Finally, after more than six months abroad, the end of our adventure was upon us. Jessica and I had spent 189 nights in 48 different rooms, but after rising from our beds this morning, we would not lay our heads to rest until they were reunited with the long longed-for pillows of our own beds back home.
But we still had half a day to kill before our flight, so we figured we might as well explore some more of Reykjavik while we had the chance.
The Church of Hallgrimur proved just as stunning in the light of morning as it had in the evening two nights earlier.
Just downhill from the church is an area known as the Neighborhood of the Gods---so called because all of the streets are named for Norse mythological figures like Odin, Loki, and Thor.
(The Icelandic letter “Þ” is equivalent to the English “th,” so Þorsgata means Thor’s Street.)
Like I said, we had time to kill.
We saw some of the older buildings in the center of Reykjavik dating back to the late 1800s. (When it comes to architecture, at least, Iceland is on the same time scale as California.) But what really stood out to us were the statues---some more explicable than others.
Behind the memorial to the Unknown Bureaucrat, we came upon the Tjornin---a serene, glassy pond in the middle of the city.
The Tjornin is famously full of birds well fed with tourist bread (though still no match for the swans of Stratford-upon-Avon). Jessica and I laughed to see Nic receive a small measure of the avian intimidation tactics we were faced with back on our way to Liverpool from Wales.
Truly, when you stare into the eyes of a waiting duck, it is the void that stares back.
Next, we took a nice stroll along the Reykjavik harbor before stumbling onto an indoor flea market that's only open on the weekend.
Wandering back into town, we spotted another statue at the top of a hill, so naturally we climbed up to see it. It turned out to be a statue of Ingolfur Arnarson, the Viking captain who first colonized Iceland and gave Reykjavik its name, which means "Smoky Bay."
From the top of the hill, we had a decent view of the surrounding cityscape. Reykjavik is definitely a city on the rise. Construction and renovation projects were underway everywhere we went.
We still had a couple hours left to kill, so we went back to the main tourist street and did some window shopping.
There was one incredibly cheesy but impressively committed Viking-themed souvenir shop, as well as a smaller but more interesting shop selling trinkets inspired by Viking culture and mythology. I bought a pack of Norse god themed playing cards, and Jessica got a pack of cards featuring the Yule Lads.
You see, Iceland doesn't just have one Santa Claus, it has 13. The catch? They're a band of impish degenerates with self-explanatory names like Bowl-Licker, Sausage-Swiper, and Window-Peeper.
If for some reason you still want to send these lovely lads your Christmas wishes, you can deposit them in a specially designated mailbox outside the shop.
Finally, after a perfunctory lunch at Subway, we picked up our bags from our host Ingi, then made our way to the pickup spot for the airport shuttle. Somewhat unfortunately, there weren't nearly as many pickup spots as drop-off spots, so we had to walk about a mile across town to the nearest one. Still, it gave us a chance to enjoy the minimalist architecture and brisk subarctic air.
We also discovered that Reykjavik has a Brewdog, the TV-famous Scottish craft brewery that we'd visited with my Dad in Edinburgh.
Keflavik is a pretty small airport, and we'd arrived a couple hours early like we were supposed to. Still, we barely made it through security before our plane started boarding. Icelandair has done a great job of attracting people to Iceland with budget prices and easy stopovers, but it seems like the airport hasn't quite caught up. The people there were perfectly nice and respectably fast, but there were just too many people in line.
In fact, it was so crowded that we barely had time to fill up our water bottles---the line for the fountains was a good five minutes long.
The gates opened on schedule, but it was well past the flight time before they’d finally gotten everyone on board. Icelandair is a good value for the price, and I'd happily fly with them again, but they don't quite seem to have their act together when it comes to scheduling.
Oh well. No harm, no foul.
We walked out onto the tarmac to meet our plane, and I stooped to touch the ground one last time before we left for good. As we buckled up in our seats, it really started to hit us that the trip was really over and we were finally heading home. We didn't know whether to be happy or sad.
The flight was long and uneventful. A nice additional perk of our stopover in Iceland meant that the return flight was a couple hours shorter than our original flight from Oakland to Barcelona. It was still a long flight---9 hours---but when every hour in the air feels longer than the last, the difference between a 9-hour flight and an 11-hour flight is huge.
Of course, it may have helped knowing that we didn't have a full day in a foreign country ahead of us once we landed.
The one somewhat unpleasant surprise was that there was no food service unless you paid. And I'm the sort of cheap jerk who would rather go hungry than pay for mediocre, extortionately priced food.
Finally, we landed in San Francisco, just a few hours after we'd left Iceland, thanks to the time zones. Surprisingly, getting back into the US proved far easier than getting out of it, and we were soon reunited with our parents at the curbside pickup. My uncle Steve---Nic and Jessica's dad---had rented a preposterously large SUV to pick us all up together with my aunt and both my parents.
There were happy tears all around, but by this point the three of us were delirious with hunger and fatigue. At least, I was. And I was too far gone to notice how anyone else was doing.
We were swept away in our big black four-wheel-drive chariot.
We were at Super Taqueria enjoying the burritos we'd been waiting six months for and barely tasting them.
We were at Nic and Jessica's house saying goodbye.
I was home, simultaneously reunited and separated in ways that were perfectly natural and yet somehow strangely new.
I was in bed---in my own bed, with my own sheets and my own pillows---drifting off to sleep, no different than any other night, as if nothing had happened at all.
But it had happened. It had all happened. We have the stories and the pictures and souvenirs to prove it.
Epilogue
It's strange to be back home after all this time, which I guess isn't all that strange. But at the same time, one of the eeriest things is just how easy it was to slip back into all the old routines.
For a while, I felt a bit like Tom Hanks at the end of Cast Away as he looked at all the untouched food on that buffet table at the airport. Only instead of food, it was stuff.
That first night back, as I was getting ready for bed, I had a groaning realization that all my stuff was still packed away in my backpack downstairs. Just as I'd resigned myself to getting it, I realized that I had a drawer full of sleep clothes and a bathroom cabinet with toothbrushes and toothpaste to spare.
Having my desktop again was nice---though it was less nice when I booted it up on my first morning back and remembered that it was perilously near death when I had left it. It would be a frustrating, hours-long process just to get it back into shape, and what I really needed to do was buy a bunch of new parts and rebuild it from the case up.
Why put so much time, effort, and money into a desktop when I'd been perfectly happy with my laptop for the past six months?
Easy: games. And laptops cost more in the long run if you use them all the time. And, and, and…
Still, one of the biggest lessons of the trip for me---apart from opening my mind to other places and cultures---was the realization of just how little stuff we really need to get by. Which is a bit ironic, considering all the cool things I wanted so badly to buy in so many places but didn't have room to carry.
Looking back on the trip, I think we did an impressive job for two introverts who'd never really done anything like this before. I'm glad we got to see so many different places, and Airbnb made an incredible difference in the cost and quality of the trip.
Our parents being able to join us one by one over the course of the trip was also a brilliant idea and an absolute blessing.
If we were to do it again, though, we'd probably do a few things differently. We'd spend more time in fewer cities. Maybe take a weekend here and there. As much as we enjoyed seeing so many different places, it was exhausting and wore on our nerves. I'd also like to try and put myself out there more when it comes to interacting with locals---though that's far outside my comfort zone. And it would be nice to see what some places look like after dark.
And we'd probably skip Lausanne.
But besides that, I'm satisfied with everything we did, even the not-so-good bits. Getting sick in the Sahara and finding ourselves homeless in Rome were terrible experiences, but they're also some of the most vivid and interesting memories of the trip.
Anyway, I guess I'm just rambling now. This story may be over, but I'm sure there will be others to tell soon enough. One thing about living out of a backpack for six months and getting by on hardly any money: it kind of changes your perceptions of what is and isn't possible.
Over the course of our trip, we saw some amazing natural wonders---from the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco to the windswept isles of Scotland. But here, on our last full day of the entire trip, we saw things to rival them all.
If you have just one day in Iceland and want to see as much of its otherworldly beauty as possible, the go-to solution is to book what's called a Golden Circle tour. Every tour company has its own variation on the theme, but as the name suggests, it involves a circular day trip that stops at some of the most iconic tourist sites within striking distance of Reykjavik. There are geysers, waterfalls, and a dramatic valley where the oldest parliament in the world once met and which is slowly being torn apart by tectonic forces.
We got up early, bundled up, and walked out to a nearby hotel to be picked up. In the van, we met some other tourists who had booked a Northern Lights tour the night before. We had considered doing the same, but listening to their story reassured us that we had made a smart decision.
They had driven for hours and hours and never seen them, getting back long after midnight and having to scrounge a few hours of disappointed sleep before getting up again for the Golden Circle tour. Apparently, there's only about a one in three chance of actually seeing an aurora on one of those tours. It could very well be worth doing if you were spending a week in Iceland, but not if you want to make the most of a single day.
In a way, traveling across Iceland reminded me of traveling across Morocco. The geography couldn't be more different, but they were each strikingly alien in their own way from what I'm used to the world looking like. Iceland is young, geologically speaking. It is still being formed by volcanic and tectonic activities, with sharp angles that have yet to be weathered down and desolate plains that have never known the touch of trees.
It's not surprising that Iceland has become a popular filming location for the alien worlds of sci-fi films like Prometheus and Interstellar.
I took almost as many pictures here as I had on Skye.
As we left Reykjavik behind us, we could see the signature plumes of steam from the geothermal vents that dot the landscape. A quarter of the city's electricity comes from harnessing these vents, as does all of its hot water, which is either pumped in from the power plants or up from the ground beneath Reykjavik itself. Visitors who don't already know this fact will certainly learn it as soon as they take a shower or run a dishwasher. That good old sulfuric twang is a dead giveaway.
As we passed near one of the major geothermal stations, we could see the water pipes zig-zagging across the landscape. The pipes look like they're resting right on the ground, which isn't far off the truth. Between the cold air, hot water, and geologically active ground, there's no way the pipes could be anchored to the surface. They'd be torn apart. Instead, the pipes rest on a series of platforms and rollers, free to expand and contract as the laws of nature demand.
Our first stop of the tour (not including a "comfort break" at a roadside rest stop) was the Kerith crater lake. The most impressive thing about Kerith is the color---the ground is made of deep red lava rock, and the water is solid turquoise. The water of the lake is actually an exposed portion of the natural water table. The water doesn't come from rain or streams; it rises up out of the ground.
With plenty of even more impressive sites ahead of us, we were given just enough time to walk around the rim of the crater and appreciate the bleak countryside surrounding it. Nic also ran down to investigate the water itself.
He informed us that it was cold.
Our next stop was a horse farm.
Iceland has its own unique breed of horses. They're short, stocky, and naturally healthy, with a rocking hairdo. They're the only horse breed allowed in Iceland, and once an Icelandic horse leaves the island, it is never allowed to return for fear of carrying foreign diseases back with it.
After learning a bit about what makes Icelandic horses so special, we got to go inside the stables and meet a few Icelandic horses up close. They were extraordinarily calm and friendly, but there was one chocolate-colored horse that shied away from almost everyone. I was able to coax it into letting me pet its muzzle. The others were impressed, and I was feeling like a bit of a horse whisperer---until a woman from our group came up and got him to come right to her. Oh, well.
Apparently, the most impressive thing about Icelandic horses, besides their cuteness, is that they have five natural gaits, or ways of walking and running. Most horses have three natural gaits: walk, trot, and canter/gallop. All horses know these three gaits instinctively; they don't need to be taught.
In addition to walking, trotting, and cantering, Icelandic horses also know how to tolt and skeio. I won't try to explain any of them---YouTube could to a better job of that than I ever could---but suffice it to say that these two extra gaits are supposed to make Icelandic horses much smoother and more comfortable to ride at high speeds.
Of course, we got a live demonstration of all five gaits, complete with a bit where the rider held a full pint glass in the air to show how effortless the ride was.
Our next stop was a "small" waterfall near the highway. To be fair, it was nothing compared to the waterfall we'd be seeing later in the day, but it was still a gorgeous scene.
Finally, right around noon, it was time to start seeing the Big Deal sights on the Golden Circle, starting with Geysir, the namesake of all geysers. (Don't ask me why they changed the spelling.)
The main show here isn't actually Geysir but another geyser named Strokkur, which erupts in a towering plume every 5 to 10 minutes.
Geysir itself sits a bit further up the hillside, but it's more of a hot tub than a geyser these days. Its eruptions can shoot hundreds of feet into the air, but it's been years since the last one actually happened. Geysir is old and tired, and its pipes are a little clogged, so it can only perform if it gets a little help from an earthquake or its caretakers. Still, at over 60 feet across, it's impressive enough just to watch it resting---a 212-degree sleeping giant.
The whole area around Geysir and Strokkur is filled with smaller geysers, springs, steam vents, and boiling mudpots. Everywhere we walked, the ground was awash with rivulets of steaming water. Thankfully, the frigid air cools the water quickly, so you don't need to worry about melting soles as long as you stay inside the ropes.
Nestled inconspicuously in a seemingly flat and empty stretch of scrubland lay the next big sight of the tour---Gullfoss, the Golden Waterfall. From the parking lot, you can just make out a sliver of the Hvita river upstream and a hint of mist rising up into the air. In what is surely a brilliantly planned piece of crowd control, the true spectacle of Gullfoss stays patiently hidden from view until you get to just the right spot on the path. Then it hits you all at once.
Gullfoss is a wild, almost otherworldly cascade of angles. The Hvita river dives sharply to the left, then even more sharply to the right, plunging into a deep rift valley that runs off at yet another wild angle.
After a bit of waiting in line, we made it up to a mist-soaked rocky outcropping in the very middle of it all. The roar, the chill, the power, the sheer beauty, even the crowds of tourists experiencing it along with us---all of it blended together into one of those transcendent moments where time fades away and your noisy mind is subsumed in pure awe.
It was, quite simply and honestly, one of the most stunning masterpieces of nature that I've ever seen with my own eyes.
