Green Amsterdam

 

Arriving back in Amsterdam straight from Antwerp my plan was to leave my things with my new Airbnb host and go straight out to the afternoon smilonga in Oosterpark. It was another lovely day. The city had a buzz. Compared to Antwerp it felt alive. Seen from the bus I caught at Centraal station the NEMO science museum looked like part of a ship with what seemed to be a garden built upon it. I felt at home. Not knowing much but on this the third trip to the Netherlands since August, having the basics of navigation and orientation by bus, bike or train.  That sense of independence counts for a lot.  Not having that sense, nearly twenty years ago in Munich meant feeling trapped.  Being able to get around was one of the reasons - another being lower crime rates - that I felt more at ease in Amsterdam compared to my first ten days in Buenos Aires when I walked everywhere.

North Amsterdam was green with reeds, canals and lagoons. I saw some tiny, hut-like houses and many allotments. It was hard to reconcile with Ben Coates' view in Why the Dutch Are Different:

Dutch gardens, although they seemed to be smaller than British ones were not generally neat and trimmed but had a cultivated wildness about them that I liked but which might be called messy in the UK. I remember a neighbour in Scotland tutting over another neighbour's lavender which, like ours, fell over their own path.  What a mess that is! she said looking over the fence.  Admittedly the poor lavender looked bedraggled after rain.  But I liked the smell of as our legs brushed past or when we reached down to rub our fingers along the flowers and smell them.  Life is made of such lavender moments.

The community project, Het Groene Dak (green roof) location of the Tuinhuis milonga, with its larger, linked gardens was like that too. The project has been going for twenty years.  Everyone I spoke to agreed that the Netherlands was a small country with a water problem, then and now and a lot of people and that there was a true sense that nature had had to be tamed for that to be possible but the people I met all enjoyed nature, gardens and the natural world.

I was staying quite far from the centre between the Oostzanerwerf and Kadoelen neighbourhoods in north west Amsterdam. It was one of the few Airbnb spots left in Amsterdam for that night.  It is near Het Twiske, a park and lakes where I think I was told you can swim.  It reminded me of my friend Laura, host of the Tuinhuis milonga saying she had gone swimming in the deep, clean Maarsseveen near Utrecht. Swimming in lakes seems relatively normal in the Netherlands. It used to be in Germany when I was a child. Here, in UK though you would be called a wild swimmer, part of an alternative community, transgressive, bending, often flouting the rules.  How different from Switzerland.

In Amsterdam, there was no time to charge my phone but remembering what the kind stranger had said, not having it made me ask for directions. Talking to people boosted my confidence, knocked after the Antwerp milonga.  It made life so much nicer. The Italo-Japanese couple I was staying with had a bike business and were going  to lend me a bike. I was lucky that Akiko accompanied me by bike to the free NDSM ferry across the IJ.  It docks by Amsterdam Centraal station. She was going to the flea market on the north side of the water.  You’ll have to remember the way back though, she said. The route did not seem straightforward but her confidence in me was fortifying. Just remember 'Molenwijk' (a large store) she said and you’ll make it back from there. First I had to learn how to pronounce it. On the way she told me interesting things about Japan and that she and her partner had specifically chosen Amsterdam because it was a tolerant, English-speaking city and that they were able to stay here due to a recently discovered ancient accord between Japan and the Netherlands dating from a time when the Dutch were apparently one of the only western people the closed Japanese society would trade with.  She said that even now, as a mixed race couple socially it was easier for them to live here than in Japan.  I also heard the lovely news that they were expecting a baby! 

The sketch shows my plan on how to get from the NDSM ferry to Oosterpark only some 5km away; admittedly not much of a map but rather more than I had had to get from Antwerp to northwest Amsterdam. 

I had noticed several times on the ferry, how few people had their heads buried in their phones as is usually the case in the UK wherever strangers congregate.  Most were chatting.  A local café, 'Delicious',  in Perth has the sign featured in the header photo.  The Brits need to be told to look up, out of their phones! But sure enough, this does happen in this café in a way it doesn't in other establishments despite that Perth is a reserved place.  Snobby say Dundonians, ignoring that Perth, though almost blindingly white is what might be politely called socially diverse:  police crawl every street in the town centre on a Saturday night.  The cafe is small and people acknowledge one another. All ages drop in to sit in or take-away. Over, say, a quick bowl of their very good soup - costing less than a large coffee in other places - you might well exchange a few words. You are almost expected to hear - Dutch-style, I suppose - snippets of local news: the Forth Bridge is closed, the owner's holiday plans, the weather for the weekend.  Another reason you do is that mercifully there is no piped music, or if the radio is on, it is very low. 

Once across the IJ and on my own again I saw a lady also on a bike with what looked to be the sort of rollable bike paniers I had been looking for - the kind you can turn into luggage for a trip or into a shopping trolley for town. At some lights I tried perhaps over-optimistically to ask about them. The lights changed, we set off but I realised she thought my gestures had meant I was telling her something was wrong with her bike. After several minutes of farcical confusion we struck up a mobile, friendly conversation in on her side Polish-accented Dutch and English on mine. Since I do not speak Dutch I was surprised how much I was able to understand. She did not speak English either, having grown up during the Soviet domination of Poland.  She had moved to the Netherlands several years previously, learned the language and loved it here. What I had taken for rollable paniers was in fact some other kind of wheeled trolley she had picked up for a song at the flea market. With the conversation I lost track of the way but she said to follow her and we parted pretty close to the park.