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The Netherlands

The Netherlands

Last updated on: June 30, 2016 at 2:07 pm by Jane the Actuary

The Netherlands 2016-06-30T14:07:58-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Now we’re in the Netherlands. (Again, pics and links to come.)

It’s a funky country – bikes everywhere.

Here’s what we’ve been up to here.

Saturday was a roller coaster of a day.

We had a flight at 8:30 in the morning, on Ryan Air, which flies out of a small airport on the outskirts of London, so we had to allow plenty of travel time. Happily there was an express train at reasonable cost, though annoyingly, the tube station across the street from our apartment was closed on weekends for construction, so we needed to take a taxi to get to the train station.

We packed the night before, so that we needed only to put the final things in the suitcases Saturday morning, but we were still nervous about getting us, and the kids, ready in time for the taxi scheduled for 5:30. Then, at 5:30, we made it in front of the building – when we realized that we had all left the apartment without any keys and, though we left the apartment door unlocked, we had forgotten about the need to get buzzed into, or unlock, the building entrance.

We were doomed. What to do? We started randomly pushing buttons, hoping desperately that someone would answer so we could beg to be buzzed in, but it was 5:30 in the morning. Now, as it happened, the building was on a bit of a slope, and one of the second-story windows was half-open, so my husband boosted my middle son up, who rapped on the window and, in his politest, but most desperate voice, asked for help, and the poor resident was willing to buzz us in.

In the meantime, the taxi dispatch called us, asking whether we still wanted the taxi. Yes, of course, my husband said, somewhat irritated. Do you want to talk to the driver?, the dispatcher asked. No, we said, we just want the taxi to come. But the taxi was nowhere to be found – until, after a few more puzzling exchanges, we finally figured out that the taxi was at [address] Street, and we were at [address] Road – which was, at least, just a couple blocks away, so once this was straightened out, he made it over to us and got us to the train station in plenty of time.

The airport – it was not like any airport I’d seen before. In order to make it to the gates, you first walk through a long shopping mall (basically) where they advertise sales, and women stand ready to hand out perfume samples. They you wait at a food court area for gates to be assigned – but, astonishingly, the “Pret” at the airport had prices identical to their locations in the city. Then you get your gate assignment, walk there, wait in line for some time, then walk down stairs, and walk outside to the plane itself, which you enter not through a jetway but by going up the stairs.

Oh, and Ryan Air? So cheap that the seats don’t even have a pocket in the back of the seat in front of you, but have the plane safety information as a sticker on the seat back. And the seats themselves are vinyl, all the better, I suppose, for wiping down as needed. And if you don’t fork over the extra cash, as we did, you have to find your own seat rather than having an assigned seat.

But we made it to Eindhoven (because Ryan Air flies into minor airports), and picked up our rental car. The good news: we were upgraded from the cheap Skoda Oktavia to an Audi A6 licensed in Munich, because of some quirk that required that the car needed to make its way there. The bad news: it seemed to have been just repaired, and there were still bits of glass in the back seat, including some in the seat belt buckles. Before we drove away, we concluded that the seat belts were a bit fussy but functional, but after our lunch stop, we were unable to buckle our youngest son into the middle seat at all, so we concluded that we’d have to, reluctantly, turn in the car the next day. In the end, happily, my husband fussed with it enough (attacking it with a knife) to get the seatbelt to buckle one more time, and now our youngest get into his seat by loosening the seatbelt, climbing in, and tightening it again – a fair price to pay for a roomier car with a high-end navigation system and all manner of electronics.

The place we’re staying at isn’t in Amsterdam itself, or any city, but a few miles from the coast in a touristy area; it’s a resort with rental houses which are little more than glorified mobile homes. The bedrooms are tiny, but there are three of them, so we all fit reasonably well, and there’s an adequately-equipped kitchen and living area.

And the weather? Well, so far there’s not much of an improvement on London; rain is and has been in the forecast every day.

In any case, on Sunday we slept in, then drove north to a national park, where we hiked along a path, then went another path that was supposed to take us to a (European) buffalo (wisent)-viewing spot, but we couldn’t see any buffalo. In the evening the kids went to the pool, and that was about it.