Eventually, at some point, we made our way back to the van and continued on our way---to Thingvellir National Park.
Thingvellir is interesting for a couple reasons. The first is geological. Thingvellir straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the tectonic dividing line between the Eurasian and North American plates. The plates are spreading apart at a little less than an inch every year. Which means that Thingvellir (and the rest of Iceland) is spreading apart at a little less than an inch every year.
We could see this divide as clearly as the watery rift in the ground that it’s creating. The rift is called the Silfra, and if you have the time and inclination, you can actually go scuba diving in this crack between two continents. I don't really get claustrophobic, but the thought of that makes me uncomfortable. Apparently, though, the water is some of the clearest in the world.
Even more importantly---and probably quite surprisingly for most people---Thingvellir has a very notable position in political history. It is the original site of the oldest extant parliament in the world, the Icelandic Althingi. (Yes, the Old Norse word for parliament was basically "the All Thing"---the word thing originally meaning a gathering or assembly.)
Starting around 930 AD, chieftains from across Iceland would gather once a year at Thingvellir ("the Assembly Fields") to recite existing laws, debate new laws, and settle disputes. The Icelanders had no written language, so it was important for the laws to be recited on a regular basis to make sure everyone stayed on the same page.
No buildings from these meetings survive, but they were always big events. The chieftains would bring their retinues, and citizens from across the country would also come to observe the proceedings, address the assembly, or sell food and trinkets to everyone else.
The central meeting point of Althingi was called the Logberg, or Law Rock. No one knows for sure exactly where the original Law Rock was, but a flagpole marks the most popularly theorized spot.
Walking uphill to the tourist center, we were able to take in the beautiful, desolate scenery. To be honest, it made me want to reinstall Skyrim once I got back home.
The rain had picked up at this point, so we took shelter in the visitor center for the last few minutes before it was time to meet back up at the van.
Back in Reykjavik, we walked around the shopping district until it was time for dinner.
And of course, dinner was at the Lebowski Bar, where we enjoyed some delicious---albeit very expensive---burgers, fries, and milkshakes. As a small nod to our current host country, Jessica and I also enjoyed some Icelandic beer. I had a red lager, a type of beer I'd never heard of before. It was really good, like a red ale but cleaner.
Sure, it was a shamelessly tacky and touristy extravagance, but we had plenty of reason for both celebration and mourning. This was the last supper of our trip. The next time we dined, it would be on burritos in California.
A month and a half after returning to the continent from Britain, it was time for us to leave them both behind. We would be flying out of Amsterdam after lunch and arriving in Reykjavik, Iceland by dinner.
We made it, but it wasn’t easy.
The Amsterdam commuter trains took us right into the airport. We had about four hours before our flight, so Nic led us outside to see the "I Amsterdam" sign and a collection of cutely decorated elephant statues.
Back inside, we had two objectives: check our bags and get VAT refund stamps for our various purchases (or rather, Nic and Jessica's purchases, since I was too cheap to buy anything worth refunding).
We asked at the information desk and learned that the Icelandair baggage check was just upstairs of us, but it wouldn't be open for another hour. The tax refund desk was open for business---but it was clear on the other side of the airport.
Nothing else for it, we lugged our luggage across the airport to the tax desk, then lugged it all the way back again after waiting in the half-hour long line for refund stamps. As we waited, there was a bit of pain every time someone walked up to the counter and produced an inch-thick pile of miscellaneous receipts that had to be gone through one by one.
But it all went fine. We got in our steps and made it back to check-in with time to spare. And wait in another line.
Since we had already checked in online, we got to wait in a shorter line for people who only needed to check bags. The only problem was that our line only had one attendant working it, while the regular line had three. So we ended up waiting longer to check our bags than we would have if we'd been lazy and waited to check in at the desk.
Security at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol was thorough, professional and---best of all---fast. But that ended up not mattering too much since our plane had been delayed by 45 minutes.
Unperturbed, we picked up some lunch and topped up our phone batteries.
The 45 minutes turned into an hour and a half. Apparently there was a technical problem at the airport in Iceland that had delayed our plane's inbound flight to Amsterdam.
And once we got onboard, there was another delay. We’re not exactly sure, but it seems like the air traffic controller wasn’t responding to the pilots’ request for a new spot in the takeoff queue. It also sounded like they were having trouble finding someone in the terminal to detach the plane from the gate.
Finally, over two hours late, we were in the air.
En route, I watched my first in-flight movie of the trip: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I can see why a lot of people might not like it---most of the characters are exasperating or infuriating most of the time. But the direction and acting were outstanding. Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell unquestionably deserved their Oscars.
Soon enough, we were able to see Iceland from our window. Iceland's main airport sits on a barren, ragged peninsula on the far southwestern corner of the island. It was the first of many landscapes that seemed like it belonged to another world.
The small delays continued to pile up. Most of the other passengers on the flight had connecting flights to North America that they had long since missed, so we were asked to stay on the plane until they had all disembarked. Then, at the baggage claim, we waited until all the bags from our flight had been unloaded and claimed, but none of our showed up. So we got in line at the lost baggage counter, where we were informed that all backpacks were being distributed at another location on the other side of the room.
Our next obstacle was the bus. Keflavik Airport is about a 40-minute drive from Reykjavik, and unless you're renting a car, the only options are to buy an expensive bus ticket or an even more expensive taxi ride. We must have just missed the last departure, so we had to wait another 45 minutes before the next bus arrived.
At least that gave us time to pick up a snack.
Stepping out into the Iceland air was a bit of a shock for us, having acclimatized to mild late-summer weather of Holland. It was 50 degrees out, and the breeze was piercing. I love the cold, but Nic and Jessica were glad to have upgraded their jackets back in Amsterdam.
On the drive in to Reykjavik, we got to see the blasted scenery of the Southern Peninsula up close. Apparently, the peninsula is full of underground lava fields, which is why it looks the way it does. As we got closer to town, though, we could see more and more vegetation. But although this scenery looked less alien to us, it is actually more alien to Iceland. Pretty much the only things native to Iceland are arctic foxes and small scrub brush. All the other animals and trees were imported by humans for eating and building with.
Despite being the capital of Iceland, Reykjavik feels more like a low-density suburb. The tallest "skyscraper" is only 19 stories tall, and there are hardly any buildings that look older than 50 years or so. But as we would later learn, that actually makes a lot of sense.
Despite its truly rich cultural heritage, Iceland was barely populated for most of its history, and most of its populace were subsistence farmers living in mud houses. It was really only during the World Wars of the 20th century that the outside world began to pay any attention to Iceland thanks to its strategic location, and much of its modern development has only happened since then.
Anyway, the airport shuttle bus was able to drop us off at a hotel that was only a few blocks from our Airbnb. We'd made it---hungry and about three hours later than we'd hoped, but we'd made it.
Thankfully, that was the extent of our day's tribulations. Our host Ingi was happily waiting for us at his place. (The Airbnb is his home, but he has a living space in the garage that he uses when people rent the house.) As he was showing us around, he casually asked if we wanted a pizza.
"Sure…" we responded with a bit of hesitation, wondering what we were really being offered. But it was just a pizza, no strings attached. Apparently he had just ordered an extra by mistake. It was small, but there was enough for each of us to scarf a slice or two to tide us over until we could go grocery shopping.
But first, we went sightseeing.
Downtown Reykjavik is centered around a low, gradually sloping hill, and at the top of that hill is the Lutheran church of Hallgrimur, one of the tallest buildings in Iceland. Its modernist façade has a unique stairstep design that makes it look like a formation of volcanic columnar basalt piercing up out of the ground. (I thought it looked like something out of Minecraft.)
As impressive as it is, the Hallgrimur isn't actually the main church of Reykjavik. That honor belongs to the much older and humbler Reykjavik Cathedral about a half-mile away in the heart of the city's old town.
It was late, but the church was still open and welcoming. Inside, the Hallgrimskirkja Motet Choir  was having a practice session in front of anyone who wanted to watch. It was comfortably warm inside, but the singing gave us chills. This wasn't any ordinary church choir; the Hallgrimskirkja tours across Europe and boasts a lengthy discography.
Their voices filled the church with as much music as any pipe organ could produce.
Eventually, though, we had to move on. In front of the church, we found a proud statue of Leif Erikson---the “founder of America,” apparently.
We walked through the downtown shopping district, looking through windows and ducking in to see a fun variety of artisan handicrafts. Being so remote, Iceland is apparently one of the few places in Europe where local artists can still carve out a sizeable niche against the backdrop of mass-produced knickknacks.
Our main objective was to find a pair of Icelandic national soccer team jerseys for Nic and Jessica. (Iceland may not have won the World Cup, but they certainly won our hearts.) The first few tourist shops were a bust, but we kept on looking and eventually found the jerseys we were looking for.
It was fully dark at this point and high time for us to pick up some groceries and get to bed. We had a long day ahead of us---our last full day of the entire trip---and we didn't want to waste it by being tired.
On the way back, though, we did notice a Big Lebowski-themed bar and made a mental note for future reference.
Day 186: Last Day in Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum and Sweets. Lots and lots of Sweets.)
Our week in Amsterdam had flown by, and today was our last chance to cross any items off our must-see list. The biggest line item was the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands' answer to the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London. We also had a canal boat tour to cash in, as well as some more edible works of art to enjoy.
Our first stop of the day came at the recommendation of one of Jessica's friends, who had insisted that we absolutely had to try some Dutch poffertjes from a food cart at the Alberg Cuyp Street Market. A sort of fluffy miniature pancake, poffertjes can be popped out hot and fresh by the dozen thanks to a clever contraption that pours the batter into a specialized pan
We got them with sea salt and caramel sauce, and they were the creamiest, fluffiest, most delicious things we could remember tasting on the entire trip.
As we walked over from the street market to the Rijksmuseum, we stopped for coffee at an espresso bar that one reviewer claimed to be the best in Europe outside of Italy. It was just okay, at best.
The Rijksmuseum is beautiful and massive. It resembles a cathedral from the front, with its twin spires, tall arched windows, and engraved images---not of saints and martyrs, but of artists and scholars.
Inside, we ran yet again into our old friend Laocoön one last time. Note how in this depiction,  Laocoön's right arm is extended horizontally outward instead of bent back at the elbow. As we'd learned back in the Vatican archives, that means that this statue (or possibly the copy that it was a copy of) was made before 1906, when the original statue's missing right arm was finally discovered. Before then, most experts believed that Laocoön's arm had been extended in the way we see here. Given the aesthetic principles of Greek and Roman sculpture, it seemed obvious.
But Michelangelo had known better.
Four hundred years earlier, when tasked by the Vatican to reassemble the recently unearthed statue, Michelangelo could tell that the right arm was supposed to be bent. Just by looking at the musculature of the one-armed statue, he deduced that, 1) the original Greek sculptor was as much a master of human anatomy as he was himself, and 2) that the way the muscles in the sculpture's back were flexed meant that the model posing for the statue had to have had his arm bent back at the elbow. And he was right. It's like something out of Sherlock.
Bypassing the rest of the museum for now, we headed straight upstairs to the main event: the Gallery of Honor, a purpose-built grand hall exhibiting the best of the best of the Dutch Golden Age.
The museum's cathedralesque motif resumed at the top of the stairs. Light poured into the gallery's antechamber through stained glass windows venerating the great artists and thinkers of Western civilization.
The Rijksmuseum's Gallery of Honor is a brilliant idea that I think more museums should embrace. It consists of a long, vaulted corridor lined with alcoves dedicated to the greatest works of the greatest Dutch artists from the Golden Age. Even if you only had one hour to visit the museum, you could spend the entire hour here and leave contented that you made good use of your time.
The previous day, we'd been so impressed by the Mauritshuis in The Hague for its impressively manageable collection. In a way, the Gallery of Honor does an admirable job of creating the same effect in a much larger museum---it makes the unmanageable manageable.
Rather than rushing around trying to see all the most important stuff---our visit to the Louvre in a nutshell---the Rijksmuseum brings all the most important stuff to you in one easy room. Then, if you have more time, you can relax and explore the rest of the museum's fantastic collections at your leisure, free to guiltlessly explore whichever exhibits happen to tickle your curiosity.
But enough about design theory; let's get to the art.
One of our favorite artists featured in the room was Jan Steen. A natural comedian and storyteller among the Golden Age artists, Steen made paintings that were colorful, fun, and lowbrow with a snarky undercurrent of social commentary.
Many of Steen's paintings feature large families or groups of revelers, and the level of detail is amazing. His faces are brilliantly emotive, and every person exudes a sense of story. One of my favorites is Prince's Day, which shows a raucous tavern scene. There are over twenty characters in the picture, and every one of them feels fully alive and engaged with what's happening---even the barely visible couple whispering to each other in the background.
But the real punchline is a barely-there portrait of the prince hanging in the murky recesses of the ceiling. These people couldn't care less that they're supposedly celebrating the prince's birthday; they're just happy for any excuse to drink and be merry. And the primly dressed little girl looking straight out at you from the middle of the scene seems to know it, too.
It's no surprise that Jessica and I both loved the work of Van Ruisdael, the Golden Age's master landscape artist. I was particularly struck by his painting of The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede. It shows a picturesque windmill standing near a river. The nearby town is just discernible by the roofs of the local church and castle peeking up in the distance. Late afternoon sunlight beautifully illuminates the windmill at a dramatic angle, and at first the scene seems idyllic. Looking closer, however, you can see the clouds are becoming ominously dark, and the surface of the river is marked by a noticeable chop.
I may be overthinking it, but with the way the windmill dominates the scene while the castle and church fade into the background, it seems as though Ruisdael had something to say about the relative positions of industry, government, and religion in Golden Age Dutch society. Perhaps even about which way the winds were blowing, so to speak.
Another of the honored greats was Frans Hals, with his ability to create portraits that are remarkably heartwarming and instantly likeable.
