After I finished working at the end of February, I spent a week in The Netherlands and another in Rome. Had to add a couple more magnets to the collection before leaving Europe!
In fact, the day after my last day of work found me on a plane from Milan to Amsterdam. I had met some wonderful Dutch people at Italian-language school in Genova, later found a cheap flight, and knew I couldn't pass up an opportunity to visit them at their homes.
Anne (pronounced An-neh) was an exceptionally lively man of 80. If you don't believe me, how many men of that age do you know that go and study a language in another country?
(This also goes to show that when it comes to making friends, age is nothing but a number! And that we all need a grandpa, now and then.)
It's true what they say: northern Europe really is a world apart from the south.
I had a fantastic time in the Netherlands. The weather was beautiful, Amsterdam’s canals and well-maintained canal houses shone, Anne and I discovered wonderful restaurants (a very cute Italian trattoria, a sumptuous Indonesian place, a French bistro). “What did we do,” he frequently asked, “to deserve this?”
One day he took me on a detour through a grand park he used to cycle through every day to work. “It made me really happy,” he said, “to think that at the end of the day I would be able to bike home through this.” Old thatched-roof houses, forests of green trees, almost-hidden lakes... “It was a FEAST!”
Maybe his most special memory was of this spot.
"In 1945 I was 8 years old, standing on this corner, when I saw the first Canadian soldiers coming down that street. That's when I knew the war was really over."
"So, everything's on me today," he continued. "I want to give a little back to the country that did so much for me."
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We did a lot of great things together. He taught me a lot about the history of the international institutions of Den Haag [The Hague], his home city. (For example, did you know that the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice and the Permanent Court of Arbitration among others, was built with money donated by Andrew Carnegie? Who said “It’s a shame to die rich”?)
We went to a fascinating exhibition on Alexander the Great at the Hermitage in Amsterdam. (Because the Russian collection is so huge and can’t possibly all be displayed, parts of it travel to other Hermitage museums around the world.) Random tidbit: did you know that the word ‘barbarian’ used to be much less pejorative? It comes from the Greek for ‘he who doesn’t speak Greek’.
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| tried kroketten at the museum cafe (breaded sticks filled with potato and minced meat) |
And of course we visited the Rijksmuseum. What a place for a Rembrandt-lover!
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| the entrance to the Rijksmuseum |
Obviously a whole salon is reserved for maybe Rembrandt’s most famous, and definitely biggest work, the Night Watch. Up close it was possible to see not only the brushstrokes but also, in some places, remnants of the slashes made by a psychologically-disturbed man with a bread knife in the 70s. !
Anne also took me to Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder, “Our Lord in the Attic”, a 17th-century Catholic church built in the – well, guess – of a wealthy merchant’s home, back in the days when it was against the law to practice Catholicism.
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| "open" restoration (meaning the museum is still open during work) |
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| of course I'm going to take a picture of the organ |
We went to another famous Dutch house, that of Anne Frank. It was a memorable experience to walk through the upper rooms where she and her family had once hidden from the Nazis for two years, before they were betrayed. The rooms were empty; yet full of ghosts.
Also sad was an unplanned walk through a section of the red-light district. Women, wearing practically nothing, posed or beckoned or pranced inside small, glassed-in cubicles. The feminine half of the human race has been fighting against objectification for how many centuries - ?? – and these ones depend on it to make a living.
(As for the famous Amsterdam pot...yeah, I did see or smell it a lot. In certain neighbourhoods. Still uninformed as to its quality, however.)
* * *
Other highlights:
- strolling through the stylish and serene streets of Den Haag
- feeling the sun and wind at the beach on the north coast
- having hot chocolate on Anne’s sailboat
But the best experience was on Thursday afternoon after lunch. We left the restaurant and headed along the street to a nondescript building. Anne quickly bought tickets to what looked like a small gallery and, holding his finger to his lips, hurried me through the hall. We came to a rounded staircase and ascended.....to arrive back at the Dutch coast!
That’s what it felt like, anyway. It was a panorama: a huge cylindrical painting of the 19th-century coast near Den Haag. It was if we were on the highest hill on the beach. We could look out in every direction, over “real” sand dunes, and listen to the screeches of seagulls, the lapping waves and distant conversation.
How could you not enjoy your time with someone who shows you things like that?
Thank you, Anne, for showing me how to live a life more filled with curiousity, beauty and gratitude.
“When I’m in America,” he said, “and my children say ‘bless you’ after I sneeze...I say: ‘I already am! Eighty years old! Like this! Hey!”
