying on a houseboat, so I started searching around on the internet. Somehow or other I stumbled across a gay-friendly site (as they euphemistically put it) and Claude and I were offered to share a double bed. Houseboats were all booked up but eventually I found a 4 storey house in the middle of the red-light district for a very reasonable price. The house was amazing - you entered through a narrow door, then climbed tiny, very steep steps (about 40 degree gradient) to a very well-equipped kitchen & dining area (one of the dining tables was filled with sand and shells with a glass top); the 2nd level had a lounge with a huge flat screen tv, and the upper 2 levels were bedrooms (one with ensuite and spa bath).
The red-light district is made up of a number of blocks bisected by canals - it is full of neon-lit windows in which prostitutes display themselves (I read in a newspaper there are 400 of them and the mayor wants to reduce the number), "coffee-shops" where you can smoke marijuana, sex shows, etc. It's not quite as sordid as it sounds as it's regulated quite well, and there are many restaurants, cafes, clothing shops interspersed among them, etc - there are many entertaining juxtapositions such as seeing adjacent windows, one with people dining and the next with a woman disporting herself with virtually no clothes on barely a metre away. I overheard a guide taking a group around saying the Dutch virtually don't frequent the area and they are quite low on the scale of countries in the usage of marijuana, but they were tolerant of it because it was relatively discreet, well-controlled and it was good for business as it brought in tourists.
The real joy of Amsterdam of course is the architecture, the canals, and the museums, and Claude and I had a wonderful time at the Rijksmuseum, which had a large collection of paintings by Vermeer (it was stunning to see the original of the Milk Maid), Rembrandt, and other artists.
Yes I know you don't believe me and that you believe I am only saying this to cover the fact that I spent all my time smoking marijuana and frequenting prostitutes, but it's true, and the only experience I had in that line was buying a few pieces of "special cake", which I had with a cup of tea. They were awful - very dry and tasting of nothing - they needed some almonds or hazlenuts, a drop of liqueur, maybe a little creme patisserie - after all if you're going to make something like this you should do it properly and it should taste good. At least, like Bill Clinton, I didn't inhale :) - I just chewed a dry bland cake - don't know which is worse.
A number of Claude's friends (Geoff, Lisa, Jo, Thierry, Claire) from the course remained for a couple more days so one night we went out and several of them went ice-skating, which was quite hilarious, especially Claude, as he - how can I put it - hasn't got much experience and the inevitable happened.
The bicycle part about Amsterdam is true - everyone seems to have one and they ride them everywhere, no matter what the weather. Other cities I have been to where there is a very high level of bicycle use are Copenhagen, Stockholm, and the cities on the plain of the Po river in northern Italy, like Ferrara. I really don't know why bicycles are popular in some places and not others, but it's great to see the places where they are used as the car traffic is substantially less.
After Amsterdam I drove to the North Sea and followed the coast south. The coastline is actually made up of many long sandy windswept beaches (some had surf clubs) with quite a few wind and kitesurfers.
Large stretches of the coastline have massive dykes built on them, and you can stand alongside them and see the North Sea battering the dykes on one side and the calm inland sea on the inside.
Then the road led through the undersea tunnel to Belgium for a few kilometres and it was back into France again.
