Cycling the Waterland in a Day

I suppose the easiest way to travel right now is through memory. As I do more cycling around my neighbourhood these summer days, I’ve been thinking of the cycling day trip my husband and I took in fall 2017. We took a ferry from downtown Amsterdam to Amsterdam-Noord where we rented bikes and explored the Waterland, the picturesque countryside east of the city that boasts traditional Dutch farms, separated bike paths built on dikes, and charming seaside towns.

Notice how flat it is to bike here—such a nice change from Vancouver! This excursion was an excellent and easy break from urban sightseeing.

In typical fashion, I try to pack too much into a day though (as my husband would readily attest to). Cycling from Amsterdam to Marken to have lunch, and then hopping on a ferry to Volendam, heading north to Edam and coming back through Broek in Waterland to have a bite to eat and being back at the bike shop by 6pm (and getting a bit lost on the way home too)? Yeah, we count our lucky stars we made it just before the owner was locking up. My legs were spinning like the windmills we passed.

Well, not this one. This one wasn’t spinning at all.

We saw a lot more of these modern ones, though the romantic in me was wondering where all the traditional windmills are? Are they a thing of the past?

The village in the photo above is Durgerdam, a town of about 430 inhabitants that we quickly passed through. Check out the cobblestone street (not the most bike friendly, but it certainly gives it character!)

Marken was our first stop. This small fishing village was originally an island until engineers connected it via a causeway in 1957.

The rows of green houses with triangular roofs were particularly striking.

There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing other peoples’ quotidian routines when you are far from yours. If there is an art to laundry hanging, I think this person’s got it down.

I tried some tasty kibbeling for lunch (the Dutch version of fish and chips). Marken used to be a fishing hamlet in danger of being abandoned but it’s been able to survive as a tourist destination.

The main reason we bit off more than we could chew regarding our ambitious cycling day was because we met some fellow tourists who told us you could take a ferry from Marken to Volendam. It would be quicker than backtracking to get up to Edam, and why not enjoy a ferry ride with new scenery? For those who know me well, spontaneity is not my strong suit (a friend joked with me many years ago that I had to “plan my spontaneity”). I laugh but it’s kind of true. Not so on this day!

The bikes were stored on the lower deck where there was also covered seating. I didn’t last long up here—the winds were something else! We said goodbye to Marken . . .

. . . and about 30 minutes later said hello to Volendam, of which I hardly have any pictures because we couldn’t linger long in order to reach Edam and all the way back to Amsterdam on time. And besides, Rick Steves called it “grotesquely touristy” and we believe everything he says, so that settled it.

Who am I kidding? Of course I took another photo, and I’m not sure Rick, this residential street looks rather lovely . . . maybe I’m just a sucker for canals, which reminds me, I have yet to post about Venice. Next post maybe.

Speaking of canals, Edam‘s were picture perfect. Here are our colourful bikes in the centre of town.

We took a peek into this cheese shop below—why we didn’t buy any, I don’t remember. I wished we had more time to explore this quaint town. Edam is famous for its cheese of the same name covered in yellow or red wax. Too bad we weren’t there in the summer on market day where local farmers bring their cheese into town by boat to get it weighed and measured.

Just your regular fowl hanging out by the side of the road:

Instead of hugging the water, we took a faster inland route back to Amsterdam that led us through the beautiful town of Broek in Waterland as the sun was setting. This is the town’s lake that, in the winter, becomes an ice rink.

The town is known for its extreme cleanliness. Not much was open by the time we got there but thankfully this restaurant was so we could have some sustenance for the last leg of our journey.

And then we were back in the big city to witness night cast its spell.

What places have you been revisiting in photos, dreams, memories?

The Look of Light

Before I move on to other cities from our trip, I remember I had written prior to visiting Paris that Adam Gopnik’s memoir Paris to the Moon “makes me want to pause long enough to notice the light.”