And of course, there was Vermeer---the once-nearly-forgotten master of light and color whose slow and fastidious technique (along with his relatively early death) left him with remarkably few paintings to his name. As we'd learned the day before at the Mauritshuis, the Rijksmuseum has the largest collection of paintings by Vermeer in the world: four. And while the Mauritshuis has the iconic Girl With a Pearl Earring, the Rijksmuseum has some classics, too, including The Love Letter, The Milkmaid, and Woman Reading a Letter.
At least, usually. When we visited, however, Woman Reading a Letter was on loan to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. Luckily, Jessica and I had already been there and seen that.
Another particularly interesting canvas came in the unlikely form of an angrily defecating swan. The life-size Threatened Swan was painted by Jan Asselijn as a straightforward nature scene, showing the drama of a swan defending its nest from a curious dog. But that's just the beginning of its story.
Over a hundred years later, simple nature paintings had gone out of style. People wanted art to be rich with symbolism---whether or not the artist actually intended it. The Threatened Swan was therefore "improved" by the addition of allegorical labels, effectively turning it into a glorified nationalist political cartoon. The swan's eggs were labelled "Holland," the dog was labelled "enemies of the state," and the swan was the Dutch government defending the people of Holland from their enemies.
Last but not least was Rembrandt, the big daddy of the Golden Age painters. Rembrandt was a master of pretty much every genre of painting, but his trademark was large-scale group portraits. It was a mark of pride during the Golden Age for professional organizations to commission group portraits of their members. And Rembrandt had a unique talent for turning what would normally have been a dull lineup of doctors or lawyers into a lively and interesting scene.
The ultimate room at the end of the Gallery is dedicated to Rembrandt's massive Night Watch. The room was designed specifically to showcase it, and the rest of the Gallery grew from there.
Today, at least, the painting is considered a spectacular masterpiece. But as soon as he finished it, Rembrandt’s group portrait commissions immediately dried up. Whether this was the result of dissatisfaction with the painting or an unfortunate coincidence caused by an economic downturn is a matter of speculation. In any case, this painting represents the high-water mark of Rembrandt's career.
Another funny story about The Night Watch is that the name is a total misnomer. The painting's actual name is the more accurate but less catchy Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq. Due to the improper use of a dark varnish, the image became so dark that people mistook it for a night scene.
It was only in the 1940s that the varnish was finally removed to reveal the truth. And just over a month after we saw it, the Rijksmuseum began a new restoration project that will hopefully reveal even more lost details. The painting is still on display, though---it is being worked on in public, behind a glass wall that has taken over the center of the room. You can even livestream it on the Rijksmuseum's website.
Having finished our tour of the Gallery of Honor, we were free to wander the rest of the museum to see what we could see.
A nearby room on the same floor was dedicated to Dutch naval art and history. Above the door hangs a trophy that we found as hilarious as it was interesting. For everyone else, it will take a bit of explaining.
Thanks to our travels in the UK, Jessica and I were able to immediately recognize the emblem on this ship’s stern carving as the British royal crest. So, what was a piece of a royal British ship doing hanging in a Dutch museum? The bulk of the room is dedicated to explaining the story.
 In a daring raid, Dutch captain Michiel de Ruyter sailed his fleet up the English River Medway and captured over a dozen English warships, including the English flagship HMS Royal Charles. He towed the Royal Charles back to Amsterdam, where it was put on display as a tourist attraction---to the great annoyance of its namesake King Charles II of England.
The ship was eventually broken up for scrap, and this stern piece was kept as a trophy of the catastrophic embarrassment they had wrought upon the British navy.
That was what Jessica and I found so hilarious.
De Ruyter became a national hero in the Netherlands, and even King Louis XIV of France---with whom the Dutch were not on particularly good terms---honored De Ruyter just for sticking it to the English.
Another nearby room was filled with landscape paintings, including one that Jessica and I recognized instantly for its style as the work of our favorite artistic discovery of the trip: Claude Lorrain. A nearby plaque explained that, much like Claude, many of the great Dutch landscape artists honed their skills while studying abroad in Rome.
We also saw some truly insane dollhouses. Apparently, it was popular among a certain class of wealthy Dutch merchants to show off buy commissioning absurdly opulent dollhouses. The houses were incredibly detailed, with miniature recreations of real paintings on the walls. One of these dollhouses on display was as tall as a person and cost more than an actual house in its day.
And of course, once a merchant had spent a considerable fortune on completing their dollhouse, it was only natural for them to then commission an artist to do a painting of it.
One of the larger rooms was dedicated to the famous ceramic pottery made in the Dutch city of Delft.
We learned that the tremendous success of "Delft Blue" pottery industry is partly due to Queen Mary II of England, wife of William of Orange. Mary loved the blue-and-white ceramics that the Dutch were importing from China and Japan. Naturally, this started a craze among well-to-do Dutch and English women who wanted to copy her style. There were only so many imported ceramics to go around, however, so it was only a matter of time before a group of Dutch artisans cracked the secret and began making their own domestic versions.
Delft Blue pottery ended up becoming so renowned that it was even exported back to China and Japan.
There's even an artistic offshoot dedicated to creating illustrated Delft Blue tiles as an alternative to canvas paintings.
Downstairs, we saw some impressive Post-Impressionist paintings, including self-portraits by Van Gogh and his friend Emile Bernard.
Before leaving the museum, we made sure to see one last highlight of the museum---a massive floor-to-ceiling painting by Jan Willem Pieneman of the victorious Dutch and British forces after the battle of Waterloo. The painting was commissioned by the Duke of Wellington to celebrate his victory, and he can be seen in the center of the painting, illuminated with a shaft of light as if by God. But the Dutch King William I saw the painting and liked it so much that it bought it out from under Wellington and gave it to his son Prince William II. The prince is also featured in the painting, in the lower left corner, being carried off the battlefield on a stretcher.
After leaving the museum, we took another stroll through Vondelpark, which we'd visited before after seeing the Van Gogh Museum. It's a big park, but trees and canals do a nice job of dividing it into cozy-feeling sections where you can almost feel alone with nature.
It was beautiful and serene, except for one mildly horrifying sight we came upon when we had to cross under an overpass.
Our next goal of the day was to find some oliebol, a sort of Dutch doughnut hole that Nic was determined to try. We found a highly rated bakery, but we were sadly informed that oliebols are only really made around Christmas. So instead, we made do with some raspberry-redcurrant tarts that were to die for.
(Don’t ask about the potato…)
The tarts had an unusually thick, cookie-like crust. Jessica tried to wheedle the secret out of the man behind the counter, but he either didn’t know or just played dumb.
With nothing better left to do, it was finally time to cash in the canal boat tour vouchers that we'd gotten in a package deal with our Van Gogh Museum tickets and the windmill countryside tour. It's no less touristy than any of the big City Sightseeing bus tours, but we still had fun and learned a bit.
We learned that the three U-shaped canals that belt the center of Amsterdam were dug during the Golden Age, when Amsterdam’s population quadrupled in size and necessitated a major city expansion. The inner ring was for royals and nobility, the middle ring was for wealthy merchants, and the outer ring was for the working class and warehouses.
Today, even the outer ring is such valuable property that only things like banks and high-end boutiques can afford it.
As much as any of the other amazing sights, we were also impressed by how daringly close the drivers of Amsterdam park their cars to the edge of canals.
We also learned the story behind Amsterdam’s city crest---a red shield with a vertical black bar and three white X's (more formally known as crosses of St. Andrew). The red shield symbolizes the city, the black line symbolizes the Amstel river that runs through the city, and the three crosses of St. Andrew represent divine protection from fires, floods, and plagues.
The use of red and black to represent the city and the river seemed odd at first, but as we talked about it after the cruise, we soon realized that we were walking on red brick streets and looking out at a shimmering river that looked like glinting obsidian in the sunlight.
We decided to end the day with a meal at Europe’s oldest floating Chinese restaurant. Another thing we'd learned on the canal tour was that Amsterdam has the oldest Chinatown in continental Europe. (Jessica and I had already learned that Liverpool has the oldest Chinatown in all of Europe.)
Well, we almost ended the day there.
Nicolas wouldn’t be satisfied with our stay in Amsterdam until we'd had some of the churros we’d seen in bakeries and chip shops around town all week.
Venturing back into the streets, we found a hole-in-the-wall ice cream joint near the Red Light District called Sweetness. We ducked inside and soon found ourselves ordering something called the Red Light Special, which looked like a sort of churro sundae in the pictures on the overhead menu.
It wasn’t until the server turned out the lights and shouted “Are you ready?!” that we began to wonder whether we had ordered something we hadn’t intended to.
It was a churro and ice cream extravaganza, complete with red sparklers and a powdered-sugar fireball.
As ridiculous as it was, it was also delicious and just the right size for the three of us.
With our stomachs full of sweets, it was finally time for us to head home and start packing up. Tomorrow we would be flying to Iceland for a 48-hour cherry to cap off our six-month adventure. It’s been an amazing ride, and it’s hard to believe it’s already almost over.
After our heavy-hitting history tour the day before, it was high time for us to take a couple of fun, low-key day trips. The first was to the beautiful city of Haarlem just west of Amsterdam, and the second was to The Hague, known for being the capital of the Netherlands, the seat of the International Court of Justice, and for having the word "The" in its name.
After enjoying some stroopwafels in the traditional manner, we headed out for our day trip to Haarlem. Since we were staying in the suburbs north of Amsterdam, we had to catch a commuter train into the city and transfer to a regional train from Sloterdijk Station on the city's western edge. Even so, it was a very easy trip. The ride from Sloterdijk to Haarlem is only a bit longer than the ride into the city from our Airbnb, and the whole affair took around 45 minutes. If you're staying in Amsterdam itself, you could easily make a side trip to Haarlem even if you only had a few hours to spare.
We knew we would love Haarlem from the very first minutes we arrived. A bit like Bruges, it's the type of Goldilocks town that was large and wealthy enough to create some beautifully picturesque architecture in its heyday, which was recent enough for the city to still feel fresh and alive but not so recent for it to have been paved over and filled with modern skyscrapers. As Rick Steves puts it, Haarlem is the quintessential Dutch Golden Age market town.
As we wound our way through the gently winding brick roads leading to the city's church-dominated main square, Jessica and I were reminded of our time in Seville, all the way back in the first weeks of the trip.
Haarlem's main square is lined with beautiful Golden Age buildings, including the city hall, a former guild hall, and the towering Church of St. Bavo (also known simply as "the big church"). Near the church stands a statue of local hero Laurens Coster, whom Haarlemers claim invented the printing press a few years before Gutenberg. His statue is holding up a carved letter "A" with the serene solemnity of a saint holding their respective emblem.
The Church of St. Bavo is suitably grand for having served such a wealthy merchant city. Of all the churches and cathedrals we've visited on the trip, it reminded Jessica and me most of Bayeux Cathedral---big and airy, with a lot of white light streaming in from barely tinted windows.
As with many other grand old churches, we had to enter through a gift shop on the side. Interestingly, though, the designers chose to emphasize the fact that it is not an original entrance by leaving the edges of the entrance partially unfinished and making it clear that the gift shop is not actually part of the same building.
Like so many old ex-Catholic churches, the walls have been plastered over to create a smooth, light ambience. But there are a few spots where the plaster has been removed to show the original carved embellishments beneath.
The church's biggest claim to fame is its 18th-century pipe organ. It was the biggest in the world when it was finished, and it's still considered one of the world's best. It was played by Mozart at the age of 10, three years into the musical prodigy's debut tour across Europe.
Nearby, a cannonball protrudes out of the wall with no explanation apart from the date 1573 scrawled below it. Apparently, it was fired by the Spanish and lodged itself into the wall while the city was under siege during the 80 Years’ War of Dutch independence.
Another curiosity is the church's medieval brass lectern. It is supposed to represent a pelican, but the artisan who made it had clearly never seen an actual pelican in his life. As we'd learned in Oxford, the pelican became a popular symbol of Christ due to a basic misunderstanding of its biology. I can imagine someone in medieval Haarlem hearing about this new fad and rushing to create an image of what he must have imagined to be a fierce and noble creature.
A more down-to-earth exhibit stands in the so-called Brewer's Chapel in the south transept. It commemorates the lives of Daniel Cajanus and Simon Paap, Haarlem's tallest and shortest citizens, respectively. Though they did not live at quite the same time, they both lived during the period of early Modern Europe when people like them could have a lucrative---albeit horribly demeaning---career as a traveling oddity, getting paid to be put on display in royal palaces across the continent.
While it probably wouldn't make our top ten list of European churches, St. Bavo is more than worth a visit on any day trip to Haarlem.
After wandering around the square a bit more, it was time for our big appointment of the day. I know I said this was going to be a low-key, but it did have a sobering capstone all the same.
The most famous Dutch holocaust story is obviously that of Anne Frank, but another of the most well-known stories---at least among people who grew up in the church---is that of Corrie ten Boom, recounted in her memoir The Hiding Place. All three of us had read it in school, but that was a long time ago and the details had gotten pretty hazy.
The story starts with Corrie's grandfather, who moved into this home and set up shop as a watchmaker. (As we'd seen, there is still a ten Boom jeweler's operating the old storefront, but apparently it's not affiliated with the museum or the ten Boom estate.) Corrie's grandfather also established a family legacy of looking out for the local Jewish population, whom he respected as God’s chosen people and pitied for their lack of a homeland.
Corrie's father was a watchmaker, too, and Corrie carried on the family business and became the Netherlands' first female licensed watchmaker. Neither Corrie nor her sister Betsie ever married, and they both stayed at home to take care of the family and the business.
When the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis in 1940, Corrie was already 48 years old. From the very beginning, the ten Booms were dedicated to helping the Resistance however they could. They offered their home as a safe house for wanted Resistance members and ordinary Dutch citizens running from the Nazi labor drafts.
Later, as the Holocaust intensified, they opened their home to Jews fleeing capture by the Nazis---a selfless decision that would have grave consequences.
