A set of articles covering our long weekend trip to Amsterdam with Leger Coaches in 2001.
Each article can be accessed by clicking/tapping the seven photos below. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Showing posts with label amsterdam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amsterdam. Show all posts
Wednesday, 25 March 2020
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Clogs, Cheese, Canals and Crispy Fried Duck...
19 August 2001. As we attempt to draw the Netherlands weekend to a close in one entry brought to you by the letter "C", we start off in a clog shop in Marken.
The tools of the trade are there but not the clogger himself as Marken is still acting a bit like a ghost town.
There are rows and rows of freshly caught clogs hung up waiting to be smoked in the time-honoured tradition... hang on... it's what? They don't have the shelf space? They are waiting to be painted?
Now at one time my dear old dad taught me how to apply shoe polish. Using a soft brush you dipped the bristles into the Kiwi tin and then using gentle circular motions of the hand, brushed the polish into the shoe leather.
You then took a slightly stiffer brush and vigorously scrubbed and buffed the shoe until the shine dazzled your eyes. Then you took a duster and repeated the buffing until you had to either draw the curtains or turn the lights off in order not to hurt your eyes. This occurred every single morning.
I'm ashamed to say that the last time I actually polished a pair of shoes that way was probably some time in the early 1970s... But hey! How easy do the Dutch have it?!? A coat of Dulux and an annual application of varnish and there you are! Permanently sparkly shoes and with an image of your choice!
Well, to be fair windmills featured quite a lot... The only downside would be the clatter as you walked down the street and not being able to visit mill towns in the north and villages in the south of England in the summer without being given some bells, a stick or a hanky and being dragged into some loony dance where fearsome men with antlers strapped to their heads attempt to poke your eye out or knock your hat off with the stick or dust the fluff from your ears with their hanky!
Even the coach driver was getting spooked at there being so few people about - we left Marken and headed for Volendam, stopping on the way at another clog factory where someone demonstrated chopping logs into footwear and I got engrossed with a cheesemaid...
This could have been scary - I still hadn't forgotten the dancers stabbing Barbara Parkins with pitchforks in Alistair MacLean's Puppet on a Chain - but I made her put her pitchfork down...
And so, on to Volendam, across a causeway with the sea on both sides of the road. Volendam is another of the places where traditional dress is worn by the locals - just not when we were there...
It was picturesque, it had lots of tourists, lots of shops and a tiny, tiny corner of beach.
Our guide Chris, found a suitable bit of headgear and as we drove back out of Volendam for a meal in Amsterdam she got Peter, the driver to wear it. The looks on people's faces as we drove past them were priceless...
We ate on the floating Sea Palace Chinese Restaurant in Amsterdam and an excellent meal it was too. This floating eatery boasts 800 seats but we were told that unfortunately on the day it opened to a full house, it started to sink as it had been designed to cope with the average weight of Chinese people not tubby westerners... Whether this is true or not I'm not sure because I couldn't find anything about it with a quick search through Google! But a good story none-the-less!
From the restaurant we went onto barges for a tour of the canals at night. There were a couple of snags. One: it started to rain heavily. Two: it wasn't yet night. The idea had been to view the canals whilst they were all lit up with electric lights along their length, but the firm had double booked and we had to go whilst it was still light...
However, once the rain stopped, the sun came back out for a while and we had a brilliant sunset and a rainbow too, to enhance the view over the harbour with the venerable Grand Turk looking wonderful in the golden glow given to it by the low sun.
Towards the end of the trip, during which we had demolished several bottles of wine, we passed the Skinny Bridge. Our last major Amsterdam landmark.
Thursday, 5 August 2010
Stealing Bikes and Buying Love
18 August 2001. We are still in Amsterdam. We have been exploring on our own for a while but are now joining the rest of the coach party.
Our rendezvous point is the restaurant where we shall have our evening meal. Ben's Bar. When we get there, there are already a few familiar faces from the coach milling about. We get a drink apiece and wait for our guide Chris and the rest of the folks.
We sat in a corner of the restaurant by a window that is only just out of sight to the right of the photograph above. On the left of the photo and directly opposite us over the canal are a few bicycles, chained against the railing. We were kept entertained throughout the meal by the antics of various tea-leaves, who were put out at the presence of chains, but who proceeded to remove wheels, seats, handlebars and any other bits they could before one persistent chap came back after having already taken the saddle. He produced a huge bunch of keys and tried them patiently until he finally was able to hoist the frame onto his shoulder and set off, accompanied by a rousing round of applause from the restaurant...
