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Netherlands

Across Northern Europe: A Coda to Travel Love in Amsterdam

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 23, 2007

Sometimes I walk to the southeastern corner of Central Park and watch the tour buses respire tourists. I walk by slowly and try to pick up an accent or language. For a while I thought of stopping and offering to show them the city, to take them for a drink or walk through the park. But I never did.

One nice thing about New York is that there are always plenty of travelers to watch and I like watching them more than I like looking through my own photographs because they are living something current and exciting and photos only remind me I was doing that at some other time but not now.

If there is one honest to goodness reason not to go on a long trip it is because coming home is so impossible. A married friend of mine e-mailed me while I was away saying how much he still misses that time in his life – now fifteen years in the past – when he went traveling in Asia. At film festivals, after the Q&A, someone always comes up to tell me about the trip they took two years or two decades ago and still think about always.

I’ve sometimes compared travel to a dangerous drug, which makes you feel high in a new and fabulous way and then becomes necessary just to feel normal. And I think that’s true.

But just now I’m thinking that high is more like a first love.

First, with love, you find yourself with a certain kind of new-found freedom. In high school or maybe university you start to become your own person and its flush with possibility and uncertainty and innocence. And then you meet someone who makes you feel high in a new and fabulous way.

When it ends, if you’re lucky, you’ve learned something about finding the right person but certainly you’ve lost the innocence of caring so much so quickly so blindly.

Isn’t that how it felt on your first week out alone? Wasn’t it like a new kind of freedom? And wasn’t it filled in by making connections to people that were much stronger and faster than they had any right to be?

If you are unlucky, when the newness has warn off, you’re left looking at pictures. You are too jaded or scared or cynical or bored to make new pictures that mean anything.

“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the suffering of being unable to love.”

I have no idea where I’m going with this.

But its worth reminding myself that I’m in the apartment of the girl who filled up my innocence when I left home more than two years ago. The thing about love when you’re traveling is that you can always blame the road for the split. You don’t have to learn what’s wrong with being together, because itineraries split you up before you find out. So its like the magic of that first love in high school, but without the kick-in-the-gut first break-up. What a dangerous little thing.

“It’s really good to see you,” I said when we touched glasses tonight, my last in Amsterdam.

“Is it different seeing me in my real life instead of the other times when I was traveling?” she asked.

“It’s very much the same but its very different too.”

“I think its very different,” she said.

“Yes, but you are the same person.” And that hung in the air.

What I meant is that in the bar in Amsterdam with the warm red light and the white, leather benches I saw the same face I met at the World Bar in Sydney 31 months ago. I heard the same voice inflecting the same way.

At most museums and some monuments they have benches in just the perfect place. You have a very good view and can rest your legs. You don’t wait in line to sit on them, of course. You maybe mill around hoping someone will get up. Or you stand there looking at the paintings while someone else sits. And when someone gets up the bench is immediately filled.

There are certain people like this too, who when they become available will always be made unavailable by the next passerby. The passerby might truly love the view or only know that it is a good seat and they should take it. But if you ever fall in love with such a bench and then leave it to go to Asia and Europe and South America you can be certain if you drop in for a few days it will not be empty. And if you’re very unlucky that won’t even hurt because all those places will have made you almost unable to love seeing new things or unable to do other things. You’ll only be reminded that something current and exiting is in a 31-month-old picture.

That’s not hell, it’s Amsterdam.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.

Gadling Delivers an Ohioan a Dutch Delight

by Jamie Rhein on Aug 21, 2007

I ran into Greg Phelps last night. He’s the art car friend of mine based in Columbus, Ohio who gave me the heads up about the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft and the art car event weekend in Louisville that took place there the beginning of August. He just got back from traveling in the Netherlands.

“Thanks for pointing me towards that Web site,” he said. (Enthusiastically, I might add.) “When I went to the Netherlands, I read all the posts. That crane hotel was the best place I have ever stayed.” The Web site, of course, is Gadling.

Turns out, Greg read Justin’s post “Get High in the Netherlands” about the luxury hotel inside a crane that is just big enough for two people. When he got to the Netherlands he followed through on the travel tip about this unique place to bed down for the night. Greg loved the hotel and mentioned making the crane move just the way it’s described in the post..

It was neat to find out that talk around a punch bowl pays off. I mentioned Gadling to Greg when I ran into him at an art exhibit, poetry reading for mutal friends of ours. He said he was going to the Netherlands to visit his girlfriend’s family. I said, “Hey, you ought to check out Gadling’s Netherland’s posts.” We also made the car art connection since I had just written an art car post thanks to a tip from Marilyn Terrell who often passes on to Gadling gems of interest. As I wrote before, Greg’s art car ended up last year in the event Marilyn tossed to us in an email. Small world.

