Amsterdam

I’ve now spent 11 nights in Europe, and my trip actually is moving into the home stretch, but this is my first blog post. I write for a living, but, hey, I’m on vacation. I guess that sort of unofficially comes to an end Monday, when I have a meeting with an e-health official from the European Commission.

I have already seen Amsterdam, Bruges and Antwerp, and I’m heading to Brussels Sunday late afternoon. I’ve also made en-route stops in The Hague and Ghent.

Just like freelancing, traveling alone has its ups and downs. You have the freedom to do what you want, when you want. But there are also long periods of loneliness.

What’s that, you say? I came to Europe with a friend? Well, things didn’t exactly work out as planned. She apparently was upset on the flight that I didn’t read the four or five tour books she brought on Amsterdam and that I didn’t appear “excited” about the trip. How is one supposed to show excitement on a 7½-hour flight. Should I have been doing cartwheels through the airport terminal during my 4-hour layover in Newark? I suppose I should have been glad I was leaving Newark.

(By the way, I usually love flying in Boeing 767s because they are comfortable, quiet and seem spacious, but the relatively new 767-400 that Continental flies on the EWR-AMS route felt really cramped with the seats so close together and limited under-seat storage. I could not even completely open my laptop when the person in front of me reclined all the way. Oh, for a seat in an exit row!)

Anyway, the tension sort of built in the weeks leading up to the trip, with her complaining that I wasn’t getting excited. I was working hard on multiple projects, including an application for a fellowship I badly want. She was off nearly the entire month of March. During that time, my parents came to visit for a weekend, I sprained my knee playing hockey (I’ve had it wrapped nearly 24/7 on this trip because of all the walking and climbing up stairs), plus I had a trip to Houston less than a week before I left for Amsterdam. I came home to a pile of dirty clothes and a barrage of e-mail. Isn’t that enough excitement?

In Amsterdam, things deteriorated fast. I have been to Europe several times before and have found that the best plan after the all-night flight over is to get to the hotel, eat a good lunch, nap for a couple of hours, shower, go out for a few hours in the late afternoon and evening, then turn in early for a full night’s sleep so I’m ready to go the next day.

She was not happy about the nap, but that’s what I do.

Then, I had to take care of kind of an emergency. I refilled all my prescriptions the day before I departed. One medication came in two bottles. I grabbed the smaller of the two, but didn’t realize there were only 20 pills in the bottle—not even enough for a week. Another medication I just completely forgot to pack. I’m positive it’s on the kitchen counter right next to the sink back home. Why I put it there remains a mystery.

Fortunately, a pharmacy near my hotel was very accommodating. It was about 2:30 p.m. in Amsterdam, which was 7:30 a.m. back in Chicago. My pharmacy at home was not open and my doctor was not in his office. No matter, since the Amsterdam pharmacy would not fill a prescription anyway unless it came from a Dutch physician.

I figured I would have to wait in line at some walk-in clinic and hope for the best. Instead, the pharmacist called a local doctor’s office, gave the receptionist my name and told me to head right over there. Less than 30 minutes later, I had my script, and the pharmacy filled it right away. The total doctor’s fee was €13.25. (The meds—both generics—actually cost a bit more than I would have paid at home. The lower European prices we hear so much about really only apply to brand-name drugs.)

Anyway, I was tremendously grateful to you-know-who for accompanying me throughout this little adventure, since I was the idiot who forgot his pills. But my “thank you” and “I’m sorry” was inadequate, since in hindsight, the trip was already ruined.

The next day, she thought I was wasting time by doing pushups in the room before showering. That took all of 30 seconds and it got my blood flowing so I would get moving faster. Plus, it’s a good way to stay in shape when the hotel doesn’t have a gym.

Tension continued to breakfast, for reasons I still don’t understand, then boiled over at the Amsterdam Historical Museum. I like to take my time in museums, plus I actually have an interest in history. (Just check my résumé: B.A., history, Washington University, 1992.) She went ahead and finished way earlier than I did.

I didn’t know how much earlier until she found me in the museum and told me she had been waiting outside for 40 minutes. I was shocked. But then she told me rather huffily (is that a word?) that she was moving on to another museum and I said, “Fine.” She took that like a frustrated “Fine,” which it was not, and turned around and walked away without saying a word. I called her back, then she told me we needed to talk when we got back to the hotel since, in her words, we were “not communicating.”

Back at the hotel, she was already making plans to not stay together in other cities on the trip and to travel on her own the rest of the way. I asked her what she wanted to talk about and she basically refused. Yeah, I suppose we really were not communicating if she doesn’t want to talk.

We spent the next three nights sharing a room but not saying more than “hi” and “bye” when one of us came or went. Seriously, I’ve had much better experiences sharing a dorm room with five total strangers in a Madrid hostel. This time, it was a supposed friend being hostile. And they ask me why I drink!

Later, when I was drinking, someone in a pub suggested to me that I should have traveled with a male friend. If I had any male friends who were still single, I might have considered it. Such is the nature of being in your mid-30s.