It started to go dark and an air of expectancy crept over Chris's party. She was about to lead us through Amsterdam's notorious red light district! She warned us against taking photographs. Although a quick visit to Google images will show that taking photos can be possible (you'll have to do your own searching - I'm not providing any links!) apparently both cameras and photographers have been known to be thrown into canals...
I didn't risk it. Although this could be because Fran didn't let me stand still for more than a second and also because shortly after spying a rather delicious form in a window lit by red fluorescent tubes, I walked straight into a crotch-high bollard and thoughts of making a transaction suddenly didn't seem as appealing... The rest of the group did however find it very funny...! There were very many windows, most of which were occupied by a comprehensive assortment of women. All ages (over 21 most if not all), sizes, shapes and colours were there. Dressed in lingerie, some were miserable, others bored and others enticing. Some could have been supermodels, really beautiful girls. The coach picked us up and delivered us back to the hotel. Then a "men only" optional trip returned for a couple of hours. I wasn't allowed. In fact Fran maintained a firm grasp of my ear throughout the evening...
Now I know... The lack of photos may be a disappointment! So my final offering for the 18th of August 2001 is this. It was done just to illustrate this entry. The research I've had to do to produce this has been exhausting... And as I'm sure I've mentioned before on this blog - I'm rubbish at drawing people!
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
Walking the Canals of Amsterdam
18 August 2001. Our guide, Chris, has left us to our own devices for and hour or so and we try to make sense of our map and head off along the sides of the canals to try to find the Anne Frank house.
The canals of Amsterdam are extremely pretty. Tour boats ply up and down them constantly and houseboats are moored along their length.
As a backdrop Amsterdam's unique narrow houses stand - though not altogether entirely upright. Amsterdam is a little like Venice. The houses are built over the water on wooden piles. If air gets to those piles - in years when the water level drops - then the wooden piles start to rot and the result is as you can see here. Buildings suddenly become lean-tos...
We found the Anne Frank House. Anne and her Jewish family hid in extremely cramped quarters in this house during WWII from 1942 until 1944 when they were found by the Germans and transported to the concentration camps. Her diary, kept until a couple of days before they were found, was published after the war. Anne herself died in Bergen-Belsen two months before the war ended. Only her father Otto survived.
We thought we were lucky to see no queue coming out of the door, but then we noticed the sign that pointed to an entrance around the side and that did have a queue. So much of one in fact that we reluctantly decided we didn't have enough time to wait.
Walking around in the heat was hard work! We found a bench beside an old inn of 1695 whose piles had been exposed to air at some time causing them to start rotting and making the place lean. Here we sat for a while with a drink cooling off.
We had walked past a canal crowded with boats so close you could literally walk across from one to another. A huge floating stage area had been set up and technicians were building light gantries, testing TV cameras and one chap was interviewing a young girl in jeans who suddenly let fly a stream of operatic melody totally out of keeping with her dress... Good set of lungs...
We also saw, though weren't too tempted by, the Cannabis Connoisseurs Club and The Hash, Marijuana, and Hemp Museum!
And everywhere there were the bicycles. Sometimes heralded by bells. Sometimes heralded by a warning shout. Sometimes accompanied by a scream of agony. Why do they not have brakes? Very strange! We did have to wonder how you would ever find your own bike amongst the huge numbers of chained or abandoned bicycles.
But all it takes is a small piece of individuality!
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Tour of Amsterdam
18 August 2001. If you have been following the Amsterdam weekend entries, you will know that we have just left a diamond house where I left with a diamond chunk I hadn't paid for. It was never going to make the trip home and indeed, as soon as I got outside and checked the end of my finger, it had fallen off with virtually no chance of finding it.
The wider a building the more expensive in the 17th century. So consequently all buildings are very narrow and somewhat tall. This means that the space available for staircases is very limited and they are certainly not wide enough to carry furniture up and down four storeys, so houses were built with a hoist at the top so that furniture could be swung up the exterior and in through a window.
Some of the houses were built leaning forward so that furniture didn't attempt to enter a window on a lower storey than it should... It is said the old Amsterdam wives would hoist drunken husbands up this way but then forget to swing them into the building until morning when they had sobered up... Ah yes... the old Flying Dutchman story...!
The Begijnhof began in 1346 when the buildings around this green were endowed for Catholic women who wanted religion but not the strict life of a convent. There were some habits they couldn't do without obviously...
The old church is still there and the only surviving wooden house in Amsterdam can be found on this square.