As a side note, I had had the impression that we were solidly in Calvinist-country, and figured our only church options were Dutch Protestant services, which seemed a bit much to oblige the family to attend. Well, I should have looked a bit harder, as I would have found English-language services not far from here had I gone onto masstimes.org, which has international listings, as I later learned.

Monday we went to Amsterdam. Now, the odd thing is that the guidebook reported that parking in Amsterdam is insanely expensive, and that you’re supposed to park at the Park + Ride and take mass transit in, but it turns out there was a parking garage a short walk from the train station and the city center, with reasonable rates (EUR 13!), so we drove in (45 minutes) for a look-see.

Turns out, I don’t like Amsterdam. The whole area by the train station is super-seedy. The Red Light District is so close to the train station that we wandered in by mistake, and the “coffeeshops” were all over, and the stink was not limited to the inside. We finally made it to a nicer area, and walked along a canal, then to the Beguine-Hof, and then to the Anne Frank House – but, as it happens, it’s a two hour wait to go inside (really – I asked the women at the front of the line and that’s how long they’d been waiting), so we didn’t. (Until 3:30, admission is by advance booking only, with tickets mostly sold out more than a month in advance, so not an option for short-notice tourists; and according to the guidebook, lines shorten in the evening, as it’s open ‘til 9.)

A couple comments on churches:

We walked into or passed seven churches. Directly by the train station was St. Nicholas, a Catholic church, and one with a Holy Door, for that matter; had it been Tuesday rather than Monday, we could have attended an English language mass. Later we passed another Catholic church, this time a small one in the midst of coffeeshops, with, also an English language mass available (with Latin liturgy, in fact). Then we passed the Old Church and the New Church, both in the core of the city center, both now turned into museums. In the Beguine-Hof, the old Beguine’s church had been turned into a church for the English-speaking Protestant community in 1607, and is staffed by Scottish Presbyterians. Across the street, a Catholic church which looked old but couldn’t have been earlier than the 1800s, when Catholics were permitted to worship openly. Then, finally, just across the street from the Anne Frank House was the West Church, the first functioning Dutch Protestant church we’d seen in the city.

What’s going on? Are the Catholics more religious than the Protestants? Or is it that the Catholic churches there are serving an immigrant population, and, among native Dutch, both historically-Catholics and Protestants are equally indifferent to religion?

Also, with respect to Amsterdam, it really didn’t have much with respect to attractive sights. Even on the main square, the “Dam,” one of the major sites was Madame Toussaud’s. The other attraction is The Heineken Experience. Of course there are art museums, but that’s not high on the list, especially with the kids.

So on Tuesday, when my husband had a visit into the company’s Amsterdam office on his agenda, I was initially at a loss for what to do. Other than go to English-language mass at 12:30, there wasn’t really much appeal to a second day in Amsterdam. There was a science museum (EUR 15 per person) but the reviews suggested we’d get tired of it, and that it was aimed at younger children.

Instead, we went to Leiden, which is a short drive from the vacation rental where we are, so not terribly out of the way for my husband to drop us off there on his way to Amsterdam, and then pick us up at end of the day. The forecast was for rain in the afternoon, and Leiden had a number of museums to offer, so the plan was to walk around the city in the morning, then duck into a museum when the rain started.

Leiden, it turns out, is just as cute as Amsterdam is supposed to be, with old buildings and canals, but without all the unpleasantness and without all the crowds. True, the buildings aren’t all as old, but it was still a very pleasant place to walk around, with a long shopping street, and canals, and another Catholic church (which had a flyer posted seeking children of immigrants to be interviewed and talk about religious customs in their parents’ home countries – a bilingual poster, in fact) and another Protestant church (very white inside, and with the worship area condensed to a small portion of the overall building).

There was also a part of the canals where a half-dozen historic boats were docked, with bi-lingual descriptions.

Leiden also features a windmill that’s been restored and turned into a museum which was a huge hit with the kids. They were ready to go there as soon as it opened, and I had to stall them ‘til the afternoon, when it did indeed cloud over and look ready to rain, and rain very heavily, though the clouds ultimately blew over. The museum had a video (choice of language) explaining museums, and an extensive display explaining all about windmills, as well as preserving the furnishings of the miller’s home on the first two floors.

