Ketchup and Fries

I have to figure out how to smile when I pitch.

I’ve got some catching up to do. Friday before last one of the members of the club who works for the trains here acted as my free pass and tour guide to and around Amsterdam. What a deal!

“I’ve heard you went to Amsterdam?” and look me in the eyes and grin.  I think they expect me to blush. My answer is honest and usually the same. “I really enjoyed the Van Gogh museum.” And to be clear, it is definitely not the “Van Go” museum. It is pronounced like the Spanish conjugation for “they go” and “Ho,” like Santa Clause except the “H,” in the beginning and end of the word is pronounced by closing you epiglottis slightly until there is some friction. This is one of the easier adjustments! But I digress.

“At 26, unemployed and at a complete loss,” begins one of the informational paragraphs at the ground floor of the museum, “Van Gogh decided he would become a painter.” There is hope for me yet!

As you walk through the museum you are taken though the periods of his life and his growth as an artist. It is amazing to see how his style, skill, and subject matter changed based on where he was living and how his life was. I noticed this especially when I turned a corner into a new gallery and thought to myself “God, that looks drastic.” The gallery was dedicated to the time he spent stuck in a hospital before epilepsy led to his ultimate end. It was in this room too that I had a pretty cool revelation. It is interesting sometimes to look at Van Gogh paintings from different distances and find out at which distance they look the best. While I was doing this, I stood four feet away from a painting of a man and a  women sitting and working in a candle lit evening and thought to myself, this is where Van Gogh once stood. That was unusual interactive experience.

After three hours there, it was well past time to eat. I had my mind made up before I left Meppel that I was going to try food from Suriname. We road bikes that we had rented to a huge market that extended probably 800 meters (that’s almost half a mile) down a street where we found a Indian/Suriname food place. The food was really tasty, chicken in some sort of curry, with potatoes, green beans and some kind of flat bread. I don’t how authentic the Suriname flavor was, in fact it just tasted like Indian food, but it was good and gave us the rest and fuel to move on. 

At the market I bought probably the one thing I miss the most from summers back home: a nectarine. It was good, slightly better than thinking you are drinking Sprite through a straw and finding out its just carbonated water. It did the job. From there it was on to the Dam, a central square in front of the royal palace where many people meet and sit on the steps below a big sculpture of something I forget.  But come on, it’s basically just the entrance to the Red Light District. 

(This is the part that puts the grin on the faces of my hosts when they ask me about Amsterdam.)

 The Red Light district during the day on a Friday is a funny thing. Walking down a cobblestone street between a canal and buildings that in their old age have started to lean over you, you hear several types of English being slurred or bellowed or both . On the ground level of these buildings there are three types of places:  “Coffee Shops,” windows/strip clubs, and businesses that cover all the other tourists’ needs: French fry vendors, hostel entrances, bars/restaurant/cafes, and French fry vendors.  Walking by a coffee shop is like walking though a bong. Imagine the smell of roasted beans at your local coffee shop, multiply that by ten and make it weed. Outside the dimly lit shops, there are loungy patios by the canal where I expected to hear wild philosophical conversations about nothing. What I heard was ruckus soccer chants and drawn out comparisons of the crazy stories from the night before. 

“I have never seen so many women that want to have sex with me,” is the second part of my reply when I am asked about going to Amsterdam.  But I’m sure they just as soon do jumping jacks and whistle the theme song to the A-team.  There are every different type of women there. Think about all the types that you can think of, now invent four more. It was an interesting time, but this was the PG tour with a member of my club.

After the Red Light District we headed back to the Dam where we were just in time to see some of the royal family entering the palace and to get selected to help with this street performer’s show:

After a long day it was brownie, train, lights out.