*This photo is one of Greg’s from his trip. I chose this one since it sure looks like Holland to me. Look for a later post on his art bike which was part of his Netherlands experience.

Across Northern Europe: The Elusive Dutch Drivers License

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 17, 2007

I met Ella, Hilde and Amber in a Stockholm hostel two years ago this summer just after they went to the Roskilde music festival. They were roadtripping from their home in Rotterdam, Holland and we got along famously. So famously, in fact, they invited me to drive south to Denmark with them in Hilde’s sister’s tiny car. It was an act of generosity, yes, but also one of convenience: I could drive.

Though all three were well into their 20’s, only Hilde had her license. Driving in Holland just isn’t so simple.

To be fair, Ella knew her way around a steering wheel, having taken several dozen lessons as part of Holland’s rigorous, expensive divers-license gauntlet.

“I was taking lessons two to four hours a week,” Ella said today, license now in hand after completing an eight-month process that took her sister three years.

But back in 2005 in a Swedish parking lot, a perfect metaphor played out for the difference between American and Dutch driver certification: It was the Dutch learner teaching the American licensee how to drive.

Though I’d been driving for nearly a decade my mastery of the stick shift was non existent and since that July afternoon I’ve often credited Ella with giving me the direction my various amateur instructors hadn’t: basically encouraging me to ride the clutch as I started in first gear. She had plenty of chances to offer advice as I stalled and sputtered and the giggling Dutch girls asked if I was sure I had my license.

Amber would like to drive too but she’s held back by a common complaint: It’s just too expensive. Before you can spend several hundred euros taking the theoretical and in-car exams you need the green light from your instructor. Typically that comes after 40 or so lessons (though Hilde’s mom had more than 60 when she finally attempted to get her license in middle age). Each lesson is roughly 30 euros, bringing the total cost over $2000.

The various hurdles are paired with a general sense that driving just isn’t necessary. Holland is biker-friendly and covered with train tracks. But still, today, it was nice to have the driving option as they headed to another music festival, Holland’s own Lowlands festival.

“When you have your license you get the feeling that you need it,” Ella said. “But really there’s very good transportation without it.”

An old van pulled up to Ella’s apartment and the Dutch girls piled in with some other friends. Though two-thirds of the trio are now street legal, they were still bumming a ride.

“Even when you have your license,” Hilde pointed out. “You still need a car.”

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Photo of the Day (7/29/2007)

by Erik Olsen on Jul 29, 2007

Here a lovely little photo from the Netherlands that caught my eye. Shot by t3mujin but without a caption or even an identifying location, I presume it is in Amsterdam somewhere. I only know (or think) it’s a Netherlands shot because the photographer has tagged it as such.

But either way, I like the simplicity of the scene, the way that the shot here is not some famous spot, just a few homes along the water, but the colors and the reflection make for a satisfying photo.

By the way: If you’d like your photo considered for the Gadling Photo of the Day, go over to the Gadling Flickr site and post a few. We’ll take a look and if we like what we see, we’ll run your pic.

Viking Ship Of Popsicle Sticks Sets Sail

by Jamie Rhein on Jul 19, 2007

On Monday night I heard a story on CNN about the Viking ship made of popsicle sticks that recently set sail across IJesslmeer lake in the Netherlands. One of our sister sites, Engadget covered this story when the ship was first completed. The hope for this ship is that it will be seaworthy enough to follow the Viking route to North America. An accounting of the project was also covered in last Saturday’s The Gazette, a Montreal paper. There is a photo of the ship as well. (This photo is a popsicle raft featured in garretsbridges.com. Maybe a post idea for our newest sister site DIYLife?)

The story behind the popscicle Viking ship story is intriguing. Robert McDonald, the man in charge of this project, was badly burned as a child and his family killed in an explosion. Afterwards, because of his injuries, he was told that he wouldn’t be able to do what other kids can do. Ever since he has gone on to prove the naysayers wrong. He writes about his life and projects on his Web site, OB Viking Ship. Come to think of it, it does seem that McDonald, an American, is unable to do what most people do which is to buy a normal ship instead of building a replica of a Viking ship out of 15 million recycled popscicle sticks with the help of 5,000 school kids. His aim is to show that what people think is impossible is possible and intrigue kids to manifest their dreams. Here’s a TV report from the Netherlands on this latest undertaking to cross the Atlantic. There are English subtitles. I love this story.