Sunrise on the morning commute

Apart from the day after we arrived when jet lag didn’t wake us until 1:30pm (!), our days were full of walking different neighbourhoods; visiting art galleries, historic sites, and monuments; eating baguettes, macarons, galettes, crêpes; ordering a café crème and deciding I DID like coffee as long as there was sugar in it; taking pictures of colourful doors and narrow streets, returning to our Airbnb exhausted in the best kind of way.

A former train station, Musée d’Orsay is filled with Impressionist paintings. Our favourite museum in Paris.

As much as I could on a first trip to Paris, I tried to pause, to really look around me, to appreciate the ordinary along with the extraordinary, the juxtaposition of old and new, sacred and secular, to follow my favourite Impressionist painters in looking for the light. Here are some of those moments.

Strolling through Luxembourg Gardens with a view of the Pantheon

Couples dance to live music in Montmartre. This scene for me captured Paris at its most romantic.

The love lock bridge is gone but that doesn’t stop people from decorating the posts of Le Post des Arts.

I could care less about the Forum shopping mall but the ceiling fascinated me.

The enchanting Notre Dame

Classic V-shaped building and wide boulevards from the Haussmann era of Paris’s city planning

This boy stopped so I could get a picture of the door but I like it better with him in it.

The light on this galette (like a crêpe but made with buckwheat flour) makes it look even more divine! One of the best things I ate.

Dinosaur meets Eiffel Tower

Backside of Basilica du Sacré-Coeur. Did you know it has a pig gargoyle?

Hotel de Sully in the fashionable Marais district

The golden hour hitting the extravagant Palais Garnier (opera house)

I have a thing for red doors, and architecture that melds in interesting ways.

A decadent visit to Ladurée on Les Champs-Élysées

If this is what Sainte Chapelle looked like on a grey day, imagine if the sun was streaming through all that stained glass.

The view from L’Arc de Triomphe is magnificent in all directions.

La Madeleine meets Calvin Klein. Unfortunately this kind of juxtaposition was a common sight.

Moonlight over the Louvre. Bonne nuit, Paris.

Paris to the Moon

When a friend found out about our first trip to Paris this fall, she said, “You must read Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon.”

Considering I love the French language (I requested a Collins French dictionary for my 14th birthday) and reading about their culture, I was surprised I hadn’t heard of this collection of essays on Paris. I had read Hemingway’s memoir but not Adam Gopnik‘s, a staff writer for The New York Times who lived in the French capital from 1995-2000 with his wife Martha and their newborn son Luke.

It was a very serendipitous read. Many months before knowing about the book, The Artist and I had booked our accommodation on the Left Bank in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of the 6th arrondissement. We/I chose it because of its artsy and intellectual heritage. This district had a vibrant café culture in the 20th century where Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and the like would think their thoughts, exchange their thoughts, and write their thoughts.

I wanted to feel a part of that, even if the area is more glam than bohemian now.

Guess where Gopnik and his wife lived during their time there? Saint-Germain-des-Prés, literally just a few blocks from where we’re staying! I basically read this book with a map in my other hand so I could follow his daily visit to the butcher and baker, his favourite walk pushing the stroller across Pont des Arts, his run around Luxembourg Gardens (using the busts of Delacroix as his reference point) and his route to fulfill un café crème or bûches de Noël craving at Gérard Mulot or Ladurée.

After reading so much guidebook-type information on Paris, it was refreshing to vicariously live “ordinary” Paris. When Gopnik mentions iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, he talks about it in the context of something unexpected, like a news story that involved a clash between an American tourist and a French elevator operator. He uses this story as a springboard to philosophize on a key difference between the two cultures (absolute professionalism versus absolute tourism). I’ll leave it to you to guess what ideal goes with what culture.

I love how Gopnik can take the simplest things—for example, an error message on his fax machine (erreur distante)—and find a parallelism with French intellectuals and politicians who flash the same message “whenever they run out of paper or ink or arguments.”

But it is his reflections that come out of raising his son in a new place that stay with me the most (and provided some chuckles).

