Tag: europe

Amsterdam #6: Surprise and Delight, with Bonus Soundscape

I had one solid day of fantastic sonic stimulation, documented below, but there were many other days full of surprises. Amsterdam is great for this kind of thing–everywhere you turn, it seems, someone is pulling some odd stunt or staging an experimental something or showing off his/her lifelong obsession.

It’s the kind of vibe that makes this such a friendly city to pot-smokers. (I mean, in addition to the very fact that you can buy the stuff with ease.) You know that feeling when you’re high, and you feel like whatever you’re looking at/listening to/eating must surely have been designed just for stoned people? Well, even if you don’t–Amsterdam is like that all the time, even if you’re sober. Everything seems to have been put there to surprise and delight. (Unlike some cities, where you feel like everything has been put there to make you feel put-upon, stressed-out and unwelcome.)

I write a guidebook to Amsterdam, but honestly, it’s not the best way to see the city. Yes, there are a few things where it helps to have a guide to check the opening hours and how to get there on the tram. But Amsterdam shows its best parts only when you wander along aimlessly and poke your head around interesting corners, into odd museums, into appealing bars. You never know what you’ll see. Or hear.

The first bit is totally missing the beauty of Yoko Seyama’s work In Soil, at the Nederlands Institut voor Mediakunst. I am a sucker for any art installation that involves walking into a dark room and losing your sense of space. The visuals for this don’t show up on the camera, but click the link to see one image.

The second clip is from the Pianola Museum, a “museum” that’s open maybe one day a week. (I think they call themselves a museum so they can get nonprofit status.) But it was Museum Weekend, which meant free entry.

Finally, I went out to see this random band, Bob Billy, with some friends. Immediately transported back to 1993 or so. I wish they lived in NYC.

Earlier:
Amsterdam #1: Photos
Amsterdam #2: Two Examples of Dutch Literalism
Amsterdam #3: Adventures in Croquettes
Amsterdam #4: The Good Food
Amsterdam #5: You’ll Eat What I’m Cooking

Amsterdam #5: You’ll Eat What I’m Cooking

In addition to the freelance food, I had another distinctly Amsterdammy dining experience near the end of my trip, at a restaurant with an extremely limited menu. Lots of restaurants in Amsterdam serve just one thing each night, and you either like it or you don’t (though there’s usually a vegetarian option too). I hate the tyranny of choice, so I love these restaurants. All you control freaks out there: I can’t tell you how nice it is to sit back and just say, “Bring it.”

This particular restaurant was called CousCous Club, and it serves…couscous. Three kinds–with veg, with veg and a little meat, and with veg and a lot of meat. There are three kinds of dessert too. Two wines–red or white. Oh, and three cocktails–a touch that seems positively decadent. The couscous was good and cheap, and our server was extremely sweet, which doesn’t happen very often in Amsterdam.

I ate at another set-menu restaurant, Marius, earlier in the trip. I remember enjoying it immensely, but because I also drank all the suggested wines (mmm, Saumur!), I don’t remember any of the details. Damn–I hate when I do that. But thanks to Chef Kees anyway, and to Rod and Lieselotte, who spotted me cash, even though I was supposed to be treating them. I hate when I do that too.

Speaking of distinctly Amsterdammy food situations, it was Amsterdam where I first got the idea for a supper club, in 2000, I think it was. I met someone who was going around to other people’s houses and cooking big Indonesian dinners for whoever showed, for a flat amount per head.

Took me another year to implement it back in NYC, in the form of Operation Roving Gastronome. Took me another year to realize I couldn’t make it a money-earning endeavor, even though the Indonesian woman somehow had–Amsterdam can be a little magic when it comes to money.

Then it was another couple of years later that I wound up falling into another supper club situation, as mine and Tamara’s dinners got out of control. And another couple of years till the book deal… And tonight I ate cold pizza for dinner. I need to get the Amsterdam creative spirit back.

Whee!
tilt-a-whirl

Earlier:
Amsterdam #1: Photos
Amsterdam #2: Two Examples of Dutch Literalism
Amsterdam #3: Adventures in Croquettes
Amsterdam #4: The Good Food

Amsterdam #4: The Good Food

Not to be a total downer on the food front. I did have a few amazing treats. The first white asparagus of the season–so sweet and succulent–was at someone’s house, so I can’t help you with that. But I can tell you to go to ‘t Mandje on the Zeedijk on Wednesdays at 5pm for the most amazing oysters you will ever eat.

These oysters are enormous!

Normally, I avoid anything when someone tells me first how big it is, and then later how good it is. When it comes to food, ‘large’ is almost always a bad sign. Except for with these oysters. I didn’t know they could grow that big. They were bigger than my hand.