After gathering with the rest of our small tour group in the downstairs dining room, we headed up to the living room, just above the watchmaking shop. Here in this room, three generations of ten Booms told stories, played music, and enjoyed the wholesome pleasures of family life. We’ve seen plenty of Holocaust-related sights that still reverberated with evil, but this place was the opposite. It felt like the warmth of love still emanated from every wall and surface.
Corrie's sister Betsie chose not to marry because she had always been sickly and was afraid of dying in childbirth. Corrie had deeply wanted a family of her own, but it never worked out that way. She fell in love with a man once, but he ended up marrying a wealthier girl at his family's insistence. Crushed, Corrie took some advice from her father and dedicated herself to sharing her love with the entire world, not just one family.
During the war, their plan to help smuggle Jews out of Nazi reach worked for years. They had some Resistance members rig up a false wall in one of the bedrooms, with a small hiding place behind it. But in early 1944, things finally went wrong. An informant tipped off the secret police, who raided the house. That was okay; the six Jews they were currently protecting made it safely to the hiding place, and the Germans weren't able to find it.
The problem was that the secret "all safe" signal--a triangular clock sign---was still up in the dining room window. At any moment, a Resistance member might walk in and spoil the ruse.
Corrie tried to take down the sign as inconspicuously as possible, but a clever German officer noticed her and instantly suspected what she had done. He had her put the sign back where it was, then they sat down and waited. By the end of the day, they had captured dozens of Jews and Resistance members who had entered the house thinking it was still safe. Corrie, Betsie, and their now-elderly father were all arrested and sent east to the concentration camps.
Still, there was a silver lining to the storm cloud: the Nazis never found the hiding place. They knew there were Jews hiding somewhere in the house, so they decided to starve them out. They had the Haarlem police assign officers to occupy the house and wait for the Jews to come out. Â After two days, however, a pair of Resistance-sympathetic police officers were assigned to the house, and they let the six escape.
Upstairs, we got to see the hiding place itself. A hole had been opened in the wall to show just how cramped the space really was---for anyone, let alone six people at once. The actual entrance was cleverly hidden behind the bottom shelf of a cupboard.
Corrie’s father died within days of arrest. Corrie and Betsie were separated, but they both ended up at Ravensbruck, an all-women concentration camp outside of Berlin. Inside the camp, they lead illicit church services with a smuggled bible, and they never lost faith. Sickly as she was, Betsie eventually died in the camp, but not before she had shared a dream with Corrie. She'd dreamed of a huge mansion where they could minister and care for all the people who had been harmed by the Holocaust. 15 days after Betsie died, Corrie was released---probably because of a clerical error. A week after that, everyone left in the camp was sent their death in the gas chambers.
After the war, Corrie found Betsie's dream house. Its wealthy owner had had a dream of her own. Her six sons had all been captured by the Nazis. If they all made it home safely after the war, she promised God that she would donate her house to his service. For the next five years, Corrie ran the house as a refuge for Holocaust survivors. And in an act of extraordinary grace, she also opened the home to Dutch collaborators who couldn't find work or housing anywhere else in the post-Nazi world.
The rest of Corrie's life was spent traveling the world and telling her story of faith, perseverance, and forgiveness.
For a story that involved so much suffering and death, visiting the ten Boom house proved to be a remarkably heartwarming experience. I didn't have any specific expectations going into it, and I was very pleasantly surprised by how much we enjoyed it.
After leaving the ten Boom house, we walked around the town center some more, seeing some beautiful back alleys and some odd retail stores. Apparently, there's a Dutch clothing chain called Sandwich, which had proved an unexpected twist in our smartphone search for possible lunch stops earlier in the day.
There was plenty more we could have seen in Haarlem, including some very famous museums, but we wanted to keep the day as light as possible. So we eventually headed home to do some grocery shopping and enjoy an early evening…with perhaps a bit too much wine.
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The next day, we set out for a visit to The Hague---the Netherlands' unofficial capital. Amsterdam is technically the capital because the Dutch constitution says so, but all of the nation's most important government institutions, including its parliament, are in The Hague. It is also home to a fantastic little art museum.
The Hague is in South Holland, a little over an hour's ride down from our Airbnb. It's actually the same train route that we took to get to Haarlem; we just rode it for an extra half hour or so this time. It was overcast and drizzly, but the sight of the flower farms passing by was still spectacular.
The Hague isn't a major tourist destination like Amsterdam or Haarlem. There are still plenty of tourists wandering about, but like Madrid or even Edinburgh, you get the sense that the city still belongs to itself, not the visitors. Some people may see this as a downside, including Rick Steves, but I find it refreshing.
The city feels clean and restrained, with a tasteful balance of modern and Golden Age architecture. Even some of the major government buildings are surprisingly restrained. A nice-looking row house on one of the main streets turned out to actually be the Dutch Ministry of Defense headquarters.
The centerpiece of The Hague is the Binnenhof---a palatial medieval castle that has been the seat of the Dutch government since 1584. It houses the parliament, the prime minister's offices, and the Ministry of General Affairs. In US terms, that's like having the Capitol, White House, and all the cabinet departments together in one giant building.
In the center of the Binnenhof's main courtyard is a golden fountain dedicated to Beatrix, the previous Queen of the Netherlands. She’s still alive---and going by the title Princess Beatrix---but she followed in the footsteps of her mother and grandmother by stepping down once her son Willem-Alexander was experienced enough to be an effective king. It's a nice tradition that allows each Dutch monarch to enjoy a reasonably long reign at the peak of their prowess, followed by a nice retirement.
We wondered what Prince Charles in the UK thinks of it.
A few blocks away, we saw the Noordeinde Palace, one of the Netherlands' three royal palaces (the main palace being in Amsterdam on Dam Square). Like everything else in The Hague, Noordeinde is refreshingly restrained---like a miniature Versailles.
Just in front of the palace is an equestrian statue of Prince William I of Orange. William founded the House of Orange-Nassau and was one of the main leaders of the Dutch war of independence from Spain in the 16th century. He's like the Netherlands' George Washington, if Washington's descendants had gone on to rule the US after him. Around the base of the statue are plaques dedicated to the various regions of the Netherlands, and facing the palace is the royal motto Je Maintiendrai ("I Shall Defend").
But unlike Versailles, where the statue of Louis XIV faces out toward the world, Prince William is facing inward toward the palace---as if to remind the monarchy that it's their job to take care of the people, not the other way around.
Continuing on in a rough loop around the Binnenhof, we stumbled upon the embassy of Morocco, then found ourselves on the Lange Voorhout---a broad tree-lined avenue that's home to a medieval church, the Dutch Supreme Court, and the embassies of the UK, Spain, and Switzerland. As we walked along the impressive street, a royal-looking carriage procession passed us by.
We got a great view of the Binnenhof from across the Hofvijver pond, then completed our circuit as we came to the Mauritshuis royal art gallery, just outside the gates through which we'd first entered the Binnenhof that morning.
We'd penciled in the Mauritshuis as an "if we felt up to it" part of our itinerary, but it turned out to be the highlight of the day. Described by Rick Steves as a bite-sized version of the Rijksmusem in Amsterdam, it was a perfect one-hour journey through some highlights of Dutch Golden Age art.
(Peter Paul Rubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles, c. 1616 - 1617)
(Rembrandt van Rijn, The Laughing Man, c. 1629 - 1630)
(Jacob van Ruisdael, View of Bentheim Castle, c. 1652 - 1654)
(Cornelis Vroom, River Landscape seen through the Trees, c. 1638)
(Jan van de Cappelle, Seascape with Ships, c. 1660)
(Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Vase of Flowers in a Window, c. 1618)
(Willem van Haecht, Apelles Painting Campaspe, c. 1630)
(Paulus Potter, The Bull, 1647)
The museum has a fantastic collection including a ton of Rembrandts, but its biggest draw is its collection of Vermeers, including the iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Johannes Vermeer is possibly the most revered Dutch Golden Age painter after Rembrandt, but he only made a handful of paintings and was relatively unknown in his lifetime. The Mauritshuis has three paintings by Vermeer, which actually makes it the second-biggest collection in the world. (The biggest is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which has four.)
Vermeer was a master at playing with light and color. His paintings look incredibly lifelike at a distance, but up close you can see that they are actually very simple, with most of the details implied rather than drawn. In that way, they remind me a bit of the Impressionists who would come two centuries later.
As we left, we saw some panels explaining the history of the museum. The art was once the personal collection of the Princes of Orange, who became the Dutch Royal family. The name Mauritshuis comes from the building’s original owner, Johan Maurits. Long before it was an art gallery, it was Maurits’s house. Maurits was the nephew of Prince William I (the Dutch George Washington whose statue we’d just seen outside the royal palace), and he also served as the governor of Brazil for 24 years.
How did a Dutchman become the governor of Brazil, a country that is famously Portuguese and not Dutch? Like the rest of Dutch history around this era, the story involves the Habsburgs, and like any story involving the Habsburgs, it is mind-numbingly complicated. But it ultimately boils down to three main facts: 1) Brazil had some very valuable sugar plantations, 2) the Netherlands wanted those sugar plantations, and 3) Portugal and the Portuguese Brazilians couldn’t stop the Dutch from taking them.
All in all, Maurits was an extraordinarily wealthy and well-connected man, so it was only natural for him to build a mansion in a place of honor, right next door to the capitol.
The Mauritshuis is far from the largest art museum we saw on the trip---the Prado probably has more paintings in some of its rooms than the Mauritshuis has in its entire collection---and it only has a handful of true masterpieces. But it was still one of our favorite museum experiences.
Visiting a giant art museum like the Prado, Louvre, or Rijksmuseum is an overwhelming experience. You either plan your visit out in advance, stringing together a shortlist of masterpieces separated by rooms full of impressive paintings you'll barely glance at, or you wing it and end up spending an hour in the first room you happen to enter, missing the greatest masterpieces altogether.
The Mauritshuis, on the other hand, is a perfectly tailored experience. Every painting is worth looking at, and it only takes an hour or so to look at them all. There's no pressure to pick and choose which paintings to see, so you can indulge in taking the time to truly appreciate the details of a still life without worrying that you're going to lose out on seeing something better down the line.
We'd visited the P.W. Akkerman stationery store in Amsterdam a few days earlier, but the one in The Hague is the one I really wanted to see. Why? Well, it's kind of a niche thing, even among pen enthusiasts.
Akkerman has a great collection of mid-range to ultra-high-end pens, but nothing you can't find elsewhere. What they do have that’s utterly unique is a range of their own-brand bottled fountain pen inks that they started selling in 2010. The inks themselves are great, though most of them are believed to be rebranded versions of other inks you can get anywhere else, too. But what you can't get anywhere else are the bottles, which have an amazing design like a cross between an hourglass and a genie bottle. The design is also very convenient, for reasons that are of no interest to someone who isn't into fountain pens (and probably most who are).
There are a couple online pen stores in the US where you can sometimes buy Akkerman inks now, but for a long time you could only get them by special ordering them from The Hague. People on online pen forums would organize massive group buys to cut down on shipping. Between the desirableness of the inks and the difficulty in getting them, they became something of a cult obsession.
Now that the inks have been out longer and are easier to get, I think the Akkerman madness has mostly died down, but I wasn't about to pass up the opportunity to buy some in person.
After drooling over their pen collection for the better part of an hour, decided to settle for buying two bottles of ink. As I checked out, the woman at the counter showed me a brand new ink color they had just released, inspired by the color of Delft Blue ceramics.
Nic and Jessica, meanwhile, had caught up with me and were amusing themselves outside.
As I paid for the inks, I mentioned to the lady behind the counter that I worked for a pen store in the US that specializes in Japanese pens. She asked if I'd seen their collection of Nakaya pens, which of course I had. (Nakayas are $500-1000+ fountain pens that are handmade in Japan and famously exquisite.) I said that we didn’t carry anything quite that nice where I work, and that this was the first time I’d ever actually seen one in person.
She asked if I wanted to try one. Not to buy, she assured me, just to experience it. Because, "why not?"
Nic and Jessica had joined me by this point, and after seeing my reaction, they had both pulled out their phones before I even finished enthusiastically agreeing.
It was fantastic. With virtually all fountain pens, you have to balance smoothness with fineness. The thinner a line the pen writes, the scratchier it tends to be. But the Nakaya was incredibly fine and incredibly smoothly at the same time.
Anyway, I picked up my inks and checked off several items from my mental bucket list, and we headed back to Amsterdam.
There was still some time left before the afternoon was over, so we decided to head into the city center to take care of some small things we wanted to do.
Our first stop back in Amsterdam was the Copa Amsterdam soccer store. Nic had discovered it while he was waiting for Jessica and me to arrive from Bruges, and he'd been excited to take Jessica ever since. They sold shirts and jerseys for teams from across Europe, including some vintage and special edition designs. I can’t say Nic and Jessica were quite as much in heaven as I had been at Akkerman, but it seemed pretty close.
We also stopped to pick up some fries at a nearby stall---something we'd been excited to share with Nic since our experience in Bruges. Jessica and I got Andalouse sauce like we had before, and it was just as good. Nic asked for the vendor’s favorite, which was tasty sauce with a sweet onion flavor.
We also went back to Dam Square. We’d passed through it a couple times before, but this time we stopped to linger and appreciate it. Besides the magnificent royal palace (which we somehow neglected to take any pictures of), the biggest site on the square is a towering  monument to the Dutch soldiers and resistance fighters who died in WWII. The crests of the various regions of the Netherlands are carved across the back of the monument. Interred behind each of these crest is an urn filled with dirt from that region, taken from a spot where a Dutch soldier was killed in action.
Finally, we took a stroll over to the Jordaan, a picturesque residential neighborhood on the western edge of the city center. From what we gathered, it's a bit like the Brooklyn of Amsterdam---a once-working-class neighborhood that now caters primarily to wealthy hipsters. We didn't actually go into the Jordaan to see for ourselves, however, since our destination was on the near side of the dividing canal.
This is the Anne Frank House. If you want to visit inside, you either need to book a timed-entry ticket two months in advance or queue up for hours in the hope that you might be able to get a same-day ticket. We didn't want to do either of those things, but thought we should at least see it from the outside.
Sitting by the canal, we took it all in for a few minutes: the architecture, the slightly less-crowded ambience, and the variety of tour boats passing by every couple minutes. Amsterdam may not be at the top of my list of favorite cities of the trip, but it definitely has a fun and charming spirit to it. Sort of like Paris, I think it's easy to be overwhelmed by the thronging tourists and the rush to see as much as possible, whereas the real joy is in stepping back, going for a walk, and just letting the atmosphere of the place wash over you.
Day 183: Operation Market Garden (and a not-so-brief primer on Early Modern Dutch history)
For today, we had booked an all-day tour of the sites of Operation Market Garden, an impossibly bold operation that ended in failure and has been immortalized in movies like A Bridge Too Far and featured in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. Being WWII history buffs, we were already familiar with the broad strokes of the operation, but today we'd get to learn some of the blow-by-blow details while standing in the actual locations where they happened.
Market Garden was far too large and complex an operation for us to see everything in the one day we'd allotted, so we opted to focus on the parts of the operation handled by the American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division. It seemed appropriate, given our previous crossovers with the 101st in Normandy and Berchtesgaden.
And at the risk of continuing to say this so often that it loses what little meaning it might still possess, this day was truly one of the highlights of the trip.
We met our guide Murk outside the train station, where we discovered two cool things about him. First, he was a former history teacher with an extensive knowledge and passion for teaching European history. Second, it was actually a private tour, so we had him all to ourselves.
There was a third cool thing, too. Murk was a massive Rolling Stones fan. He even wrote his masters thesis on the socio-historical significance of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' early songwriting.
Operation Market Garden took place in the eastern part of the Netherlands, so we had a little bit of time to kill on the drive over. Luckily, Murk was a fountain of knowledge and more than happy to answer all the random questions we could think of.
We learned that he loved being a teacher, but he finally quit after years of frustration with the increasingly restrictive lesson plans he was being saddled with. Making sure that every student gets an equivalent education is an admirable goal, but when the scope of a WWII history class becomes so rigidly defined that the teacher isn't even allowed to discuss the importance of WWI for context, something has clearly gone wrong.
As a private tour guide, he can now teach history as holistically as he wants, and only to people who are interested enough in history to hire him for essentially a full-day private field trip. (Appropriately enough, his business is called History Trips.)
We also enjoyed an interesting lesson on Dutch names. It started with a seemingly simple question---Nic asked what the proper pronunciation of the surname Van der Veen (the last name of some of his close friends). Murk laughed goodheartedly at our American pronunciation, then gave us the correct pronunciation, which I would describe as roughly like "Fahn dur Fen."
He explained that it was a place name, meaning "From the…"---he trailed off as he searched for the right English word. "Like, when plants die and turn into a bog."
"Peat?" I suggested after a moment's hesitation. After all the talk of peat in Ireland and Scotland, there was no way such a niche topic could come up as fortuitously as this. But it did. "Yes! Peat!" (Which is a delightful exclamation to hear in a Dutch accent, by the way.)
Van der Veen means "from the peat bog." And as I thought about it, it makes sense. If you pronounce "veen" as "fen," you get an English word that means basically the same thing. And the more I looked after that, the more I noticed that a lot of Dutch words actually sound a lot like equivalent English words once you know the right way to say them.
Speaking of surnames, we went on to learn that most Dutch people didn't have last names until the early 1800s. And they would have kept on not having them were it not for Napoleon. After the Netherlands were absorbed into Napoleon's empire, he ordered a census to determine how many able-bodied men he could conscript into his armies. And to complete their forms, the French census-takers needed a last name---even if it meant having to make one up on the spot.
Some people went with occupational names---like the equivalent of Smith or Miller---while some used their father’s given name, and others named themselves after the place they were from. Van der Veen was a common choice among people from the northern peat bogs, and one of the most common of all was “Van Dyke,” meaning (obviously) from the dyke.
And that dovetailed into a neat little linguistic history lesson. Modern Dutch uses the letters “IJ” more-or-less in place of the English letter “Y," and they're basically treated as a single compound letter. At the beginning of a proper noun, both letters are capitalized together, and the main river that runs through Amsterdam is simply called the IJ---a "single" letter with both characters capitalized. The Dutch even pronounce the name of this letter the same way that Americans pronounce the name of the letter “Y." The Dutch refer to the letter “Y” as the Greek Y, since it resembles the Greek letter Upsilon. The bottom line of all this is that if you see a Dutch word with the letter “Y” instead of “IJ,” that means it is an older word---most likely a name---that was cemented before modern Dutch spelling was standardized.
Finally, we reached our first stop in the village of Overloon, the site of a major battle between British and German forces just after the end of Operation Market Garden. The Allies had managed to secure a spaghetti-thin strand of road all the way through the Netherlands to the doorstep of Germany, and the German army threw everything they had in an attempt to cut the strand while it was still thin.
Today, the village is home to a British war cemetery, as well as one of the most impressive war museums that we'd never heard of. The Overloon War Museum was listed on Murk's website as a highly recommended add-on to the standard tour, but I think even that is seriously underselling just how incredible this place is.
Opened in 1946, Overloon was one of the very first WWII museums in Europe. It is set in a patch of woods where a massive tank and infantry battle between the Allied and German forces during Operation Market Garden. The disabled tanks other vehicles from the battle were left in the woods and converted into an open air museum. Since then, the museum has amassed a stunning collection of tanks, trucks, and other military vehicles.
A few vehicles and art installations are still outdoors, but the bulk of the collection is now kept safely indoors. As we walked through the forest, Murk commented that he liked the movie Fury because it showed how it took a clever use of multiple American Sherman tanks to take out a single German Tiger.
As we moved inside the museum, we got a quick refresher on the backstory of Operation Market Garden. Inspired by the successful use of paratroopers on D-Day, British Field Marshal Montgomery drew up an even larger, more complicated operation. Essentially, the Allies would try to capture a two-lane highway cutting 60 miles deep into German-occupied territory
(Source: Wikimedia)
The ultimate target of the push was the town of Arnhem, which sat astride the furthest branch of the Rhine just after it splits up into a delta that spiders across the Netherlands. If the Allies could capture Arnhem and fortify their supply lines, they would have cut the German forces in half and given themselves an open path eastward into the heart of Germany.
It was a bold plan, to say the least. And according to Murk, pretty much everyone outside of Monty's inner circle knew it was crazy from the start. It was audaciously complex, requiring clockwork cooperation between tens of thousands of soldiers among multiple divisions, and the slightest misfortune or miscalculation could bring the whole thing toppling down.
General Eisenhower---recently promoted to the role Allied Supreme Commander---had a different plan for Monty’s troops. The Allies had already surrounded the Belgian port city of Antwerp and secured the south bank of its estuary to the Atlantic. A good push with the help of British paratroopers support could have driven the German forces out of the city and off of the north bank of the estuary. That would have allowed the Allies to begin shipping war supplies directly to the front line in Antwerp instead of using the existing, painfully stretched supply lines running hundreds of miles back to Cherbourg in Normandy. It also would have allowed them to then pivot toward Germany and advance eastward without fear of counterattacks from behind.
Eisenhower was shrewd enough to appreciate how much Montgomery resented being made to serve under an American general, and how eager he was to find a way back into the limelight. Eisenhower told Montgomery that he could do his operation, but only with British troops. Eisenhower wasn't about to sacrifice any Americans for Monty’s suicide mission.
Then everything changed when Germany started barraging London with their deadly new V-2 rockets. Churchill and the rest of the British government was intent on cutting off the V-2 launch sites in Holland at any cost, and Montgomery convinced them that his plan would be the fastest way to get it done. Eisenhower was compelled to support Operation Market Garden to the hilt---committing the entire strength of 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions to the job.
It was a mess from the start. Speed and surprise were key, yet it ended up taking three days just to drop all of the men and equipment because there were so many of them and not enough planes. Many troopers landed only to find their equipment---dropped hours or even days earlier---had been long since stolen or blown up by the Germans.
There were around a dozen bridges that needed to be captured, and there were no provisions made for repairing or replacing a single one if it was sabotaged by the Germans. So when multiple bridges where inevitably ruined, it took days to fix the problem. And all the while, German artillery rained down on the jammed convoy and the paratroopers stuck far behind enemy lines. The British paratroopers that were dropped on the city of Arnhem---the operation’s ultimate objective with its bridge across the Rhine---were sent in with only 48 hours' worth of supplies. They managed to hold out for nine days without reinforcement before finally running out of ammo and being forced to surrender.
Inside, the museum holds a stunning collection of military tanks, trucks, and other vehicles from WWII and beyond. It started with some life-size dioramas telling the story of the Allied invasion of Europe from D-Day leading up through Market Garden.
We saw firsthand the massive superiority in size, armor, and weaponry that the German tanks had over the American tanks. Germany had designed its tanks to take on the Soviet Union, which at the time had the most formidable tank corps in the world. By comparison, British tanks had fallen woefully behind the cutting edge, and American tanks were still in their infancy.
The most memorable tank on display was one that actually fought in the battle of Overloon and was disabled by a landmine. Enshrined on the front of the tank is a grisly letter written by the tank's driver after he learned that the museum had put it on display. The letter recounts in grisly detail the moment of the explosion and the driver's efforts to save his crew members, several of whom died from their horrific wounds shortly after being pulled from the wreckage.
There were a number of planes in the collection, too, including a Spitfire, a B-25 Mitchell, and a C-47 transport in the middle of being restored.
The museum includes a small collection of more modern tanks as well, including a Dutch tank that served in UN peacekeeping missions.
In addition to tanks, the museum has a stunning variety of other vehicles, including jeeps, motorcycles, gigantic logistical trucks, and even a snowmobile.
It was amazing to see just how much variety and specialization there was.
One corner of the museum highlights how black American soldiers were mainly used for logistical operations and unskilled labor, with only a relative few assigned to black combat units. (The US military remained strictly segregated by race until 1948, three years after the end of the war.) Despite being disproportionately relegated to the more ignoble roles during the war, many black soldiers came to enjoy a level of pride and respect for their service that they had never gotten back home. When they returned from the war, however, it was like nothing had changed at all. They were once again treated as mere "boys," socially inferior even to the former German POWs who had opted to become naturalized US citizens after the war.
There were other fun curiosities, too, like a sign used on the "Red Ball Express"---the complex convoy system that carried essential supplies from Cherbourg at the tip of Normandy all the way up to the front lines.
There was also a pretty impressive display of just about every type of explosive and ammunition used during the war.
And we probably shouldn't have been surprised to find some LEGO dioramas there, too.
We could have easily spent an entire day in the museum, but it was really just the appetizer to the main event. Like I said before, we were already having to pick and choose what we would get to see today, focusing on the American half of the operation. Getting to see the entire breadth of the operation would have required a two or even three day trip, which in retrospect would have been incredibly cool, though perhaps not the best use of our time when we only had a week in the country.
We started in the village of Son, just north of the city of Eindhoven in the southeastern Netherlands. Between Son and Eindhoven runs a major waterway called the Wilhelmina Canal. The bridge crossing the canal was one of the many bridges that needed to be successfully captured as part of Market Garden. And it was at this very river crossing where Murk told us the story.
As the convoy of British ground forces (”Garden”) pushed up through Eindhoven to secure the bridge from the south, the 506th Regiment of the 101st Airborne (including Easy Company), was dropped near Son to secure the bridge from the north and stop the Germans from blowing up the bridge as soon as the British troops reached it. The American paratroopers were held up by an unexpected German gun battery, however, and the Germans destroyed the bridge. This set the operation back until the following morning as the British engineers scrambled to bring in a replacement Bailey bridge.
Leaving the modern bridge behind, Murk took us around the village of Son, showing us where the German guns that held up the 506th had been entrenched. Comparing the photos to the town today, we could actually see where some of the original buildings still stand.
Meanwhile, the 502nd Regiment of the 101st was locked in a brutal fight just a mile west, in the woods between Son and the neighboring village of Best. Best had its own bridge across the canal, and the 502nd had been tasked with capturing that bridge as a backup. The village was heavily defended by German forces, however, and the 502nd couldn't break through. Furthermore, the Germans began to counterattack into the woods in an attempt to recapture the fields where the 502nd and 506th had landed, cutting them off from their supplies.
Those woods were our next stop. Murk had wanted to take us on a shortcut that ran along a series of dirt roads, but they were too muddy and treacherous after the recent rainstorms, so we backtracked and took the paved country roads instead. (Which would prove to be a bit of foreshadowing.)
Stopping at an intersection on the western edge of the woods, we learned the stories of two particular men of the 502nd---one a lowly enlisted man and the other a high-ranking officer.
Private First Class Joe Mann was a Toccoa man, having gone through the original batch parachute infantry training with the 506th Division at Camp Toccoa before being transferred to the 502nd. (Anyone who’s seen Band of Brothers will recall the grueling training that the troopers of the 506th went through at Toccoa and the significance of being a “Toccoa man” later on in the war, as more and more veterans were wounded and replaced with fresh-faced recruits with no experience and little sense.)
During the attack on Best, Mann's unit had been dispersed by enemy fire. Taking a rocket launcher and his M1 rifle, Mann crept up to a fortified German 88 mm gun and took out the entire crew by himself. He sustained four wounds in the process, but he refused to be evacuated. The next morning, the Germans assaulted his unit's position. A German grenade landed within a few feet of Mann. His arms having been bandaged tightly to his sides, Mann threw himself onto the grenade and sacrificed himself to protect his fellow soldiers.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Cole was already a legend, having lead his battalion of paratroopers in a bayonet charge into the hedgerows of Normandy on D-Day. That was the kind of leader Cole was---always at the front, always taking the riskiest position himself. While commanding his battalion in the woods outside Best, Cole radioed in for air support. But his troops were very close to the German lines, and the woods were obstructing the pilot's view. To avoid friendly fire, Cole needed to set out some bright orange markers to show the pilot where his men were positioned. Cole chose to deploy the markers personally, and he was killed almost instantly by a German sniper after breaking cover.
Both PFC Mann and Lt. Col. Cole were posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Moving north, we saw the fields used as drop zones for 502nd and 506th, as well as a farmhouse that was used as a supply headquarters. The current owner of the farm is an older gentleman who was there on the day of the drop as a young boy. He keeps a nice little monument to the 101st Airborne near his driveway. It's private property, but the owner is friendly and allows Murk to visit with his tour groups. At least, that's what Murk says.
We learned that in addition to the C-47 transports, gliders were also used to bring in supplies and support staff that weren't parachute trained. The gliders eventually had to go back where they came from, it was painfully time-consuming for a C-47 to land, attach a glider, and take off again. Instead they developed a clever skyhook system where the transport planes could snatch the gliders off the ground without having to land at all.
Our goal was to keep cutting northwards along country roads, following the path of the paths of the 101st Airborne and the British ground forces. But at almost every turn, we ran into closures caused by road resurfacing projects. It was almost as if the resurfacing projects had been strategically placed to prevent us from moving more than a kilometer or so in any direction from the Paulushoef farm. Murk had never seen anything like it, and his knowledge of the Dutch east-country back roads was tested to the limit, but he pulled through for us in the end.
Our next stop was the town of Sint-Oedenrode, just north of Son. It was here that General Maxwell Taylor---commander of the entire 101st Airborne---established his divisional headquarters during Market Garden. He originally set up shop in a nice building near the center of town, but he soon relocated to an old fortified manor house on the outskirts of town. Complete with a moat, gatehouse, and tall crenelated towers, it seemed to Taylor a much more fitting residence for someone of his station. (And honestly, who wouldn't take the opportunity to set up shop in a castle if they could?)
On our way out of Sint-Oedenrode, we stopped to visit another monument. In a touching reversal of the usual story, this monument was built by the 101st Airborne in honor of the Dutch citizens who aided them during the campaign.
The next village north of Sint-Oedenrode was Veghel, and it had another essential bridge that the Allies needed to capture. Fortunately, the elements of the 101st that landed near Veghel were able to capture the town on day one with relative ease. Unfortunately, the two towns were separated by about three and a half miles of exposed two-lane highway running through open floodplains and farmland. It was stretches like this that helped to earn this route the nickname "Hell's Highway."
The land to either side was soft and marshy---impossible for the Allied vehicles to drive on. If a vehicle broke down or was damaged by enemy fire, the rest of the convoy couldn't just go around them. Everyone behind the disabled vehicle came to a dead stop until it could be pushed off the side of the road. And all the while, the rest of the convoy were sitting ducks for the German artillery and 88mm anti-tank guns.
A full week into the operation that was only supposed to last two or three, the Germans launched a major counter-offensive to cut off the highway between Sint-Oedenrode and Veghel. Since there was no alternative path for the Allied supply convoy to take, the Germans knew that if they could capture just a tiny sliver of the highway and hold it for even a few hours, that might be enough to put the final nail in the coffin of the already floundering Allied operation.
And that's exactly what they did. The American 501st Regiment of the 101st Airborne was able to repel the German attacks against Veghel itself, but the Germans succeeded in capturing a small stretch of the highway south of Veghel and held it for a full day before finally retreating. The Allies retook the highway only to find it covered in mines and booby traps that took hours to clear, by which point the operation had already ended in the failure to take the final bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem.
A wide, modern highway now runs along the route of Hell's Highway, but sections of the old two-lane highway still run alongside it. And we were able to stand at the side of the road where all this happened as Murk recounted the story.
Our next stop was a windmill in the small community of Eerde on the western fringe of Veghel. It was here that the 501st Regiment fended off a fierce counterattack from the German 6th paratrooper regiment, a unit that the 101st Airborne had previously faced off against during the invasion of Normandy. With the help of some British tanks, the Allies were able to hold off the German assault, but at great cost.
The windmill was badly damaged during the fighting, but it has since been rebuilt by donations and volunteers. There's a small shop nearby with murals inside that tell the story of the battle.
Our last stop was the town of Veghel itself. We saw the Klondike Manor, which served as the headquarters of the 501st and still bears the Screaming Eagle crest of the 101st Airborne. We also saw a monument to the 101st Airborne that included an inscribed boulder, a bronze kangaroo, and a buried urn containing soil from all 50 US states. The kangaroo was a bit perplexing until we learned that "Kangaroo" was the call sign for the 101st Airborne Division during Operation Market Garden. That's also where the name of Klondike Manor comes from. All of the units in the 101st had call signs starting with the letter K, and the 501st's call sign was Klondike.
Translated into English, the inscription on the monument reads:
In honor of the heroes of the 101st Airborne Division of the American Army under the command of General Maxwell D. Taylor, Operation Market Garden, 17 Sept. - 28 Nov. 1944, North Brabant, Gelderland.
In everlasting gratitude,
the government and people of the Netherlands
As we drove back toward Amsterdam, we had more time to ask Murk our random questions about Dutch history and culture.
Nic asked about why so many people call the Netherlands “Holland” when Holland is just one part of the country. We learned that at one point in its history, the Netherlands were a confederation of independent states---a bit like the United States before the constitution was signed. Hence the plural name “the Netherlands.” Holland was the richest and most politically powerful state in the Netherlands. Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam are all in Holland. If someone from another country did business with a Dutchman, odds were good he was from Holland. So Holland became synonymous with the Netherlands as a whole. And to be fair, while plenty of people are more than happy to correct those who mistakenly refer to the entire country as Holland, the Dutch have heavily bought into name's brand recognition. "Holland" is emblazoned on almost all of the tourist trinkets we saw, and even the country's national soccer team goes by the name Holland.
Next, I asked Murk for some clarification on the history of the Netherlands as a nation. During the Golden Age of the 17th century, the Netherlands was a republic. But today, it is a kingdom. And before it was an independent country, they belonged to the duchy of Burgundy at one point and the kingdom of Spain at another point.
He explained that the Netherlands–including Belgium and Luxembourg–became a territory of the dukes of Burgundy during the Middle Ages. Through marriage, the Burgundian house of Valois intertwined with the Austrian Habsburgs and the royal family of Spain. Thus, it came to be that a boy named Charles was born in the Netherlands in the year 1500 and grew up to become Duke of Burgundy, Master of the Netherlands, Emperor of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor, and King of Spain and all its overseas territories.
Charles was a Catholic, but he let the Dutch continue practicing their Protestantism. Charles’s son Philip, however, was not so accommodating. He cracked down on the Dutch Protestants, which lead to the Eighty Years’ War and the independence of the Dutch Republic. According to Murk, though, the religious persecution was merely an excuse for the Dutch, who realized they could make a lot more money if they didn’t have to pay taxes to Philip.
The Netherlands stayed a republic for the next hundred and fifty years or so, until Napoleon swept across Europe. After Napoleon’s defeat, the rest of Europe’s leaders decided that they wanted a strong kingdom---not a wishy-washy republic---guarding the northern border of France. They elevated the most powerful Dutch nobleman, Prince William VI of Orange-Nassau, making him King William I of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (whose royal barge we'd seen the previous day at the National Maritime Museum). The house of Orange-Nassau has served as the figurehead royal family ever since, hence the reason why orange is the national color of the Netherlands.
And if you're wondering, yes---the "Orange" in Orange-Nassau refers to that old Roman city in the south of France that we'd visited months earlier with Jessica's mom Donna. How does a Dutch royal family get its name from an ancient city in southern France? The story is as complicated as the story of Western Europe itself.
To start with, we have to go back over a thousand years to Charlemagne, who managed to unite all the lands of modern Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and northern Italy into a single empire. After Charlemagne's death, the Empire was divided between his three grandsons into the kingdoms of West Francia (France), Middle Francia (the Netherlands, Burgundy, Provence, Switzerland, and Northern Italy), and East Francia (Germany and Austria).
Middle Francia was nominally the most prestigious of the three Kingdoms. It contained both the imperial capital of Aachen and the holy city of Rome. But it lacked the overarching cultural and geographic ties that unified the other two kingdoms. Almost immediately, it began to crumble and splinter into smaller and smaller kingdoms, duchies, and principalities, which then fell into political orbit around either France to the west or the Holy Roman Empire to the east. The lines became messy, loyalties became divided, and conflict inevitably arose.
At the risk of grossly oversimplifying the story, this is the reason why the borderlands between France and Germany have always been so fiercely contested---a thousand-year squabble between two siblings over how to divvy up their older brother's toys.
But back to the House of Orange-Nassau. For complicated political reasons, the city of Orange was elevated to a principality within the territory of Burgundy. Even though Orange was geographically tiny and economically insignificant, it was still highly desirable because whoever owned it got to call himself a prince. Through a series of strategic marriages, the title "Prince of Orange" was eventually inherited by the House of Nassau, a noble family whose original territory was centered around the German town of Nassau (sort of near Koblenz) but who had managed to marry their way into ownership of various valuable territories, including much of the Netherlands.
The family also made marital connections to the British royal dynasty, and Prince William III of Orange-Nassau eventually became King of England and Scotland after the ousting of James II (a move which would in turn lead to the Jacobite rebellions whose ultimate failure at the Battle of Culloden resulted in the near annihilation of Scottish Highland culture).
William III was a staunch enemy of Louis XIV of France, and it was during Louis' consolidation of French territory that the city of Orange was taken by force and made part of the Kingdom of France.
William III died without any direct heirs, so his titles and territories were divided among their closest respective claimants. The title "Prince of Orange-Nassau"---now having basically no connection to the actual territories of either Orange or Nassau---was inherited along with several Dutch lordships by William's closest male-line relative, a man named John William Friso. Friso died at just 23 years old, but his son became Prince William IV of Orange-Nassau, and Friso's great-grandson Prince William VI became King William I of the Netherlands after the end of the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Friso’s progeny thrived across the rest of Europe as well. So well, in fact, that all ten hereditary monarchs currently ruling in Europe can find Friso in their family trees.
European history is unimaginably complicated, and all the threads are intertwined. One of the coolest things about the way Jessica and I did this trip is how it let us appreciate this connectedness. Trying to understand it all is like trying to understand the books of a massive multinational conglomerate with a thousand years of mergers, acquisitions, and spin-offs.
Anyway, I think that's enough history for one day. To sum up, the Operation Market Garden tour was amazing, Murk was amazing, and we would heartily recommend them both to anyone planning a trip in the Netherlands who has at least a moderate interest in history. You can find Murk at www.historytrips.eu.
Today, we went back into the city to explore more of central Amsterdam. At least, that was the original plan. Our first stop was the National Maritime Museum, an amazing collection of wide-ranging exhibits covering topics from ship design to cartography to the social costs of the Dutch trading empire. It was so good, we wound up spending almost the entire day there.
Arriving at Amsterdam Central, it was time for us to try out the local bus system. Taking buses in foreign countries is always a fun experience---or at least local buses are. It’s more or less the same everywhere you go, but it's always just different enough to trip you up. Whether it's how to buy tickets, how to make the bus stop, which door to get in through, or just where to find the least uncomfortable seats, there's always something new to learn.
Having said all that, this bus ride was wholly unremarkable. The bus stayed on the same street the entire time, and we got off on the third stop barely a mile from the station. We could have walked it, but we had more interesting things to spend our legs on.
The museum is housed in a former naval arsenal, built in the 17th century at the height of the Dutch Golden Age. The Netherlands were then governed by the Dutch Republic, a scrappy if somewhat dysfunctional confederation whose war of independence from Spain was still in living memory. There was no national military. Instead, the country's defense was tasked to a collection of separate Admiralties run by five of the wealthiest and most powerful Dutch cities.
Amsterdam was the wealthiest and most powerful of them all, and they built this extraordinary building to serve as its warehouse.
Above the central courtyard hangs a particularly striking glass and steel roof resembling a spider's web or a kaleidoscope. The museum is divided into several different wings connected by the central courtyard. It's the sort of museum that's large enough to require a strategic plan of attack.
The first room we entered was filled with a long display of dozens and dozens of model yachts from the early 17th century to the modern day. They range from tiny, simple boats to complex multi-masted ships. They were fantastically detailed, and there was even a set of digital information panels that you could slide across the outside of the display case to zoom in on different models and get a readout of interesting facts.
Next up was a massive collection of old maps and atlases from throughout the European Age of Exploration. The earlier maps are highly stylized and hilariously inaccurate, but you can see how quickly the trade of cartography improved once the knowledge of the greater world shifted from being an academic curiosity to being a vital business resource.
At the beginning of the Age of Exploration, Portugal had the best cartographers in Europe. But the Dutch understood as well as anyone that Europe was on the brink of entering a new global era, and the nation with the best maps of the most places would have an advantage in both trade and conquest compared to nations making do with worse and fewer maps. So the Netherlands sent spies to copy Portuguese maps and map-making techniques, and within a hundred years, the best maps in Europe were coming out of Amsterdam.
Another cool thing in the map room was a demonstration of the Mercator Projection. Developed by a Dutchman in the 1500s, the Mercator Projection is still the basis for what we think of today as the standard world map.
There are a lot of different ways of drawing the round earth on a flat map, and each one is called a projection. I'd never really put much thought into the choice of the word "projection," but this display showed just how literal the term really is.
By taking a transparent globe and a cylindrical white screen, you can literally project the lines of the three-dimensional glob onto the cylinder, which can be unrolled into a flat surface. You can also literally see how the equidistant horizontal latitude lines on the globe get increasingly stretched out the further north and south you go on the map. Among other things, this makes Greenland and Antarctica look huge when really they are only about the size of continental Europe.
The real jewel of the cartography exhibit was a room dedicated to the maps of Willem Blaeu and his sons. The Blaeus developed cutting-edge techniques for making maps that were more precise and easy to read than any others. They kept a shop right on the docks of Amsterdam so that they would be the first in line to get their hands on fresh navigational records from returning ships. Willem became so famous for the quality and up-to-dateness of his maps that he was appointed the chief cartographer for the Dutch East India Company, and his son Joan was appointed to the position after him.
In the center of the Blaeu room is a gigantic map showing all of the known world at the time. Big world map filled with cities. We spotted a lot of places we’d visited during the trip, like the city of “Edenborch” and the island of "Yles" in Scotland. (Edinburgh and Islay.)
Shifting to something completely different, we entered a room dedicated to the modern shipping industry. There was a large model of the Port of Amsterdam highlighting the role each part plays in getting the stuff you buy every day out of the ships and into the stores. There was even a 5-minute simulator built into a fake shipping container that gave us a first-person experience of the journey, ending up with us being stocked on the shelves of a produce section.
Next up was a gallery of Dutch maritime art, a popular genre during the Golden Age. The Dutch navies and trading fleets were the backbone of the country's wealth, so it was only natural that wealthy Dutch merchants, officers, and politicians would want to memorialize them on their walls.
In addition to the classic naval paintings, there were a number of “pen paintings,” featuring intricately illustrated ships with intricately illustrated naval scenes drawn onto the canvas with pen and ink. Apparently, this art form was particularly popular for nautical art because it allowed the artist to show all the rigging and woodwork in fastidious detail.
In another room we found a fun exhibit on the various navigational instruments used by sailors throughout the ages. And unlike every other museum we'd been to so far, the Dutch maritime museum not only had the instruments on display but actually explained how they worked through interactive computer screens.
In another room, there was a collection of old ships' figureheads, some of which were more tasteful than others.
Another huge exhibit was titled "See you in the Golden Age." It was a fairly reading-heavy exhibit dominated by signs and plaques, but it did a good job of succinctly explaining the rise of the Dutch Republic as a global superpower, the way the Dutch trade empire operated, and the unsavory realities of what was in many ways a highly exploitative and unethical enterprise.
Thanks to shipbuilding and trade, Amsterdam became the biggest port city in the world during the 17th century. Its nickname was “the warehouse of the world.”
At first, the Dutch trading fleet defended itself by arming its trading ships with cannons, much like Spain did with its galleons and virtually every other trading power did with its ships. Over the course of the 1600s, however, dedicated warships began to emerge more and more from the dockyards. The Dutch had to fight numerous bloody wars over the course of the century---first with Spain for their independence, then with Britain for trade routes.
The Dutch East India Company---much like the British East India Company---was a massive enterprise devoted to colonizing and trading with India and East Asia. It secured an exclusive trade monopoly with Japan, and Amsterdam became the hub of Asian art and ceramic imports in Europe.
The East India Company was the pride of the Dutch trade empire, and it was hugely influential to the development of modern multinational corporations. But it wasn't country's main breadwinner. For that, we have to look to the darker story of the Dutch West India Company.
Like every other European trading power of the time, the Dutch made the bulk of their profits through the Atlantic trade triangle---which is a nice way of saying slavery. Dutch traders would buy or capture slaves from western Africa, sell them to plantation owners in North America and the Caribbean, then take the raw materials back to the factories of Europe to be turned into valuable manufactured goods.
Hundreds of thousands of African slaves were shipped to the Americans aboard cramped and dirty Dutch trading vessels.
Another source of income for the West India Company was privateering, which is a nice way of saying piracy that you agree to only do against people from other countries.
Next, we saw a short exhibit on the history of whaling, the centerpiece of which was a life-size display of a man preparing to harpoon a whale that has just breached the surface. Starting with a life-sized display of a man preparing to harpoon a whale.
I’d never realized how ardent a conservationist my cousin Nic was.
The exhibit also covered the biology of whales, why they were so they were such a valuable hunting target, and some common whaling equipment including a grisly industrial saw used to cut whale carcasses apart.
For our last stop inside the museum, we visited the “Life on Board” exhibit---a life-size board game where we carried around a bucket and tested our knowledge and reading comprehension about life on a ship.
I said that our last stop inside the museum, but it wasn't our last stop of the museum.
Just outside the museum sits a full-size recreation of the Dutch East Indiaman Amsterdam. Of course we couldn't leave without seeing that. But first, we got to see something a bit smaller.
This work of art is the royal barge of William I, the first king of the Netherlands after the fall of the Dutch Republic and the subsequent French-backed Batavian Republic.
The museum ship Amsterdam was pretty cool, even if it was a bit more touristy than the real-life ships Jessica and I got to visit at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. One corner of the ship had been converted into a virtual-reality experience that ran every 10 minutes or so. We decided to wait in line, but every time they opened the doors, a wave of people with reservations came up and took all the spots. After the third failed attempt to enter, we gave up and moved on.
Having already familiarized ourselves with navigating tall ships back in Portsmouth, Jessica and I got to enjoy watching Nic come to grips with the meager proportions of maritime life during the Age of Sail.
As we walked above-decks, we were able to view the nearby NEMO Science Museum, which looks like a cargo ship poking up out of its pier at a precarious angle. We didn't have the time or energy to visit another museum, but the staircase climb up its peculiarly sloped spine was irresistibly intriguing.
After leaving the Maritime Museum and making our way to the top of NEMO, we were able to enjoy a pretty nice view of the surrounding docks and skyline. After taking it all in, we decided to take the elevator down. But after waiting a good five or ten minutes for an open car, we decided to just climb back down the stairs instead.
After that, we decided to take it easy. It was passing mid-afternoon at this point, and we'd spent pretty much the entire day standing. Plus, we had something very special and very tiring planned for tomorrow. So with all that in mind, we settled for a quick side-trip for desert in Dam Square before heading home for an early evening.
Day 181: Wind, Wood, and Cheese—A Crash Course Through Dutch Countryside
For our first real day in Amsterdam, Jessica had picked out a half-day tour of the scenic countryside of North Hollands, including the incredibly picturesque Zaanse Schans. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting very much out of the tour beyond some pretty scenery, but I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised with how it turned out.
Our Airbnb was a pleasantly short stroll from the train station. As we waited, Nic and I captured a nearby gym in Pokemon Go. Jessica was not amused.
When we arrived at the tourist information center that Google Maps had directed us to, there was no one else there. It was still early, and everything was closed. Double-checking our phones, we realized that we were actually supposed to meet at a storefront several blocks away. We chucked our pastries into our bags, speed-walked down the down main street, and got there just a few minutes late.
Everything seemed fine, though. This was a big-bus tour, unlike the smaller group tours that Jessica and I had tried to stick to before. Even though our tickets were timed, it seemed like they were taking people in at the door and sending out new groups every few minutes as they filled up.
Our tour group was split into English and Spanish speaking sections. As we headed north towards the windmills, we learned through a prerecorded audio track about the significance of windmills in Dutch history.
There are a few things I’ve pretty much always known about the Netherlands: It is a small country, much of its land is below sea level, and for centuries it was one of the world’s greatest trading empires. And windmills played a critical role in that story.
Back in the Middle Ages, the Dutch seized upon an ancient technology known as Archimedes' screw. A brilliantly simple device, the screw can drain vast areas of wetland with just three basic ingredients: a pipe, a corkscrew, and a way to keep the corkscrew turning.
That last ingredient had always been the tricky one. Turning such a massive corkscrew was labor-intensive, and it had to be done more-or-less continually in order to keep the drained land from flooding again. A German engineer figured out how to reduce the workload with a more efficient crank mechanism, but it still required human hands and sweat to operate. Hands that had to be paid, and sweat that needed to be replenished.
It was the Dutch, appropriately enough, who came up with a way to get the work done for free. The Netherlands, with its flat plains and reliable wind, had always been prime territory for windmills. When Dutch engineers figured out use the turning of a windmill to power the turning of a water screw, the rest was just a matter of logistics. The water was pumped up into dikes---tall levees with canals running down the middle of them. Water from one dike would be pumped up into a larger and taller dike, until finally it was pumped into an above-sea-level dike that flowed out to the Atlantic.
Using this technology, the Dutch were able to double the size of their country without having to take land from anyone else but the sea (There’s a famous saying in the Netherlands: “God created the earth, but the Dutch created Holland.”)
While electric pumps have now replaced the windmills, the job is still the same. Without continual pumping to keep the land dry, half of the Netherlands would be lost back to the sea. One article I found claimed that if all the pumps stopped, half the country would be underwater within a week.
But that is just the first half of the story. To find out how windmills took a country they had literally created and transformed it into a global trade empire, we had to make our first stop.
Zaanse Schans is a historic neighborhood just north of Amsterdam, just over a mile from our Airbnb. It is one of the most idyllic and iconic places in the Netherlands, with beautiful old homes and windmills. In the 19th century, it attracted painters like Monet. Today, it attracts throngs of tourists.
After passing through a quaint old-timey town, we were given a tour of one of the mills by one of the millers (or rather sawyers) who actually works there.
We learned that in the 1600s, the Dutch invented a new type of gearbox that transformed the rotating movement of a windmill into an up-and-down motion---perfect for attaching wood saws to.
According to our guide, this was the true first step in the Industrial Revolution. With the vast fields of wind-powered saws in the west and dense forests in the east, the Netherlands was perfectly positioned to process lumber at a staggering rate–more than double France and England combined. Within a few decades, they had raised an unparalleled trading fleet that sprawled across every corner of the globe.
The resulting Dutch Golden Age ushered in a century of incredible wealth, art, and culture to the Netherlands.
The windmills were really clever. They even used a winch system that automatically dragged the logs up out of the canals and through the saw blades. (The logs were kept soaking in the canals before cutting in order to minimize splintering.)
Any wood that wasn’t suitable for lumber became firewood, and sawdust was collected and sold for barn flooring and insulation.
At one point, thousands of windmills peppered the fields of Holland. Almost all have been demolished, but a handful have been preserved, restored, or even rebuilt from scratch according to historical specifications.
The sawyer who showed us around the mill explained that it is not just a preserved mill---it is a working mill. They really do cut lumber, and all the lumber they cut is ordered for real construction projects. Windmills are delicate creatures, and they can start to break down after just a week or two of disuse.
One thing I found especially fascinating was that the sails of the windmill were really that---sails. The blades are intentionally designed so that every morning the millers can decide how much or how little cloth to put on them. If the wind is low, full sails are raised on all four blades. If the wind is high, only two or three might be raised. This lets them control how fast the blades turn regardless of how much wind there is.
We also learned that old-fashioned sawyers wore wooden shoes as protection from the saw blades.
Speaking of wooden shoes, that was the theme of our next stop.
After running back to catch our bus, we headed out to the town of Marken. Once an island, it is now connected to mainland Holland by a long, narrow dike. A quaint time-warp village a bit like those in the Cotswolds or the Rhineland, it's the sort of place tourists go to see old-fashioned buildings and people dressed in old-fashioned clothes. One of the main attractions, and the only one we had time to see, is a wooden shoe factory.
Delightfully, we learned that the Dutch word for wooden shoes is “klompen”---as in, clomping around in heavy wooden shoes.)
Again, I was expecting this to be cheesy tourist trap. And, to be fair, it kind of is. But it was also genuinely interesting. We learned that wooden shoes were quite practical in their time. For field hands working in the marshy Dutch soil, wooden shoes were far more protective than cloth shoes. And thanks to the windmill revolution we'd just learned about, wood was far more plentiful than leather.
The way the shoes are produced nowadays is also fascinating. The klompenmakers take two industrial lathes and join them together so that whatever one lathe does, the other one copies it exactly. One lathe is equipped with an ordinary carving tool, while the other is given a harmless blunt tip. The klompenmakers than mount a completed shoe on the blunted lathe and a wooden blank on the sharp lathe. The sharp lathe is then turned on, while the blunted lathe is kept off. By rubbing the blunted lathe around the inside and outside of the completed shoe, the sharp lathe turns the wooden blank into a perfect replica shoe. Then, by switching the lathes to mirror each other instead of paralleling each other, they can create a perfectly matched shoe for the other foot.
All the while, the klompenmaker gave an impressively entertaining monologue, effortlessly jumping between five different languages and joking with individual tourists in each. If there's one stereotype about a European country that I'm still willing to hold onto after these six months, it's that the Dutch are born linguists.
After the presentation was over, we got to try on some clogs. I was pleasantly surprised to find that weren't nearly as uncomfortable as I was expecting. They have no cushioning, so you’d want to wear them with thick woolen socks, but the insides are fairly well contoured to match a typical human foot.
After buying some souvenirs and taking some more pictures of the kitschy clog-related artwork, we were busked onward toward the Marken docks. From there we took a boat ride over to the mainland town of Volendam, a larger but still rustic Dutch port town.
Our first stop was the Cheese Factory Volendam. It was very much like the Chocolate museums in York and Bruges, but with cheese.
It even had dioramas!
After a quick walk through a series of displays showing how Dutch cheese is made, we got to see a live presentation. While Volendam is part of the famous Edam cheese-making region, the Factory focused on Gouda-style cheese, which was fine by me.
After the presentation, we were let loose to wander and taste a wonderful variety of different Goudas. There was a very young cheese, just four weeks old. It was mild, soft, and creamy---very much to my taste. There was also an "extra old" cheese that had been aged for four years. It was stronger and harder---good, but not so much to my taste.
There was also a delicious assortment of seasoned cheeses. There was smoked Gouda, of course, as well as herb Gouda, red pepper Gouda, and even cumin Gouda. I was so impressed with the cumin Gouda that I had to buy a wheel before we left. But possibly even more impressive than the cumin Gouda was the smoked goat's-milk Gouda. I've never been a fan of the tangy character that goat cheese has, but the creaminess and smokiness of this cheese balanced it out spectacularly. If you ever have a chance to try some, even if you don't normally like goat cheese, I would highly recommend it.
After the cheese factory, we had a break for lunch. We followed our guide's recommendation and went over to a nearby restaurant that specialized in kibbeling, a Dutch version of fish and chips. The fish is cut up into smaller pieces before it is fried, and they practically melted in our mouths. As much as I loved our fish and chips in Britain, I would take that kibbeling over any of them.