He swam, I realized, exactly the way that after five years I spoke French, which also involved a lot of clinging to the side of the pool and sudden bravura dashes out to the deep end to impress the girls, or listeners.

Midway through the book, Gopnik confesses the real reason he and Martha packed up their New York life and moved to Paris was to avoid raising their son with Barney and all that that inane purple dinosaur represents in American culture.

‘We want him to grow up someplace where everything he sees is beautiful’ we said, and though we realized that the moment our backs were turned our friends’ eyes were rolling, we didn’t care. We knew that our attempt to insist on a particular set of pleasures for our kid—to impose a childhood on our child—might be silly or inappropriate or even doomed. We couldn’t help it, entirely. The romance of your child’s childhood may be the last romance you can give up.

(spoiler alert: life doesn’t turn out the way you plan, leading to some hilarious moments in the “Barney in Paris” chapter).

Perhaps I enjoyed this book so much because I share the author’s romantic inclinations and could picture myself writing a book like this, my own Paris to the moon adventures while sitting in a garden or café. While we’re only there a week and I have a tendency to sightsee ambitiously, this book makes me want to pause long enough to notice the light.

We love Paris not out of ‘nostalgia’ but because we love the look of light on things, as opposed to the look of light from things, the world reduced to images radiating from screens. Paris was the site of the most beautiful commonplace civilization there has ever been: cafés, brasseries, parks, lemons on trays, dappled light on bourgeois boulevards, department stores with skylights, and windows like doors everywhere you look . . . I see the moon these days from Paris because I once saw Paris from the moon.

What I Missed While Running Around Trying Not to Miss Things

“I literally ran in and out of the British Museum.”

These were the words of a friend over lunchtime at Herstmonceux Castle.

Mondays were the days all the students rehashed their weekend excursions to London. With such a short study abroad program of only 6 weeks and many of us never having crossed the Atlantic before, our weekends were packed with sightseeing adventures in the country’s capital. And weekend trips to London here and there were definitely not enough to see everything this fabulous city has to offer.

British Museum in London (Photo from Wikipedia)

Hence my friend’s comment, which I laughed at because it sounds silly to run in and out of a museum that one could easily spend a full day in, and yet totally understandable because sometimes it’s easier to step in and step out of a place just to say you’ve been there.

Turns out in her haste, she had missed the Rosetta Stone – the crucial text in deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and the most visited object in the British Museum. I guess it’s easy to miss what you don’t know is there.

The Rosetta Stone behind glass

“I’ll need to go back now,” she concluded.

I chuckle at this story but I have my own Rosetta Stone that I need to go back for in the British Museum. Except it’s not the Rosetta Stone – it’s something much less easy to miss and therefore that much more embarrassing – the Reading Room.

I even snapped a photo of the outside!

The Reading Room in the Great Court. Kind of invites you in with that stairway . . . (Photo from Wikipedia)

This gigantic dome room sits in the middle of the Great Court, a two-acre public square. Inspired by the domed Pantheon in Rome, The Reading Room is built of cast iron, concrete and glass, and the roof is surprisingly made of papier mâché. Until 2000, it wasn’t even open to all museum visitors. People who wanted to read here had to apply in writing and receive a special ticket by the Librarian to access it. Such people included Karl Marx, Lenin, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, and Oscar Wilde. How I would have loved to step into the space that Oscar Wilde sat in, studied, maybe even penned The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of my all-time favourite books.

Here’s the beauty I missed:

Panoramic view inside of The Reading Room (Photo from Wikipedia)

Sadly, I didn’t know at the time what this room was or else I wouldn’t have walked by it in my rush to see other things. Have any of you had a similar experience with a famous sight you accidentally missed out on?

I’ll leave you with some images I did manage to see:

The Egypt Collection

A larger-than-life Pharaoh bust

Aphrodite caught unawares

Replica of Parthenon in Greek collection

Elgin Marbles, East Pediment of Parthenon

The British Museum Reading Room by Louis MacNiece

Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge —
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years —
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles — the ancient terror —
Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.