RICK'S BIG TRIP page 3 If you get email from me, I’m probably sitting in this internet café, in the center of Utrecht. You can’t see it from the low angle of the photo, but it’s a great big room with probably 200 work and play stations. When the place gets packed it’s not a pretty picture: hot, stuffy, limited elbow room. The Borg: cybernetic units maintaining our electronic stations. Of course, most of us are just desperately seeking human contact over the wires. It’s painfully ironic.
Lessons in Dutch living: You don’t want your bicycle to end up like the one on the right. This one happens to be in Amsterdam, but it could be any town in the Netherlands: busted up bicycles are lying everywhere, some of them still chained to bike racks. This one’s actually in pretty good shape – it’s still got most of its parts. The misshapen front wheel and missing seat are usually the first things to go. I’d say the saddle bags here will be next, then possibly the handlebars. I bet the generator could still be used. In a few weeks this will be a rusting piece of scrap metal. There must be a public service that eventually picks these things up (here in Holland where everything is quickly brought under control)…but I don’t know – I see a lot of very old scrap metal laying around.
When I got back to Utrecht from Amsterdam, what did I see? Someone had made a creative/destructive project out of my bicycle – actually Busse’s bicycle that he leant me. It retrospect, it was foolish the way I left it there, like a sitting duck alone in a rack, right around the corner from where the junkies hang out. You see it’s still chained to the rack, but turned up on end. The handlebars are twisted around and of course, the rear wheel is sticking way up in the air. I carefully unlocked it and removed it from the rack, then I had a terrible time trying to turn the front wheel back around. A couple of ladies passing by, seasoned Dutchwomen, stopped to help – and still, with their Dutch expertise, it was surprisingly complicated. Finally, I got the thing ridable once again, took it home and after some tweeking and taping got the headlight working again. What a hassle! But I learned my lesson – from now on I park this thing in the bike stall. 75 Dutch cents a day is about 30 American cents well spent.
Hey look, it’s the Dom Toren a couple hundred years ago, looks about the same. Utrecht’s Central Museum (In Dutch that would be Centraal Museum) is putting on an exhibit of old scenes from Utrecht, and that’s pretty much how they look – pretty much the same, but no bicycles or cars in those days, lots of heavy lifting, and all the people have those funny-looking old fashioned clothes on.
Since we’re on the subject of Utrecht’s greatest landmark, the Dom Toren, here’s another shot, this time taken from the great tower, looking down. That’s right, I paid 10 guilders to climb up the ancient little stairwell round and round all the way to the top. “Where did you feel that, Rick?” In my thighs. You see, the cathedral tower (i.e., dom toren) used to be connected, like any proper cathedral tower, to the cathedral. But then – I think it was early in the 1800’s – some massive storm just wiped out the entire connecting branch of the Cathedral. Instead of rebuilding it like the Catholics do with those old venerable buildings, these Protestants just patched it up and left the tower standing. What you see here, looking down from the tower – with the tower’s shadow cast upon the old church cathedral (the Dom Kerk), is the gaping wound from that reconstruction: a big, flat bricked-up wall where the old extension of the church used to be.
During my stay in Utrecht, someone crafty fellow built a sand sculpture of Old Utrecht, starring of course the famous Dom Toren. It stood proudly behind a protective railing, right in Utrecht’s modern shopping/Central Station complex, the Hoog Catherijne. The same week, plans were announced by the city officials to ignore the city’s long-standing unwritten building code, and actually build (modern, ugly) buildings that are taller than this time honored landmark. Oh beloved Tower of Utrecht! What has become of Thee!
Here’s an idea of summer fun. You know, the city’s got some kind of fun council busy at work trying to dream up neat things for the bored city inhabitants to do. So they brought in a few zillion tons of sand and – just for one weekend – had a few games of soccer on the beach, even though Utrecht is nowhere near the shore. Novel, eh? It attracted a handful of spectators.
Fun’s over: This is the massive project of hauling all that sand away. It really is quite a handful when you pile it all up like that, but I’m sure it was well worth the fun. Why don’t we do that up in Idyllwild sometime? If we ever get a town council that’s the first thing I’ll bring up.
Do you know what I really love about Europe? Not soccer on the beach, or even high buildings. What I love is all these stone streets. This is a typical pattern they use. It’s so much nicer to walk on stone than that nasty concrete and asphalt we always use in the States. It’s so cozy. [Is that how you spell “cozy” in American? This computer I’m using is spell-checking in the Queen’s English, so I’m a little bit lost.]
I know, you’re saying to yourself, Rick you’re in Holland – aren’t you getting stoned out of your mind? What about all that high grade marijuana and those mushrooms and peyote? Well, I’ll get to that. Here’s a typical “head shop,” catering mostly to tourists (if you go into one of these places likely as not they start speaking to you in English before you open your mouth). You can see all the cool trippy mushroom Buddha products available. I think that’s even a mirrored ball overhead…
But what is in the center of it all? (This is for Jamyelese) Look! It’s one of those wiry head-scratchers that feels so neat as it scrambles your brainwaves. I’d buy one right away, but I know where I can get one of those back at home.
Holland: land of light. Visually, Holland is pretty monotonous. After you’ve seen a few fields and a few streets with houses, you get the color scheme pretty well: fields are green, towns are red and grey brick. The weather is usually grey, and when the clouds part, the Dutch come out in droves to worship the rarely seen sun. Sound dreary? Well, what this setting does is it makes the play of light in the sky all the more fascinating. The Dutch love light. They have big open windows, and you know their favorite painter Vermeer? His paintings are all about the play of light on various surfaces. This photo is the Old Canal, the Oude Gracht, at sunset. Sunset, by the way, lasts about two hours up here in the north. It’s not like down in California where you blink and it’s all over. And it’s at sunset that the light finally comes through, under the cloud cover. Incredibly luminous.
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