Yet I know it's true that visions are seldom all they seem

[austin_dern]

Our first morning in Amsterdam brought the sad news that whatever problem it was kept e-mail from being received and ssh from working wasn't a transient glitch but something that persisted through the day. (Well, Outlook was allowed through.) After all the running around and activity of the past week, we did something novel for us: slept in past breakfast. We wouldn't make many more breakfasts this trip, it turned out.

The obvious thing to do if one's in Amsterdam and has our quiet tastes is the Anne Frank House. We wandered over in late afternoon, using a considerably better map of the city that the hotel desk clerk --- who also serves as bartender, apparently, as the bar's most of the front section of the hotel --- and found the line was roughly eight weeks long. So we went to a bar nearby to get something to eat. Uncharacteristically, I had a beer (I believe the waiter described bunny_hugger's as ``not good for you''); more characteristically, we got a plate of cheeses (aged, according to the menu, and delicious) to snack on.

By the time we were done, the church nearby the tavern and the Anne Frank House was chiming. Or, so it looked. Actually, a guy in a boat on the canal beside it was playing a one-man musical show with the array of trumpets, drums, miniature automated organ --- he was flipping fanfold sheets in and out swiftly --- and letting the spire's chimes play out songs to match his tunes. He also coaxed the clock-keeper to poke his head out the tiny window there, so the gathered crowd could applaud him. This, he would tell us, was a once-a-week show, intended to go only fifteen (or so) minutes, although he ran long as he did some extra songs, and what do you know but we happened to be in the right spot and the right moment to catch it?

But by the time it was done the line at the Anne Frank House was even longer, reaching back into Germany, so we decided to look to other things.

For example, I saw a sign for the Tulip Museum and the promise it was only a modest distance --- I want to say 100 meters --- away. Could we resist? Should we? This was not, it turned out, a major, important museum. This was a gift shop with some efforts to looking upscale. The shop was free; the museum was three euros, knocked down to two euros because they were doing some construction.

For all that engaging are-you-kidding tourist-trap nature the museum did a sincere job at being a legitimate museum, including a film on endless loop talking about the history of the tulip, starting from Mongolia and going by way of Inspired-By-Terry-Gilliam-Animation up to the Holland stuff. A chandelier of cardboard signs showed all kinds of tulip varieties and cultivars and talked about where they came from anyway. There were even helmets with which we could inhale deep the scents of tulip or other flowers which, prior to that experiment, we would have said were odorless or near enough. And the tulip vases ... the started with the logical, and then got into the purely artistic or the fanciful and before long there's a little Delft tank.

As we looked at a map showing Other Places Tulips Are --- Albany, New York, has an annual tulip festival, and the map identified Albany as apparently one of the boroughs of New York City; they also tried to identify Holland, Michigan, which is almost as much a Holland-based theme park as Amsterdam, apparently, but missed that, too --- the woman who'd been working the register asked bunny_hugger to fill out a survey about the museum. One of the questions was about the museum's value; since it came in almost as cheap as kaassoufflés it'd be hard for that not to be worth the money.

Less expensive yet, since it was free, but a better value only because we were able to get some free samples, was the ``Cheese Museum'', which as best we could tell was actually just a ``Cheese Shop''. I'm not going to protest strongly folks who give us free cheese samples, though, including ones like the wasabi cheese that I'd never buy without sampling a good bit first.

We did a fair bit of pondering the ways of life in such a canal-heavy city. Many of the buildings --- some of them going back to the 17th century --- were canal-front, after all, and small boats were lining the canals the way cars might line the streets. Cars did line the streets, in fact, including coming dangerously close to the edges of the canals considering there's no curbs. We watched one car parallel-parking into a spot on the canal bank and on an incline where we just kept picturing the whole car going off into the drink. It didn't. We have no idea how. We're also not sure how it is drunks aren't spending about two-thirds of their time falling into canals, but that sort of thing doesn't even happen in Andy Capp anymore.

Around this point we gave up looking for particular things and went to just wandering around, which is how we got into a Delft shop, packed from head to toe and in several rooms and several layers with stuff I was terrified to look at too quickly for fear it might break. bunny_hugger found a lovely little rocking-horse figure small and probably not vulnerable enough to risk taking home with us.

Another shop we found was entirely Christmas stuff: ornaments, lights, tinsel, trees, all the miscellaneous things you might use to spruce up a December, which was no less wondrous for it being early July. It was a wonderful shop and I'm sorry we probably won't be seeing it in the proper season, not least because they had a five-foot-or-so tree decorated not with ornaments but with dolls. And not ordinary dolls: mermaid dolls. I do not understand what would motivate Dutch people to decorate a Christmas tree with mermaid businesswomen, doctors, soccer players, soldiers, or the like, but, wait a minute, a mermaid soccer player? How would that work? I mean aside from being goalie.

As we explored the city we aimed for the area of the flower market, which is again as it says on the label. Here it's a set of canvas-tent stores by the side of a canal; the stores look like reasonably permanent fixtures, and were choc full of bulbs, seeds, flowers, and all the miscellaneous stuff for decorating yards and lawns. After considerable thinking about it bunny_hugger bought a package of assorted tulips for her mother --- they had specific racks for the United States and Canada market, with a medical certificate or the equivalent so that, we supposed, customs would let us through. I offered to carry it in my suitcase so if any trouble developed it'd be mine, but bunny_hugger set them in her suitcase and I nearly forgot them afterwards.

We needed a bathroom, and went for the traditional method: finding a McDonald's. We saw two McDonald's on adjacent corners, which turned out to be the same McDonald's with two street front exits. We sincerely intended to use the bathroom and get something to snack on, maybe to drink. However, we didn't end up finding anything we really wanted to eat, and the desire to get something to drink faded with the use of the bathroom. (However, we did pay the 30 euro-cents charge for the bathroom --- well, I paid; bunny_hugger had gone into the bathroom while the attendant was busy mopping the floor. I'd put in a 5 cent piece by accident at first, and she corrected me, and I found the 50 cent piece I thought I had put down. I worry the attendant thought I was trying to cheat her, but probably, she sees many more people getting mixed up about the small versus large change things.)

We did also briefly consider going to a movie, since The Pirates: Band Of Misfits was playing and we hadn't had the chance to go together-if-separately when it was playing in the United States. (I did get to it in 3-D, myself.) There were posters for it, in Dutch; we were curious whether there might be subtitles, and if so, in English or in what? So we skipped that.

We also were there to see a fleet of People On Segways roam past on what I took to be an organized Segway Tour. Also we passed a Meijer hardware shop, which bunny_hugger knew I'd point out and giggle about, which is fair, as she was about to too. This was clearly unrelated to the Meijer discount department store chain, as it didn't have public bathrooms as far as I know.

For dinner, again, we didn't find any particularly Dutch restaurants, but the street our hotel was on was packed with quite a few places to eat, and we went to a Chinese restaurant comfortably familiar in the non-buffet model. This also means we ate at more Chinese restaurants than any other kind of restaurant, with the exception of ``what the hotel has to provide breakfast for''. There weren't fortune cookies, which were an American importation from a loosely Japanese idea anyway.

Sadly, the e-mail blackout continued, although I could check my gmail account by going through the web site.

Trivia: At the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games a new Olympic Flag, sewn by Korean women and from Korean raw silk, made its debut. The previous flag, the Antwerp flag, had been first flown in 1914 and at the Games since 1920. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Imprisoned In A Tesseract: The Life And Work Of James Blish, David Ketterer. I did not know that shortly before his death, Blish's wife had coaxed him (a rock-and-roll unenthusiast) into some appreciation for Yes. (This would be before Trevor Horn's contributions to the group, of course.) Also I admire Ketterer's endearingly mistaken efforts to insist there's something interesting about The Warriors Of Day or The Night Shapes, or that there's any way to understand what the heck The Duplicated Man is all about.