Leaving the Begijnhof, we walked down a street with a few paintings by the Old Masters displayed on the walls. This is in fact a roofed gallery with free admission and the subjects are Amsterdam's most important citizens, or at least the richest, as they had to pay for the privilege of being depicted in these large group portraits which were painted by Rembrandt, Hals and other great painters of the time. It is known as the Civic Guards Gallery.
And so we came to Dam Square with the Royal Palace and trams. Amsterdam is a city of bicycles. They are everywhere - 600,000 bikes for a population of just 800,000. When the other 200,000 want to ride a bike they simply pinch one. Bicycles can be bought more cheaply than a lock...
Some roads have bicycle lanes, meaning they may come from the opposite direction you would think. When crossing a road you must make certain to look, because the bikes, of course, are silent and usually ridden at speed and the majority of them, for some near-suicidal reason, have no brakes... We saw several near misses in the course of just this one day! Here our guide, Christine, leaves us to find our own way about for an hour or so and we are armed with a map and the intention of finding Anne Frank's House.
Meanwhile we are in search of a loo, Dad refusing to use the handy street conveniences...
Monday, 26 July 2010
Diamonds Are Forever
18 August 2001. You may remember we were on a canal boat trip in Amsterdam.
There are two coach loads of us on this holiday and we take full capacity of the boat.
The Amster Hotel is where royalty and celebrities stay - rooms cost several zeroes more than ours!
There will be plenty of time later to wander around on our own and it is those shots of canals and houses that are better than the ones taken from the boat, which were through glass and also from a very low viewpoint. We also have a night-time cruise to come when all the bridges are lit up with thousands of bulbs.
The boat drops us opposite one of Amsterdam's many diamond houses. Diamond cutting was introduced into Amsterdam in the late 1500s. They've been at it for a long while and many of the diamond firms offer tours which explain the cutting and polishing process, so that you understand exactly what it is that they hope you will buy.
There are some spectacular pieces on display - and no doubt far more spectacular diamonds to be seen on demand should they think you a serious buyer.
I saw a glint on the floor and licked a finger. It was a piece of "diamond dust", about 3 x 0.5 millimetres. Not the easiest thing to see if it hadn't been for the bursts of colour reflected off the corners and edges. I showed the store's guide and he was quite happy for me to keep it. It of course fell off my finger as soon as we got outside... Ok, form a line! Chris is about to take us on a quick walking tour of the city before leaving us to our own devices for a bit. See you next time!
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Weekend in Amsterdam
One of the set of web pages that was lost a while ago when my Freeserve-hosted pages disappeared following my jumping ship to another provider told the tale of a weekend trip with the coach firm Leger.
We took quite a few trips with Leger before we discovered aeroplanes and always had fun with them. This trip was with an early digital camera and therefore photos were small - I saved most at 320x240 resolution only. That means they have been digitally enlarged for this series of articles and may be slightly less than my usual quality.
17 August 2001. We are all up at some unheard of hour in the morning for our third Leger trip after a couple of weekends in Paris. This time we are heading for Holland and the beautiful city of Amsterdam. "We" are: myself, John Burke, wife, Frances and my Mum and Dad, Evelyne and Allan. We arrive at Blackpool Tower 15 minutes early at a quarter to five in the morning to find the coach already waiting for us.
Several hours later at Dover we wait to board the ferry to Calais. The crossing takes one and a quarter hours but clocks go forward one hour on landing in Europe! (This means the return trip "takes" only 15 minutes!)
18 August 2001. Morning already?!? It had been a very long day yesterday! We are staying in the Carlton President hotel in Maarsen, about a half hour drive from Amsterdam. The rooms have full bath and separate shower en-suite facilities and the pay TV channels must be kept away from the children...! We had a brief coach tour of the city with Chris our tour guide. She was a bit of a bundle of fun our Chris... In fact a couple of years later we ran into her again, leading another set of tourists onto a coach that we were already on in Italy and she came to sit with us, claiming her own group were far too serious and boring... (whatever you think of me, dear readers, you have to admit I'm not that...)
The building above is the royal palace on Dam Square. You can tell from the elevated camera position I took this from the coach...
The coach drops us by the side of one of the many canals and we traipse onto a boat for a tour of the canals. More on this in the next entry as, for now, it looks like Miss Franny wants a quick forty winks. Also in the next entry I find a diamond on the floor of one of Amsterdam's top diamond houses and am allowed to keep it. To come in further episodes: I suffer pain in a rather sensitive spot during a trip to the Red Light District (if that doesn't make you come back nothing will...) and we applaud the tenacity of a bicycle thief!
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