A Weekend in Amsterdam (Day 2)
One of the funny things that I forgot to mention from yesterday is that the Thai restaurant we ate at gave us cough drops as our after-dinner “mints.” No, we have no idea what they were thinking. On a slightly less funny note, it feels like I’m starting to get sick or something, which is not cool. I felt fine all day today, until we got back to the room. Ugh. It just feels like a little something in my upper chest right now. Maybe it will go away by tomorrow, and maybe it is just an artifact of being outside all day today, breathing the colder air.
Today was fun. We started the day with Mass (in Dutch!) at the Bejinhof (Beguine community) “hidden” church. The Mass parts are generally the same here, but the way things work is different. Not understanding the language didn’t help much, but some of the music was the same, and most all of the form was the same, so we could at least figure out what part of Mass was happening at any given time. I’d need to learn Dutch if we were going to live here–I don’t know if I could deal with not hearing Mass every week. Anyway, the majority of the Mass is done with the people sitting down. Almost all of the prayers and places where we normally stand in the US were done seated here. We only stood for the entrance hymn, the gospel reading, the Lord’s Prayer, and the closing blessing and hymn. We offered peace in English to everyone around us, since we didn’t know the Dutch equivalent. Some people caught it quickly enough to respond in-kind, others responded in Dutch. People were nice. The priest came down the aisle to offer peace to as many as he could. He heard us respond in English, and was able to slip some English translations into other parts of the Mass. He greeted us afterwards, too, and we talked for a few minutes. This church had the Dutch Mass, then had a Mass in French fifteen minutes later. There was a different priest to do the French Mass, so the Dutch priest came over and talked to us for a little while. All attendees are invited to “the wooden house” in the community for coffee and tea after Mass. We were going to go, but didn’t want to make people there feel uncomfortable with some odd foreigners in their space, so we kept moving.
Our next destination was the Anne Frank house, and visiting some places along the way. We saw the Westerkerk (Wester =~ western, kerk =~ church), then saw the building where Anne Frank stayed. The line wrapped two-fold around the corner and was barely moving, so we decided to skip trying to get in on the tour. There was a little place called “Caf’ Small” on our side of the canal opposite the Anne Frank house, so we stopped there for lunch.
Speaking of this, there seems to be no hurry to wait on people at any of the places we have eaten. I originally thought maybe it was just because we were American, but everyone had the same sort of service, so I think maybe it was just normal. Nobody else seemed to mind (except for one clearly-American group at one of the places where we ate, and they were quite upset at the time taken for service). It took a little bit for us to get used to, but it wasn’t bad–I kind of liked not being rushed out of a place before we had finished our last sip of drink or bite of bread. Anyway, back to the story….
After lunch, we continued north in the city and visited Noorderkerk (I’ll let you guess what that one means), then walked back east a bit to Centraal Station. We wanted to get some information on the train that we have to take in a short while to get to the airport. The information desk there was quite helpful. A e4 fare per person is much better than e40 for a cab ride.
From Centraal Station, we walked further east and saw the “new” St. Nicholas church, built in the late 19th Century. It is built in a rare style, and rather looks like an Byzantine church–a decidedly un-French style. It was interesting, but closed to the public at the time that we saw it, so we couldn’t get any pictures from the inside.
After that, we wandered through the red light district a little south of St. Nicholas. Our goal here was Ouder Kerk, (ouder == old) which is smack in the middle of the red light district. Getting there was an, um, “experience.” At Ouder Kerk is supposedly the oldest monument in Amsterdam, built in the 13th Century. It was a Catholic church, eventually dedicated to St. Nicholas. During the alteration (see the previous entry), the Protestants took over the church for their services, renaming it Ouder Kerk (there is Niewe Kerk near our hotel, but I’m not sure exactly when Niewe Kerk was built). Ouder Kerk has a full carillon, built by a local company that built five others in the city. At least some of them (maybe all of them) are still working, and there are concerts scheduled at them during the summer, spring and fall months. We didn’t get to hear one, but we hear the different carillons ringing their automated tunes all around us all day. It’s pretty neat.
From Ouder Kerk, we started back for the hotel. The last of the daylight was on its way out at this point, and we were getting tired. We dropped our stuff at the hotel and relaxed for a few minutes. I decided to go out to get a few things to take back with us, so I wandered up to a vendor near the beginning of the Damrak while Jenny rested in the hotel room. I came back with our goods, and we decided to go for dinner at the same place we had dined when we first arrived. They had good stuff and good prices, so we decided that a return trip was in order. Jenny got the same grilled meatballs with mushrooms that she had previously, and I tried their homemade goulash. The goulash was awesome, and the meatballs were still their same good selves. From there, we came back to the hotel to rest and begin preparing for our journey home tomorrow.
We’ve had a lot of fun here. Now that we’ve stayed in the city, I think that we might be at the point where, if we were to be near here again, we might choose to stay elsewhere and take a train into the city for additional sightseeing. We didn’t make it to any of the other museums that we wanted to see–we were having far too much fun walking around and taking in as much of the city and culture as we could. A return trip for some museum-going might be fun, as would visiting some of the other churches that were not open to the public at the hours that we saw there (there was another great little Catholic church not far from the Begijnhof, but they were having Mass when we walked past it today, and there were others that we just had to skip due to lack of time). There’s one major church that we didn’t even get to see from the outside, the Zouderkerk (that would be on the south end of the city).
We have a long ride home tomorrow. I need to get myself in gear and get packed. We are heading to the train station to try to catch a train around 6:30AM (they leave every fifteen minutes for the airport). Our flight departs around 10:30AM for Atlanta. We have almost two hours in Atlanta, then we leave for Pittsburgh with an arrival time of around 6:30PM or so. It’s going to be a long day. Then we have to drive home. 🙂
Pictures from today:
