Amsterdam in Prose

Providing the text to readers who have already seen the pictures is a bit like supplying cereal to children who have already eaten the peanut butter. But here goes:

Last Friday we rented a car--a Mercedes no less--and thundered up the Autobahn to Amsterdam where we met up with our quandam New Haven comrades, the Harrells (we thundered a little less after crossing the Dutch border, fearing Holland's ubiquitous hidden speedtrap cameras). One of the great pleasures of our visit was how well we ate, and the fine dining began almost as soon as we arrived. In the course of a weekend I developed something bordering on an addiction to Dutch cheese.

I should say about the drive up that it took about five-and-a-half hours, and that Katharine howled the cries of the damned for at least five of them. But the exceptional thirty minutes--spent spotting cows on the Dutch countryside and lustily booming hymns a tutto volume--was as stirring an experience as any I had in the middle weeks of July.

The girls loved staying with the Harrels. We stayed on the top floor of their three-storey apartment, whose wonders call forth effusions of foreign adjectives: accogliente, comodo, bequem, grosszugig, etc. (Ben, it turns out, has gone and become important; in rare leisure moments he hits "reply all" to the New Haven elders quorum missives that relentlessly come his way.) Every night was something of a family sleepover. Even more marvelous than our living arrangements was young Ashley Harrell, whom Eli hailed as a peer and Julia adopted as a protege. My memory of Ashley in New Haven is of a toddler not to be trifled with--and I still wouldn't recommend it--but on this trip she was as gracious a hostess as the girls or we could have asked for, sharing toys with liberality and warmth and submitting meekly to Julia's repeated successful efforts to pick her up. Ruth and Ben are loving and imaginative parents who have implemented a program whereby Ashley receives marbels in a jar for good behavior, with the reward for a full jar being a date with her daddy. (Needless to say we have since copied them.) Kate Harrell, on the other hand, provided a second infant for Eli to persecute; her three-year-old heart brimmed over at the prospect.

Saturday morning we breakfasted lavishly and then were off to see The Windmills. On the way, I made a lot of very funny Don Quixote-related jokes about windmills and having forgot my lance and whatnot. Lia laughed so hard inwardly her eyeballs began to roll in circles.

The windmills were wonderful. It's really great when iconic images deserve their status. It took a while to draw the girls' attention away from the ducks and goats and other farmyard friends who lazed about contentedly in surrounding fields. Eli tried unsuccessfully to pounce on four different ducks. She's sure she'll catch one some day. When the girls did finally notice the windmills they were duly impressed.

So were we. We even got to climb inside one of them, stand out on the landing and breathe the Netherlandish air.

Just before this, I was coming back from the car where I had gone to fetch some money to pay for our self-guided tour of the windmill's bowels. Julia and Eli saw me coming and Lia gave them permission to run and meet me half way. Before the halfway point, however, Eli carefully stretched out on her back and lay directly across the middle of the path. German tourists grumbled about the indignity of the spectacle; Asian tourists took snapshots; and the Italians stepped over her with consummate panache. Pas d'Histoire, they might have said--if speaking French were not impossibly disagreeable.

After The Windmills we had Dutch pancakes for lunch--a tasty shotgun marriage between the pizza and the crepe--and then went back to the Harrell Hotel (HH) for naps. In the afternoon we rode into Amsterdam proper and took what the Germans would call, with an elegance characteristic of that most non-Italian of languages, a Stadtbummel through the museum district. It was no small pain to walk past the museum's that house the jewels of Rembrandt and Van Gogh without entering them. But allowing Eli to go within a hundred meters of such treasures would constitute a disservice to Western Civilization for which I might expect to give a terrible account in the day of cultural reckoning.

Plus our time was limited. We boarded a nameless boat--which we naturally christened "The Brain of Pooh" (see the chapter "Piglet is Almost Entirely Surrounded by Water" in The House on Pooh Corner)--and took a tour of the much-canaled city with its more than 1,300 bridges. Amsterdam is a fascinating city and the tour was a fine way to see as much of it as a very short visit would allow.

We returned "home" again for a hearty dinner and then counted down the minutes until the kids went to bed. Actually Ben and I took a triumphant trip to the grocery store where we bought the ingredients for a Schwarzwaldtorte (Black Forest cake) that Lia made the next morning.

With the kids safely in bed we grown-ups set about the serious business of talking, which Facebook has not yet banished into desuetude. As the hour drew toward midnight, it was discovered, perhaps providentially, that Lia had never played the Nintendo Wii (I had played it once, only just elevating me from cave-man status). This gap in Lia's education had to be remedied soon. Ben had everything set up in a matter of seconds.

I trounced Lia in tennis. With boxing she seemed uncharacteristically aggressive and made short order of laying me low with a technical knockout (I bounced back with a real KO after a closely-fought second match). Then Ben and Ruth joined the fun with a series of rounds of Mario Kart.

Now Lia is the unqualifed most gifted and remarkable woman I have ever known or expect to know. Her talents are legion and known to all the world. So my surprise was all the greater to discover from firsthand observation that Lia may be the worst Mario Kart player in the history of this and other universes. She may be worse at Mario Kart than any unfortunate mortal has ever been at anything. Ever. During her astonishing streak of 12 consecutive last-place finishes (not technically finishes, actually; the computer never let her complete a race)--Lia last with no one second-to-last--Lia drove off the designed course and into meadows and mountains, over precipices and waterfalls, and backward against oncoming traffic with such staggering and relentless consistency that the rest of us were convinced that this was the ruse of a master driver displaying her virtuosity through a dizzying display of unapproachable badness. This was Kirk Cheney intentionally missing every question on the CFA; this was Max Hall throwing five interceptions in the Utah game . . . . Surely such exploits could never come about by accident. I went to bed (after midnight) and dreamed tormented dreams about nightmarish family vacations during which Lia drove us into the Grand Canyon and over Niagara Falls.

On Sunday afternoon we accompanied the Harrells to their English-language ward in Leiden. It was really nice to hear services in English again and to experience the warmth and faith of that tiny branch. Sacrament meeting attendance was sparse, so I deemed it a fine opportunity to pull out all the stops during the hymns. It was a very moving experience to sing "Come, Come Ye Saints" in farflung Leiden shortly after Pioneer Day. I also made up for lost time by making a zillion comments in Sunday School (inspiringly taught by Ben) and Elders Quorum. I pity the New Haveners who will have to endure my commentatorial classroom deluge when we return to our native land.

A funny thing happened on the way home from Church. Ben went through a changing light in front of us, and with my congenital caution I stopped. I then proceeded to turn right against Lia's advice that I go straight. We drove three kilometers in the wrong direction before making a U-turn and heading back toward HH. Then, penitently following Lia's advice this time, I took the wrong freeway entrance, driving eight kilometers in the wrong direction this time before we could correct our error.

Readers of this blog know that there is nothing at all unusal about our getting lost twice in the course of a thirty-five minute drive from a Church to a house. What made this adventure special, however, was that our rental car was fully equipped with GPS, a device designed, one had understood, to make getting lost impossible. With us, however, the notion of such a navigational impossibility had more the ring of a challenge than of a promise. And this was one challenge we triumphantly accepted. (We did, however, follow GPS religiously and successfully on the way up to Holland and on the way back to Frankfurt.)

After Church we had a lovely chicken terriyaki dinner (I'm not sure it should be called terriyaki, but it was wondrous good in any case) followed by Lia's Black Forest Cake--which doubled as Julia's second birthday cake, since our preparations for the trip to Europe kept us from getting a proper cake for her the month before (a dereliction that was, needless to add, my fault). Properly stuffed, we headed home, thundering back down the Autobahn in the frenzied hope of making it home by midnight. Unlike Cinderella, we beat the clock by a couple minutes. It was a wonderful weekend.