I’d never had much desire to visit Amsterdam.
Like Prague, Amsterdam is one of those “must-see” destinations that every study abroad student seems determined to visit. Which means, of course, that most of what I’d heard about Amsterdam had come from – you guessed it – college students. And although I had heard plenty of stories, not a single one had mentioned, say, the breathtaking works of the Rijksmuseum.
So, when my friends Molly and Michelle asked me to come with them on a whirlwind tour of Belgium and Amsterdam to see sights of the vegetative kind, I hesitated. It wasn’t until they clarified that they meant touring the Netherlands’s famous tulip fields that I decided to accept.
As it turns out, we never made it to the tulip fields. But, to my surprise, the ensuing voyage ended up becoming one of the most enjoyable, entertaining, and unforgettable trips I’ve ever taken.
Over the next few updates, I’ll take you through the canal-lined streets of this bustling city … review my favorite sights and sites … and share some of the memorable moments that made me fall in love with this maddening, mirthful city.
***
There are too many vowels in the Dutch language.
We had just descended from the train at the main Amsterdam station, and, suddenly, I had become one of those gawking tourists who stand in the middle of the milling passageways, staring up with a dead-cow glaze in my eyes and gaping like a cuttlefish.
Signs with arrows pointing every which-way were all around us, and a parrot squawk burbled from the intercom, and I couldn’t understand anything. And my usual Latin-based linguistic logic couldn’t apply here. Did that word that looked like it was spelled haaternoëgft mean “exit” or did it mean “do not enter – hungry lions ahead”? And how on earth did one pronounce it?
Worst of all, I felt grubby. The girls and I had just completed a three-day stint in Belgium, and we had emerged into the Netherlands thoroughly sated with chocolate and lace. We were well into “travel mode” at that point, which meant that we dutifully jumped out of bed when the alarm rang and layered our clothing until we resembled millefeuilles. It also meant we had been sleeping in hostels and living out of a backpack for the last several days.
Hence my gaping-glazing trance. Fortunately, Michelle (unlike I) had the situation under control, and with her Let’s Go! Europe in one hand, she scrutinized the listing of departing trains, finally pointing decisively towards a long string of vowels that ended with the word Haarlem.
“That’s where we’re headed,” she said. “It leaves in five minutes at track five.”
A train? To Haarlem? The orchestra of my mind trilled a jazzy riff, and the dulcet voice of Ms. Ella Fitzgerald began to warble the sweet, sweet sounds of Duke Ellington’s famous tune.
“Track five to Haarlem?” I asked. “Are we taking the A-train?”
The comment rewarded me with a blank stare from both girls.
I swung my backpack over my shoulder and trotted along after Michelle and Molly, singing that ol’ jazz standard under my breath: “You must take the A-train to go Sugar Hill ‘way up in Harlem, ba do bah de ya boh boh boh boh …”
I had been discovering, through this trip, that I enjoyed not being the navigational guru. Of the three of us, Michelle was definitely the organized (and non-directionally challenged) one. I had been quite content to follow her lead, look around at the sights, and not pay any attention to where we were going until we arrived at our destination.
We had only a minute to spare after buying our tickets and steering our way through the teeming station. The train pulled from the station as we lugged our backpacks into an empty compartment and sat down. The inner city flashed past us as we exited Amsterdam and emerged into the green, cow-filled meadows of the Netherlands.
Haarlem was about a ten-minute train ride from the main Amsterdam station, and the first stop outside of the city. And so we waited, clutching our bags and waiting.
Ten minutes passed. And then fifteen. And then twenty.
The girls and I looked out the window. The surrounding countryside didn’t appear to be getting any more populated. Did the Dutch count time the way creative people did? Was five minutes Dutch-speak for a half-hour? Was there really a town called Haarlem, or was this all a big joke?
A rattle in the hallway alerted us, and a blond Dutch man pushing a snack card made his way past our compartment. Michelle flagged him down and we breathlessly asked him where we were, and how long it was until Haarlem.
He looked at us and cocked his head. “Do you want to know where you are?” he asked, bemused. “You are in Utrecht! Haarlem is the other way!”
Now, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t a catastrophe. It wasn’t even really an inconvenience: anyone who’s driven with me knows that, fifty percent of the time, I end up going the wrong way of wherever I’m supposed to be going.
But, when your clothes are dirty, your stomach is queasy from too many waffles and chocolate, and your shoulders hurt from lugging clothes (and hair dryer and Let’s Go and …), and a blond Dutch man tells you that you are in Utrecht … it is a little humerous.
The train pulled in to Utrecht about five minutes later, and by the time we ran around the quay and got onto the other dock, we had to wait another ten minutes before a train heading back to Amsterdam came by. (We checked and made certain that it was headed back to Amsterdam.) Forty-five minutes after that, we arrived in the hamlet of Haarlem … right as all the little stores closed and the bus lines shut down.
So, our first lesson in Amsterdam was a very important one: always make sure your train is going the right way before you get on it. Especially if you’re headed to Haarlem. After all, as the great Duke Ellington once wrote:
If you miss the A-train,
You’ll find you’ve missed the quickest way to Haarlem …
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