Amsterdam (Interail part 2)
...Continued from "Begin at the beginning (Interail part 1)"
1st July, 5pm, or thereabouts, we arrive into Amsterdam and as we leave the station are offered cheap hostel accommodation by no less than 4 different hostel touts. We catch the number 9 tram, as instructed by directions I printed from the B&B’s web site. Somehow, we get off and the correct stop and find the place with comparative ease. The owner is expecting us - before we even ring the bell, he opens the front door with a beaming smile, saying "Come in, come in, your room is just downstairs." We pay him in cash and he smiles, saying he’ll be pleased to answer any questions we might have about the B&B or about the city. Our room is pleasant, with its own TV, fridge, minibar etc. We relax on our beds for a while, then wander the local area in search of dinner. Almost an hour after we set off, we sit down in the café just 2 doors away from the B&B, where the proprietor is a sweet little man, who attempts to speak English to us, and serves us delicious lasagne (for me), spaghetti bolognese (for Vicky) and falafel (for Esther, who has recently turned vegetarian). The area we are in seems for the most part to be populated by immigrants and as 3 young unaccompanied white women we attract rather more attention than perhaps we desired but it is unthreatening curiosity. We settle down to sleep by 11pm, woken occasionally by the rattle of trams past our ground floor window.
2nd July, 11am, we wake to the beeps of our alarm clock, which we had set as a precaution so that we did not sleep away an entire day. There is no sign of the owner, nor of our promised breakfast. Hunger leads us to the supermarket, where we buy bread and fruit juice to consume on a bench in the local park. When we reach the gates, we find out that we are in fact in a totally different area of the city from the one we had thought we were in. Oosterpark, rather than Vondelpark, so south east rather than south west. Could there be two of the same B&B? No - we conclude that the web site had simply reported the wrong park name and that there is nothing unusual or spooky to consider. An old man wanders up to us, speaks to us in rapid Dutch. I apologise that we can’t understand and he asks in broken English if he can possibly please take a photo of us. Bemused, we agree and he clicks the shutter on his camera, smiles and walks away. We do not see him again. As we finish our brunch, a few drops of rain begin to fall, so we head back to the B&B to grab umbrellas and sweaters, for it is colder than expected. I have only a thin cotton cardigan, my sweater having been removed from my rucksack in my father’s attempt to lighten my load. We encounter the owner and ask him about breakfast - he apologises profusely and produces some orange juice, croissants, butter and jam from a storage cupboard.
Around 1pm, we head for the town centre. We spend about an hour in the Rijksmuseum, see Vermeer’s milkmaid and other famous works. After this, we are hungry again, so wander the Leidseplein, ending up in a sports bar where we eat Americanised food (except Esther, who has a crepe filled with smoked salmon and cream cheese) and watch Wimbledon. In the evening, we wander the Leidsegracht, stopping to check out the sales in various shops, and go online at an Easyinternet café. We walk to the Anne Frank House, getting slightly lost and finding ourselves on the edge of the Red Light District. We only realise this when we notice the red lights on the sides of the shops - the drawn curtains suggest that they are in business. A row of shops goes: supermarket, internet café, "coffee shop", clothes shop, newsagent, sex shop, book shop. We do not have to queue for the Anne Frank House, and wander round it wondering how 8 people managed to live together in such a small space for so long. We walk back down to the Leidseplein, to find dinner, and are approached by each restauranteur we pass, with offers of good cheap food. One man, at an Argentinean steakhouse, tries to lure us in with the promise of free drinks "for such pretty young ladies". We select a small Thai restaurant, where we each choose a set meal. It is 11.30pm by the time we leave the restaurant and catch the tram back to the B&B.
3rd July, 1am, we are woken by thumping footsteps and the scrape of moving furniture above our heads. This continues until around 3am. At 9am, Vicky goes to the bathroom, to find the door locked. We discover that 6 mad Italian men have moved into the room above us and are sharing our bathroom. We have to battle to get in there, waiting by our door until we see a man leave the bathroom and return upstairs. Esther runs and throws open the bathroom door and to her immense shock finds another Italian man, clad only in a small towel which just about covers his nether regions. Eventually, when each of us has showered and dressed, we eat breakfast in our room. The croissants are the sort which are supposed to be cooked at home, so are dry and tasteless. We are outraged by the state in which the men leave the bathroom. Despite the fact that two of them have shaven heads, they seem to have moulted all over the place. Dark curly male hairs litter the shower cubicle, bathtub, toilet (they have left the seat up) and the floor, which is also covered with an inch or so of water, so that it resembles a lake, with floating hairs instead of lily-pads. After breakfast, we take the tram to the market at Waterlooplein, which turns out to resemble a larger, more varied and less crowded version of Camden. I buy a thick cardigan, lilac with flared sleeves, a hood and a tribal design printed on it in purple. Esther buys a shirt and a dress. We lunch in the café across the road, which is a part of the tourist trap exhibition known as "The Holland Experience". We avoid the exhibition itself, instead going for a walk in the rain along the Herengracht, which Vicky’s guidebook describes as the most beautiful of the city’s canals. We pop into a few shops along the way and try to spot a friendly looking "coffee shop" in which to sample the local delicacy. Alas, they all seem rather dingy and uninviting, so we decide to give that a miss. Dinner is in an Italian restaurant, where the food is delicious but the atmosphere made uncomfortable by the condescending waitress who is evidently displeased by the fact that all we order is one main dish and one soft drink each. We return to the B&B after visiting the local supermarket, to buy a picnic lunch for the following day’s train journey. Fortunately, the Italian men go out clubbing so we are undisturbed by their movement that night and sleep well.
4th July, 8am, we are woken by the clock, pack our things, eat breakfast and head to the train station, leaving the key in our room. We are booked onto the 9.56am Thalys train to Paris. The train seems quite full, the luggage rack overloaded. The man sat opposite us has a scary-looking beard, which begins just below his lower lip, is about ¾ of an inch wide all the way down, stopping just at his chin, but sticking out about an inch from his face. He smells of stale smoke and, sure enough, moves every so often to the smoking carriage for another cigarette, returning each time more pungent than the last. The Dutch family across the carriage from us have also brought a picnic, but seem to be regarding us with curiosity and talking about us as we eat ours. We ignore them, read the Paris guide book and listen to music. The toilet on board is clean, but we find it disconcerting that there is a hole in the floor of the cubicle, which is large enough to create a strong upwards breeze, felt when one stands at the sink. The journey ends at around 2pm, as we pull into le Gare du Nord.
To be continued...