And yes, they tasted amazing. I really like oysters, but I’ve never had an oh-my-god-that’s-mind-blowing oyster moment, one where I remember exactly what the oyster tasted like and where I was eating it.

These–I’ll remember. They’re from Zeeland, in the brackish inlets. They were sweet, almost like scallops, underneath the perfect amount of brininess. And delightfully slick, but also meaty and, due to their size, requiring a bit of chewing to get them all down.

And they cost 1.50 euros apiece. When Peter asked the guy selling them–a certain Vic van Koningsbruggen–why they were so cheap, he answered, “I want to make a difference.”


Vic also takes cheese to another old bar on the Zeedijk, In de Ooievaar, on Monday afternoons. Such a lovely atmosphere–nothing like a sunny afternoon bar, and a piece of bread with a thick slab of salted butter on it. The salt crystals glimmered like mica. As for proper cheese, there was Calvados-washed raw-milk camembert. This is the kind of thing they’re just casually eating in Europe all the time, those bastards.

Amsterdam is very friendly to this ad-hoc process of food in bars–Vic is just a freelance food dude, who likes these bars and wouldn’t mind earning a little drinking money. It’s something we could use more of in NYC. Does anyone know of people that do this? If I were in town regularly, I’d do it at a local bar. But I suspect everyone here is a little too busy with their real, important lives to do something like this on the side.

Earlier:
Amsterdam #1: Photos
Amsterdam #2: Two Examples of Dutch Literalism
Amsterdam #3: Adventures in Croquettes

Amsterdam #3: Adventures in Croquettes

The last time I was in Amsterdam, I made quite a few great food discoveries. This time…I guess there was no more to discover?

My eating despair could be summarized in my last dinner. I was staying at the Lloyd Hotel. The menu is very straightforward (see Post #1): headings for ‘Eggs’ and ‘Fried’, with one- or two-word descriptors. I used to rail against overwritten menus, but now I see they’re useful for stimulating the appetite.

I ordered “arugula salad” and “sweetbreads.” The waiter cocked his head slightly, then nodded and walked off. A bit later, the salad arrived. Two minutes later, along came a small plate with two croquettes.

I’ll pause here to explain croquettes (kroketten) a little bit. They’re wads of really thick white sauce with some unidentified bits of meat, shaped into a bloated-Vienna-sausage form, then rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried. Kids and old people put two of them on a fluffy white roll and call it a sandwich. I’ve had good ones, and I’ve had horrifying ones.

Last spring, I noticed the Spanish eat them too. I assumed they were a French thing. But I met a French woman on this trip who shuddered at the mere mention and said that in France, croquette means ‘dog biscuit.’ I surmise the kroket–croqueta link was forged back when Spain ruled the Netherlands. Maybe the various Old Master painters who went to Spain to pain for the court brought the fried nuggets back? Gastro-historians, please investigate.

So I thought these croquettes I received with my salad were some kind of comped appetizer, even though the Dutch don’t play that game. I ate them, and waited. And waited. Eventually, I realized I was full anyway, and hauled myself off to bed to digest.

I would write some funny kicker here, but it seems more accurate to leave it as is, on that fairly dismal note.

Six utterly uninspiring words:

Sausages in the train station HEMA. Are these meant to be brought as hostess gifts? This particular type of sausage was memorialized on a postage stamp recently, by the way.

Well, at least the liquorice isn’t a total loss. Hey–what?!

Earlier:
Amsterdam #1: Photos
Amsterdam #2: Two Examples of Dutch Literalism

Amsterdam #2: Two Examples of Dutch Literalism

The Dutch are very literal, practical, down-to-earth, commonsensical. Stereotyping, but what the heck–it’s usually true. I encountered several subtle examples while I was in Amsterdam. Among them:

Everyone’s cell phone’s ring-tone is “ringing phone.” That’s what I have my phone set to in the US, and I may seem like a total square, but I least I know for sure when it’s my phone ringing because I’m the only one in the whole country under 80 who thinks this is what a phone should sound like. In Amsterdam, I was reaching for my phone every 10 minutes, because someone sitting near me in a cafe was inevitably also a total square. Except there, it was normal.

My friend Adriana stopped through on a layover one day. She had flown in on KLM, and she said that in KLM economy class, the little decorative covers on the headrests say “Economy.” Not “Tempo” or some other euphemism. Not nothing at all, which is what airlines that haven’t thought up a euphemism do. “Economy.”