And after we’d toured the windmill museum, we then went to the Ethnology Museum, which had very nice displays of artifacts from Indonesia, Africa, Asia, etc., acquired through the Netherlands’ years as trading and colonial power. Then we got the promised ice cream, and wandered around some more until pick-up time (arranged by an exception-to-the-general-rule turning on the phone to receive texts). The one thing I wished, in retrospect, that I’d done, was to pay a bit more attention to the time so that we could have also made it on a boat tour of the canals, which, if you go to Leiden, you should totally do.

Here are two more wild things about the Netherlands:

First, they all speak English. Really. The first couple instances I felt a bit sheepish about addressing shopkeepers, restaurant counter workers, etc., in English, but they really do all speak it. And their television is, to a large extent, American and British shows with subtitles (we watched Invictus on TV Tuesday, while the rain, which finally came, poured down), and, from what I understand, movies are also generally subtitled rather than dubbed, because the country is too small for a full dubbing industry, so I guess the school classes get plenty of reinforcement.

And they all ride bikes. The number of bikes is just astonishing, and mostly on dedicated bike paths. The small road our vacation resort is on, and many others, are the width of two-lane roads, but with wide shoulders painted for bikes and pedestrians, with the idea being that drivers use the full width of the road only when there’s a car coming from both directions, but otherwise drive in the center. Now, what I don’t really know is this: is the proliferation of bike paths a response to a Dutch love of bicycles, or is it not really correct to speak of “love” of bicycling so much as being compelled to bike due to the government, in a myriad of ways, making it difficult to drive?

Oh, and one more item: Dutch is a really funky language. It’s got a lot of guttural sounds to it, so it just sounds wild to listen to. But it’s this hybrid of English and German, so you can make out a lot of the basics just by knowing those languages – not in the spoken language but certainly on signs for basics like opening hours, or basic street signs.

And, incidentally, you know how bloggers have been pointing to self-service ordering machines at McDonald’s in the Netherlands as a sign of things to come in the U.S. when the minimum wage hikes have their impact? Yes, they’re at every McDonald’s, but it’s not simply a matter of requiring fewer workers; it’s tremendously useful to have the opportunity to select among multiple languages when ordering, and to review your order more easily than talking to a counter order-taker.

Wednesday was Rotterdam. Our prime destination was a boat tour of the port, which is extremely cool. Had it been July or August, we’d have taken the two-hour tour, but in June, only a 75 minute version was available. Pictures to come later, but it was just wild to see all the ships and the massive numbers of containers stacked like Lego blocks or being moved about by giant forklifts. We also checked out the “Cube Houses” and stopped at the beach on the way back (though it was too windy to actually enjoy it).

And today, Thursday, we much more challenged to entertain ourselves due to the weather. The initial forecast was for rain all day long so we took our time about getting ready and eating breakfast. The forecast was eventually revised to rain at 3 pm, so we figured we could finally take our walk through the dunes to the North Sea and walk along the sea and along the dunes – but it actually started raining partway through the (curtailed) walk. Then we spent a couple hours at the “Space Expo,” the visitor center for the European Space Agency; this would have been cooler if we’d been there on a weekend or during the Dutch school holidays when you can take a “space train” tour through the complex of buildings rather than just looking at the various exhibits, which kept us busy for all of two hours with looking at them as in-depth as we could, but we were grateful for the activity when we heard the rain pounding on the roof while we were dry inside. We did see an astronaut – that is, the former Dutch International Space Station commander, Andre Kuipers, whose comments and personal items figure prominently in the displays, was there signing books for some kind of corporate event. Of course, I wouldn’t have recognized him were it not for the book-signing, and the fact that there were photos of him everywhere, but there you go. Anyway, we finished the day with ice cream after dinner, and, after I finish up a few things, we’ll plan our route for tomorrow when we leave the Netherlands and head to Germany.

(Helpful hint for other Netherlands-bound travelers: plan your itinerary with more care than we did. Many museums are closed on Monday, and the multiple Atlantic Wall museums were universally open only on Sunday, which, if we’d looked in advance, would have been our Sunday activity so as to not miss it. And don’t assume that the Netherlands is just Calvinists, as I did but try your luck with masstimes.org.)

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