Taking the train to Utrecht was a slightly frustrating affair - the new St Pancras departure hall is an amazing affair, and now beautifully restored (though I wasn't impressed with lamps in the ceiling being lit in full daylight). I also got to Brussels in very good time, though a quarter of an hour late: the problems began with that. After waiting in a queue for half an hour, I managed to get my money changed, but by then I'd managed to miss a train and I only got to Manon's about ten to ten. This was late enough that I'd missed the first three (starter) courses, but she'd very kindly held back the mains until I'd arrived and eaten the avocado mousse and tea-smoked duck breasts in salad that had formed the second and third courses. The tea-smoked duck was particularly interesting - it was wonderfully juicy, and had a very hard-to-define flavour, one that slipped away from your tongue just as you felt you had got it. Which, of course, meant that I had to have another bit to see if I could identify it this time. Or the next. Or, er, until the venison with a chocolate and red wine sauce showed up, the sauce bittersweet with the very high-cocoa chocolate Manon had used, and the venison wonderfully rare. Should I mention the eggs? Or, rather, the chocolate eggs, since Manon had blown them, then filled them with some rather creamy chocolate and praline. Extremely good! We all ended up helping with washing up, and then we all (Manon's in a band, and her bandmates came) sat or stood around and sang and played until about two in the morning. Great fun! Even if it did mean I got up about ten, and didn't leave for Amsterdam until about three the next day.
I got to Amsterdam, found the right tram line, guessed at the fare, got on the thing, and then texted Barry to let him know I was on my way. It was at this point that he phoned, apologetic, to say that due to Benazir Bhutto being assassinated that afternoon, they'd had a pretty crazy day at Radio Netherlands, he'd completely forgotten I was coming, and that actually I'd be better off meeting him back at Utrecht and then going to Den Bosch (or s'Hertogenbosch, as it is on maps) since that's where Caroline and Billy were, and that's where he was intending on staying the night. Which I was completely okay with - the novelty of getting on the top deck of a punctual and inexpensive train has still not yet palled - and when we got to Den Bosch, Caroline's parents' house was lovely, and I had a great meal and an excellent opportunity to catch up with Barry and Caroline. I also got to stuff my face on three different (and very good) kinds of cake, and watch bits of the TV version of The Phantom Of The Opera, which made me appreciate Maskerade even more.
In Amsterdam I wandered up and down a good deal, looking along the canals, trying to find things that the Rough Guide promised but were shut/not there. It was great just wandering, though, despite the cold wind, since I ran into a pair of musicians at the edge of the old Jewish quarter playing Christmas tunes with some real swing, as well as more traditional klezmer tunes. It definitely made me look forward to the Post-Hanukah Hopkele! The only thing I went into (apart from a café) was the Church of Our Lord in the Attic. This dated from the time when Catholics were allowed to worship, as long as the church was not visible as such from the outside. In this case (and in several dozen other cases in Amsterdam, none of which survive), the ground and first floor of the house are completely normal, and then the top three floors hold a chapel, complete with organ, three levels of seating (it's rather like an anatomy theatre), an altarpiece cunningly painted to make it look like the sky, and with a collapsible pulpit. Joost van den Vondel, the Dutch equivalent of Shakespeare, was a Catholic, and there was a very interesting portrait of him on the wall - a rather beak-like nose and a steady gaze that suggested a short manner with fools. Other interesting things: the nativity scene with a shepherd playing on a set of bagpipes plainly made (you could still see the legs on it!) out of one of the flock that gambolled round his legs, and a wooden image of the Virgin Mary standing on a crescent moon and crushing the serpent of evil, with the Christ-child in her arms, and a crown mounted above her.
Looking toward the Nieuwe Kerk from the west.
The next few days were spent going backwards and forwards from Taboe Tango to Manon's flat, and I'll only note that I found yet more instances where the Dutch way seems more sensible than the British one. For instance, late at night most of the traffic lights just go to blinking amber all the time, and you just shoot straight across the intersections, keeping a look out for headlights as you go.