There was a third item, but I’ve forgotten it now. But you get the idea. This attitude can be refreshing when you come to visit Amsterdam for the first time. After long familiarity, though, it can seem a tad bleak and passionless. Especially when it creeps down into food. Which I’ll get to…

In the meantime, a rare example of Dutch whimsy: cheese slices shaped like Easter bunnies.

cheese slices shaped like rabbits

Earlier:
Amsterdam #1: Photos

Amsterdam #1: Photos

I complained on Twitter that Amsterdam is a bitch of a place to take photos. Somehow, the light is always bad. During the so-called golden hour, when everything looks beautiful, the sun is actually so low in the sky that everything around you is in darkness. And if the sun is any higher, it’s harsh. And most of the time, there’s haze or cloud cover that adds an awful glare.

But I got some good pics. And in several posts to follow next week, I’ll have a few bonus photos.

Amsterdam…the second installment

The Amsterdam Diet (TM)

I’m not in the habit of weighing myself, but after ten days in Amsterdam, I’m sure I lost weight. And it’s not an isolated incident: this happens on every trip. It also happens to Peter, who was the first one to identify this seemingly contradictory phenomenon.

Here are the apparent components of this miraculous weight-loss system:

1) Beer, and lots of it
Amsterdam, like everywhere else until the late nineteenth century, had no reliable drinking water, so everyone drank beer. Looking at the canals today, I’m still not sold on tap water. So, beer it is, with nearly every meal.

2) French fries
Or Belgian fries (vlaamse frites), as they’re called. So good, they’re twice-fried. And served with garlic mayo. Sometimes I get the satay sauce too–y’know, for protein.

3) Herring
The only remotely “healthy” thing in the diet: raw filets of this luscious fatty little fish. If you think herring only comes in pickled, think again. In the Netherlands, you can get it at street carts, served with diced onions and sort-of-sweet pickles, on a squishy white-bread bun. Carb-fearers can go bunless, but it’s harder to get all the things in your mouth together.

4) Fizzy water
OK, I lied. It’s not all beer, all the time. I take an occasional break with Spa Rood (Spa with a red label), the best fizzy water ever because the bubbles are HUGE and almost violent. And maybe they keep me feeling full.

5) Stroopwafels
Feeling low? Give yourself an insane sugary boost with a caramel-filled crispy cinnamon cookie. Then go pass out when the sugar disperses. Or you can keep the high going with a little…

6) Koffie verkeerd
Coffee with tons of steamed milk. I actually can’t drink too much of this because it gives me flashbacks to the summer of ’95, when I nearly killed myself with coffee. I worked till about 2am every day, then shot the shit with my fellow bartender, Ed Coughlin (Ed, where the hell are you?), till 5 or 6am. Then we woke up around 2pm (handily, we were sharing this totally dodgy attic apartment with no bathroom, just two mattresses on the floor and an Ikea leatherette couch we’d scrounged) and drank coffee till 5pm, when we went to work. Oddly, I was nauseous almost every single day. Then one day, I didn’t drink any coffee. And I felt great. Hey, stomach lining: Sorry I’m such a slow learner. But I think I was really skinny that summer, between all that coffee and the menthol cigarettes.

7) Whoppers
Burger King is a Dutch chain, right? I’ve never eaten so many Whoppers as I have in Amsterdam, always in pursuit of the elusive Free Whopper after consuming ten, but always misplacing my punch card. One bite of a Whopper gives me a little Proustian flashback to 1994, when there was still a flower vendor on the Leidseplein, and the weather was bizarrely hot and all I did all day was make sandwiches and try to keep my arm cast from getting wet.

Alongside this daily menu (consume in any order, in any quantity), you must do one thing:

**Bicycle everywhere.**

I think the biking covers a multitude of sins, though why biking should work better to keep you fit in Amsterdam than in NYC (where I also bike everywhere, and for longer distances) is beyond me. Maybe all those little tiny bridges add up to more effort in the long run?

Also, I think it helps significantly if you:

**Sleep until after noon.**

This way, you end up eating only a couple of meals a day, because it’s impossible to find anything to eat after midnight except for at the Texaco (which, for the record, is the only place to buy cans of Heineken in the wee hours…or did Rod say they quit that?).

You may notice that I don’t really deal with pot, which, honestly, is all anyone thinks of when you say the word Amsterdam anyway. Marijuana was an integral part of the Amsterdam Diet back in 1994 and 1995, but now it’s barely a factor. In any case, I think it’s fine to incorporate it into your plan as long as you can be either 1) so jaded about it as to not yield to the munchies (never, ever buy anything but frites from Febo) or 2) high only after midnight, when there’s nothing to eat. As for all the other drugs you think of when I say Amsterdam, they’re all of the naturally slimming variety anyway. Dancing is very, very good for you.