Anyway, I have not let this ugly incident ruin my trip, other than the lack of companionship. Instead, I have turned into a museum maven, and even picked up a few language skills. Oh yeah, two nasty pimples disappeared along with the stress.

In Amsterdam alone, I visited the aforementioned Amsterdam Historical Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Dutch Resistance Museum, the Anne Frank House and a photography museum known as FOAM, some sort of Dutch acronym.

That’s a lot to cram into a short visit, but I was taking advantage of something called the I Amsterdam Card, which gives prepaid access to 26 museums (though not the Anne Frank House), a free canal cruise, discounts to some other attractions and restaurants, plus an unlimited transit pass for 24, 48 or 72 hours. I got the 72-hour card for €53. The three-day transit pass alone goes for €13, so I’d call it a good deal.

I would have done more, but the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage closed one day before I tried to get in, as it was moving out an old exhibit and preparing for the next. All exhibits come from the original Hermitage in St. Petersburg.

The Rijksmuseum is undergoing a total renovation, so most of it is closed until 2008. In the meantime, the one open wing is showing about 400 of the museum’s best works from the Dutch Golden Age in an exhibit called The Masterpieces. Names like Rembrandt, Vermeer and Steen are prominent, as is Delft porcelain.

This being the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, there are special exhibits and events all over the Netherlands. The Rijksmuseum is showing a special Rembrandt-Caravaggio exhibit at the nearby Van Gogh Museum. That’s one I actually did not get to.

As I am sure has happened to millions over the years, the Anne Frank House moved me to tears. Right past the entrance is a room with a large picture of Anne and her birth and death dates. That’s when it hit me how wise beyond her years she was in her writings and how tragic it is that she barely made it past her 15th birthday. I cried again when I saw Anne’s room, since the pictures she cut out of her movie magazines and glued to the wall are still there. Some original posters from Opekta, one of Otto Frank’s companies, are still there as well.

This tangible piece of history really humanizes the tragedy of the Holocaust and is a must-see for anyone who doubts the magnitude of the Nazis’ evil.

I do have to say it is a tad ironic that the room showing Anne’s legacy, including copies of her diary in 60-some languages, has a quote on the wall from Eleanor Roosevelt. Not that Mrs. Roosevelt was not a great humanitarian who was truly touched by Anne Frank’s diary, but her husband’s reluctance to confront Hitler until the end of 1941 probably cost millions of innocent lives.

Still, I come away from Amsterdam with the understanding that the Dutch have a long history of tolerance. The Jewish Historical Museum and the Dutch Resistance Museum, of course, do try to paint rosy pictures, but they come off as sincere. I mean, no other country in Europe welcomed Jews as early as 1600 (though it took more than 100 years for the descendants of victims of the Spanish Inquisition to make it to Amsterdam), and no other occupied country worked harder to subvert Nazi control.

Today’s openness about prostitution and marijuana (neither of which I sampled, by the way) is just the latest manifestation of this tradition of tolerance.

For the record, I did smell pot while walking through The Hague on a weekday afternoon. People all over the Netherlands just accept marijuana as no worse than alcohol or tobacco, or any other vice. (Frankly, I wish they would figure out the tobacco thing, since cigarette smoke is everywhere. Nonsmoking sections in restaurants are pretty much a joke, since ventilation tends to be poor in the old buildings of Amsterdam. I had to do laundry upon my arrival in Bruges because all three pairs of pants that I brought reeked of smoke.)

One little note on The Hague: I took a side trip there—45 minutes by train—on my way out of Amsterdam, not knowing what to expect of this town best known for its International Court of Justice, a UN installation and, most recently, the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, which, of course, ended with his death a month or so ago.

For the half-day I was there, I was impressed. If you ever find yourself in The Hague, do go to the Mauritshuis, a fine museum housed in a 17th-century mansion that overlooks a lake. Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” is there, as are a few Rembrandts and collections of some Flemish masters like Peter Paul Rubens and Hans Memling. The current special exhibition, entitled “Dreaming of Italy,” shows the works of many non-Italian artists who were inspired by Italian landscapes and settings.

The curator of the Italian exhibit did a tremendous job, bringing in pieces from such famous institutions as the Louvre, the Getty and the Prado, as well as from not-so-obvious places like the Milwaukee Art Museum, Smith College in Northampton, Mass., and the royal collection of Buckingham Palace.

The little diversion to The Hague lasted longer than planned, as the machine that controls the lockers in the train station broke and I could not get my luggage. Station attendants opened a couple of rows of lockers with keys to remove an access panel, but the key would not work for the row where my locker was. The mechanic they called in tried un-jamming the machine’s ticket reader and also tried the key, again unsuccessfully. He finally put his mechanic’s skills to work by jimmying the lock with a screwdriver. High-tech stuff!

This little problem took an hour and a half to resolve. I missed one train to Bruges and almost missed another, but got to that wonderful Flemish town just after 8 p.m., with some daylight left. Europe sets its clocks ahead one week before North America, so my 7-hour time change from Chicago became 8 hours the day after I landed in Amsterdam.

I’ve written so much already, so I’ll get to the rest of the trip in my next post.