After Taboe finished (and we'd spent most of the last day tidying up, I might add - a milonga was promised, but not delivered!) I went along to EKKO with Manon, as she'd agreed to make snacks for the evening there. It was very interesting working in a large kitchen (with similarly outsized pans, for instance), making an enormous onion, cheese and broad beans quiche which actually turned out quite well with Manon's help, though I should have put a bit more stock powder in. It was equally interesting to watch Manon, with a finger in most dishes, or frying meatballs in two outsized frying pans at once while keeping an eye on the quiche, or reducing Dutch ketchup (an interesting item, clearly influenced by Indonesian tastes) to a syrupy sauce for the chicken satay. We tried a milonga, with mixed success, to some of the music, but then settled down with some of Manon's friends for some very interesting chats. On one note, one of Manon's friends had no idea who the four Apostles were; something which seems to me culturally problematic given a lot of the last two thousand years of art and history in Europe. Although if the following picture is what they always get when they go along to church, confusion is perhaps warranted:
The Nativity scene in Utrecht Dom. From left to right: Ms King, Prester "Piccaninny" John (since when was Africa east of Palestine?), and Gandalf the Gay.
The museum where Manon works part-time as a guide is fascinating: basically, it covers most forms of mechanically produced music from the carillons of the 18th century through to clocks which play tunes, musical automata, barrel organs, fairground organs, dancehall organs and pianolas (one of which has three real violins inside). There's some crazily complex stuff in there, and following the path of technological, decorative and musical change was completely absorbing. The music storage system goes from cylinders of metal disks through to metal and wooden rollers with studs in to punched cards, while the mechanism changes from bells and drums to including organ pipes, entire pianos, then fiddles, accordions, saxophones. The piano and accordeon were the best visually, since the keys (and bellows) move when the tune is playing, despite no-one at the keys. According to Manon, the best kind of pianola rolls were recorded by live artists - for example, Rachmaninov. You could also get pianola rolls with only one part of a four-hand piece, so you could play one set of hands while the computer (er, piano!) played the other. That mental slip is illustrative - punched cards were an important part of early computing, starting with mechanised looms in the 18th century, and only really being superseded in the 1960s.
I also got to grind an organ, this one in fact:
I can report that it makes a glorious sound. We danced a tango to one of the large dancehall organs later, our only audience a security guard via CCTV.
The centre of Utrecht really is beautiful, mainly pedestrian with the roads made from long thin bricks set edgeways into rammed sand. At one point I saw a working barge unloading supplies next to the cellar door of a restaurant - here, unlike Amsterdam, the canals are several feet below ground level. And I saw a wonderful shop, prominently displaying half of my new favourite word, "bookwinkel", which means 'bookshop' but just makes me think of getting books out of a spiral bookshop with an enormous pin:
The most useful shop, though (apart, maybe from the cheese van selling cheese at probably 60% of UK prices), was the Drop-Inn. Drop is Dutch for liquorice, and this particular shop sold sixty different kinds. I got these big plastic-wrapped screws of salty liquorices for the family, sweet liquorice for the flatmates, some DZ (double salty, pretty lethal) for myself, and counted myself very happy.
What also made me happy on the way back was the way the security guard treated me when he scanned my bags: something looked suspicious, I dragged out my electric toothbrush, this was found acceptable, and I continued on my way. It was a far cry from the security theatre present at St Pancras where I wasn't allowed to take my coffee into the departure lounge. The idea that terrorists could use binary liquid explosives to blow up anything has been thoroughly discredited, and anyway, I'm drinking the damn coffee! I'd love to know which explosive you can both drink and detonate - it would certainly make suicide bombers more difficult to spot. The Belgians didn't care that I was taking a bottle of Evian onto the train, which is exactly what the British should be doing.
After being scanned at the British end, only a sympathetic security guard and a quick lie about needing it for my job stopped my Leatherman from being confiscated; this means that if someone dangerous did want to take a locking knife onto a Eurostar, they just need to pretend to be an IT consultant. It's easy to get round this measure of security if you're even minimally motivated, therefore why bother with it in its current state? All it achieves is to get the French hopping mad when their Opinels get confiscated on their way home. I saw the bins full of knives at the checkpoint, and there must have been hundreds of pounds' worth in there.
I am very interested in buying Luc Arbogast's CDs (I read some of your comments about using PayPal for this). How to find him on PayPal. Were you able to purchase his CDs? Appreciate your help.
ReplyDeleteYou have a lovely blog.