I can’t say I’m proud of the way I eat and drink in Amsterdam, and occasionally I do eat really good and proper meals at nice restaurants or cooked at people’s houses (in fact, there’s a whole book floating around out there with my restaurant recs).

But I can’t argue with weight-loss success. I could publish a detailed book on the Amsterdam Diet, but for you my friends, special price of free. Just let me know how it works out for you.

Fab!ulicious

Just to give you a sense of context, that’s the current motto of Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. Yes, Fab!ulicious, with the exclamation point. When has an airport ever been so cool?

And when has a city ever been so cool as on April 30, Queen’s Day? According to the Metro paper (Amsterdam is so cool, it got this fluffy daily commuter tabloid years ago, well before NYC did), more than 400,000 people came out on the streets in Amsterdam on Saturday to celebrate the queen’s birthday, the Netherlands’ biggest national holiday. That’s more than half the city’s population. Some 160,000 people came in from elsewhere on the train.

Total number of arrests that day: 60.

I don’t see something like this happening in the States, ever–and not just because we don’t have a queen. (The name of the one here is Beatrix, by the way–Trixie, for short.) But in Amsterdam, it’s totally normal for everyone from 3-year-old kids to twinkly eyed grannies to push out into the streets and canals in their best House of Orange gear and party like rock stars. I even saw a Sikh wearing a bright orange turban. (And the Dutch complain immigrants don’t assimilate enough!)

As a bonus–that is, alongside all the public beer vendors, blaring techno and disco anthems, boats full of aging rock stars playing live sets, people wearing orange feather boas and so on–Queen’s Day produces what’s probably the world’s largest yard sale. Something about vendor’s licenses (and a lack of yards) prohibits people from selling their junk on the street the rest of the year, but on this one day, it’s a flea free-for-all. Days before, people start marking out their patches of sidewalk with tape and chalk; you can practically hear people sorting out all their useless crap behind their doors.

I didn’t wake up early enough to see the good stuff, I admit (the night before is Queen’s Night, when everyone goes out to clubs)–but there was something so bizarrely heartwarming about all this optimistic commerce, even at 3pm, when the only stuff anyone had left was totally useless. And in between people selling puffy-shoulder leather jackets and decks of 49 cards and raspberry tarts rendered in ceramic were other entrepreneurs: an 8-year-old girl busking with her accordion, for instance, and a booth selling Polaroid photo ops of you sticking your head out from between Princess Maxima’s legs (Will you be the next royal child?”).

With everyone high on something, or just plain drunk or giddy, all the bizarre street action and the steady roaming around through crowds, it felt a lot like Burning Man. But, and here’s the heresy, it was better, and precisely because money was changing hands. I didn’t think I was much of a capitalist, but commerce honestly did improve the experience, and not just because there was someone prepared to sell me a super-dense and delicious orange-frosted donut or a pancake cut into the shape of a crown and covered in orange sprinkles. (Also, by the way, there was a lot of pumpkin soup and fresh orange juice being sold–because they’re, duh, orange.) Because I could choose who to give my money to, I didn’t have to accept pointless kitschy trinkets with a smile as part of a “gift economy”, as I do at Burning Man. Instead, I could laugh my ass off at some enthusiastic Dutch guy doing his best third-world salesman impression (“You buy! My friend! Special price!”) after we picked over his 1970s Dutch cookbooks and vinyl suitcases and said no thanks. We could give a euro to the accordion girl, and maybe she’d do better in the future. We could stop every two blocks and buy another beer, rather than having to schlep them on our backs all around the desert, or risk dying of thirst. We could nod sagely at the dangers of accumulating too much stuff as a woman ankle-deep in golf balls, hair straighteners, egg cups and other flotsam, wailed, “I can’t give this stuff away!” (And I could buy a perfectly decent pair of sandals from her for one euro.)

I guess it makes me a grumpy, art-hating anti-idealist, but even though I’m fond of the temporary dreamland of Black Rock City, I do like cities the way they function now–especially Amsterdam, which is almost ridiculously too functional. And even when it’s not Queen’s Day, there are enough kooks in the streets and enough do-what-you-want attitude that it’s kind of like BRC year-round. I’ve been going to Amsterdam since 1994, and envying so many things about the place all along (No working poor! Bikes everywhere! Topless women on billboards!), but I do appreciate it more after having been to Burning Man, because it’s comforting to know that this ideal place that 30,000 people strive for every September is at least partially existent over here in Europe all the time. I’m perfectly willing to carry my wallet around for that.