All the while, we were inundated with a tremendous noise of raucous crowds and blaring music. While Volendam is allegedly a very quiet town most of the time, we happened to come in the middle of a four-day folk festival filled with dawn-to-dusk drinking, singing, and general merry-making. A miniature Dutch Oktoberfest, if you will.
After wandering through the overwhelming crowds for a bit, we rendezvoused with our tour group for our next stop---a bakery specializing stroopwafels.
I'd never heard of stroopwafels before, but now that we're back, I feel like I see them everywhere. Unlike Belgian waffles, these were small, thin, and crunchy. And most importantly, they are filled with caramel! They are traditionally taken with coffee or tea and small enough to place on top of the cup like a lid. The steam from the drink heats and softens the stroopwafel, making it even tastier.
Naturally, we got to see a demonstration of how to make a stroopwafel. The process is as simple as could be: you make a waffle, split it in half with a knife, spread the filling---caramel, honey or chocolate---on the inside of one of the halves, then put the halves back together like a sandwich. One of the other people on our tour got roped into helping the shopkeeper make one in front of us. When called on, his first reaction was to look helplessly down at the bag in his hands and protest: “But I’m holding cheese!”
Before heading upstairs into the shop, we made sure to snap a picture of the original recipe hanging on the wall.
After buying a box or two to take home with us, we walked through the town to meet up with our bus, which took us back to Amsterdam.
Overall, it was a fun tour, and I enjoyed it more than I was expecting to. It was certainly cheesy---in more ways than one---but we also learned a lot without having to do any of the planning work ourselves. Really, what more could we ask for?
We still had most of the afternoon left, so we decided to stroll around for a bit and enjoy the sights of Amsterdam's city center---starting with one of our absolute must-sees.
The Basilica of St. Nicholas is “only” a hundred years old or so, but it is still very beautiful. Thanks to what must have been very clever design, they were able to make it very bright and airy inside despite having relatively few windows.
After leaving Nic's basilica, we walked up and down the main canals of the city center, taking in the sights, sounds, and---yes---smells. We didn’t enter any of the many “coffee shops” that we passed, but judging by our noses, everything everyone says is true.
We didn't quite go into the red light district itself, but we got close enough to find some rather interesting storefronts that certainly wouldn't have passed any public decency regulations back in the States.
At the south end of the city center, we came to the University of Amsterdam. Nic and Jessica had been hoping to buy a university sweatshirt for their dad, but while this campus in the heart of Amsterdam had been the University's original location, the bulk of it is now in a much larger campus on the outskirts. There weren't any university shops on the old campus that we could find, just a lot of sleepy buildings.
Before we headed back up the city's main drag, I insisted on stopping by a pen store---P.W. Akkerman. If you don't already know, I'm a bit of a pen fanatic. There is a P.W. Akkerman store in the Hague that I was dying to visit, but this satellite store in Amsterdam was a nice way to tide myself over. Nic and Jessica were more than happy to let me wander in, but I don't think they understood exactly what they were getting into. After a good long while of perusing the shelves on three different floors, I found them waiting patiently by the door, more than ready for us to continue onward.
The main street running up through the city center is vast and impressive. And the buildings flanking it are also suitably grand for the economic epicenter of a former trade superpower.
Running all the way up the street was a series of ornate street organs playing impressively complex carnival-esque tunes. We also passed a blade juggler trying to convince his modest crowd that it was only fair that they each give him ten Euros for the upcoming performance.
Finally, we made it back to the central train station---a beautiful structure in its own right that we hadn't really had time to appreciate before---and headed back home for a relaxing evening. Tomorrow, we'd be heading back into town for a deep dive into one of our favorite sites in the city: the Maritime Museum.
Today we'd be checking out of our hotel and relocating to our Airbnb in the suburbs north of Amsterdam, where we'd be staying for the rest of our week in the city. But in the meantime, we got to discover and experience one of our favorite museums of the entire trip---the Van Gogh Museum.
Getting to the museum proved a bit more challenging than we expected. After leaving our bags in the hotel safe room (we'd come back later to pick them up and take them to our Airbnb), we had to take the metro and a tram. The metro was fine, but the tram left us a little stumped.
When we got to the tram platform, the tram was nowhere to be found. Minutes passed from the time it was supposed to arrive, and nothing. There weren't many other people at the platform, which made me wonder whether we had messed up. There's nothing quite like a crowd of impatient locals to reassure a hesitant tourist that no, it's not you that's wrong, it’s the tram that's wrong.
Normally, a situation like this wouldn't be much cause for concern. Having your most basic expectations about the way things ought to work subverted is the bread and butter of a trip like ours. But we had very strictly timed museum tickets that we had paid a good sum for and very much wanted to use.
Finally, the tram arrived. And drove right passed us without stopping. Were we supposed to signal the tram like a bus? I hadn't read anything like that. A few minutes after that, a crowd finally starts to gather, and another tram comes rolling by. Without anyone signaling, as far as I could tell, the tram stops just like one would expect of a tram, and we all boarded just like one would expect of a crowd of people waiting for a tram that had just pulled in.
Maybe the first tram was on an express route that skipped our platform? Maybe we should have signaled? We may never know. Luckily, we had given ourselves just enough extra time to make up for the delay, and we were able to walk straight into the museum as we arrived.
The museum itself is quite interesting. It's a big tall building, but you can't actually enter into it. Instead, the entrance is in a futuristic lozenge-shaped building next door. You go into the side building, down an escalator, and through an underground passage to get to the museum proper.
But first, we decided to check out the current special exhibit, which was in the lower floor of the lozenge.
It was called Van Gogh Dreams, and the premise seemed both brilliant and absurd at the same time: a Van Gogh exhibit without any art. Instead of the art itself, it focused on creating a sensory experience of Van Gogh's mental and emotional journey over his final years, which were simultaneously the most tumultuous and the most productive of his career.
It started with a dark, narrow, twisting passageway filled with the loud and chaotic sounds of city life. This was Van Gogh in Paris. He had gone to the city to gain a new vision on art. He found what he was looking for in the canvases of the Parisian Impressionists, but as a young man used to the countryside, the clamor and filth of the city was poison to his soul. The stress of Paris drove Vincent to the illness and mental breakdown. He had to escape. So he went south, to Provence.
In the flowering fields of southern France, Van Gogh found what felt to him like paradise on Earth. Instead of the harsh, bustling artificiality of the city, or the grim Dutch farmlands he'd studied earlier, Provence was a dreamlike wonderland of whimsical shape and color. The exhibit cleverly represented this with a field of crystal sunflowers, reflecting an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of colors being beamed from discreetly hidden projectors. Mirrors along one wall extended the impressive illusion.
Inspired by his new surroundings, Van Gogh went to work on his new vision. He had an idyllic dream of a little yellow house where he would host a rotating cast of fellow artists. They would share their artistic methods and philosophies, and through their work bring art into a new golden age.
Van Gogh was unquestionably a visionary, but his vision tended to exceed his grasp. Less charitably, one might call him a delusional narcissist. None of his "friends" back in Paris had any desire to go stay in his little yellow house. He was intense and eccentric, and despite having next to no formal training or commercial success, Van Gogh was insufferably convinced he was a genius destined to revolutionize the world of art.
Finally, after multiple invitations---and a financial incentive from Vincent’s brother Theo---Paul Gauguin accepted and moved down to the yellow house in Arles. Almost immediately, things began to go wrong. Van Gogh may have believed he wanted to experience artistic discourse, but Gauguin's dismissal of his viewpoints was intolerable to him.
Finally, whether it was from stress, mental illness, or just lead poisoning, Van Gogh snapped.
In a blind rage, Van Gogh chased Gauguin out of the house with a razor. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in a hospital. In his delirium, he had turned the razor on himself. He cut off his ear, wrapped it up like a little present, then gave it to the first woman he came across---a prostitute who promptly and understandably called for the police.
Touchingly, Gauguin still had the concern and compassion to visit Van Gogh in the hospital. After being released, Van Gogh suffered a series of further breakdowns, and he eventually checked himself into a mental asylum in the nearby town of St. Remy.
Despite being locked in a room with barred windows, Vincent dove even further into his painting. Not for critical or commercial success, but as therapy. It was here that he perfected the iconic swirling brushstrokes that so distinctively mark his later works.
No amount of painting could fend off his demons for long, however, and Vincent eventually committed suicide.
Grateful to have seen this special exhibit, which was remarkable as much for its execution as for its content, it was time to see the museum's main collection. Sadly---though not surprisingly---photography was strictly forbidden. Luckily, as was the case when we visited the Monet and Architecture exhibit in London, there are enough public domain and creative commons images available for me to make do with instead.
(Source)
The museum is four stories tall, and the further you climb, the further you progress through Vincent's life.
Self-Portrait, 1887. (Source)
Self-Portrait, 1887. (Source)
First, though, the museum starts with a room filled with self portraits from across the length of his ten-year career. It was fascinating to see his constant experimentation and evolution as he developed his style.
After climbing up to the first floor, we immediately noticed one of the museum's most interesting features. Along with a suitably overwhelming collection of works by Vincent van Gogh, it also contains an impressive collection of works by Vincent's contemporaries and immediate predecessors. The works are always presented near each other, so you can see how one influenced the other. Vincent was always an outsider the fine art world, and it's fascinating to see how his style evolved by incorporating bits and pieces of groundbreaking works by the hip Parisian in-crowd.
I learned that Van Gogh was a late bloomer, a bit like Rodin. He was 27 when he decided to pursue a career in art. His entire career spanned just ten years from beginning to end.
The Cottage, 1885. (Source)
His early work was dark and traditional, inspired by the Dutch Realists. He focused on painting the countryside and its peasant population. Vincent was disillusioned with Industrialism and he idealized farm work as the most noble and honest of occupations.
The Potato Eaters, 1885. (Source)
Van Gogh's biggest work from this period was The Potato Eaters. It featured a gathering of Dutch peasants sitting down to a meager meal of boiled potatoes. He intentionally selected the ugliest, most work-worn peasant family he could find to serve as his model.
Vincent was incredibly proud of this painting, and it is now considered to be his first masterpiece. But no one else at the time liked it. Other artists rejected it as ugly and poorly drawn, and even Vincent's brother Theo---one of his most ardent supporters---dismissed it at the time. But Vincent refused to accept any criticism. If the painting suffered any imperfections, he reasoned, it was only because he dared to expand his skills by attempting things he'd never done before.
Garden Square with Courting Couples: Square Saint-Pierre, 1887. (Source)
Montmartre: Behind the Moulin de la Galette, 1887. (Source)
When he moved to Paris, Vincent was inspired by the works of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. His paintings started to include more playful colors and abstract brush strokes.
The White Orchard, 1888. (Source)
Field with Irises near Arles, 1888. (Source)
The Yellow House, 1888. (Source)
When he moved to Provence, Vincent started to paint more landscapes, with gardens and flowers featuring heavily in his works.
The Bedroom, 1888. (Source)
Vincent was well aware of his mental illness by this point, though our understanding of mental illness was next to nonexistent at the time. In letters he lamented the state of his "fevered mind" and compared it to "a broken pitcher that could never be mended."
Self Portrait With Bandaged Ear, 1889. (Source)
We saw a self-portrait on loan from the Courtauld Gallery in London that Vincent painted shortly after he cut off his ear, his head still bandaged. A blank canvas sits in the background–a symbol of hope for a fresh start.
We also learned that Van Gogh was fascinated by Japanese art. His brother Theo worked as an art trader, and in the late 1800s, trade between Europe and Japan was starting to really open up. Thanks to his exposure to Theo’s collections, Vincent became a great fan of Japanese art and culture, and he tried his hand at imitating their style.
In another section of the museum, we saw a collection of tools that Vincent used in his artwork. There were palettes, brushes, tubes of paint, and a device called a perspective finder. A wood frame crisscrossed with wires, the perspective finder helped artists to translate the three-dimensional world they were looking at onto properly proportioned segments of the canvas. For all of his genius when it came to depicting shapes, colors, and emotions, Vincent always had trouble keeping things in perspective.
My favorite thing in the entire museum, however, was a small lacquered box from Japan. In it, Vincent kept a collection of colored string. By playing with different combinations of string colors, he could predict what combinations of colors would work well together to create the impression he wanted.
For all his eccentricities and warped perspectives, Vincent approached his craft with a rigorously scientific mindset. He would experiment constantly with various techniques and write extensively about his findings in letters to his friends.
Nearby, the museum also featured some of these letters between Vincent and his friends, as well as his brother Theo. Along one wall hung a series of handheld speakers that you could hold to your ear and hear a voice actor reading one of the letters to you.
I learned just how deeply Theo believed in and supported Vincent, even when no one else did. Vincent never made much money; nearly all of his financial support was gifted to him by his brother. Theo paid Vincent a monthly stipend, bought him art supplies, and even covered his medical care when Vincent had his breakdowns. When Vincent ultimately did take his own life, Theo’s own mental health quickly deteriorated until he died just six months later at the age of 33. But the story is even more tragic than that.
Shortly before Vincent killed himself, he received a letter from his brother proudly announcing that Theo had finally decided to go into business for himself. After years of working under Parisian art dealers, and with a new wife and newborn son to take care of, Theo was finally taking a chance on himself and his hard-earned knowledge of the world of art trading.
But to Vincent, this was far from a cause for celebration. He feared that Theo’s business would fail, and if it failed, Theo would no longer be able to support Vincent with his stipend and art supplies–the only things Vincent felt made his life bearable. In a letter, he ranted and accused Theo of betraying him. Shortly thereafter, he was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the stomach.
Theo's own mental condition deteriorated rapidly after that, and he died a mere six months after Vincent at the age of 33. It's an unbelievably sad tale, but perhaps it may seem a bit so if one considers the fact that Theo's terminal madness is now understood to have been the result of end-stage syphilis and not merely a broken heart.
To make this tragedy all the more Shakespearean, when Vincent shot himself, his friend and fellow artist Emile Bernard had only just written an article praising Vincent and his "desperate genius" to the inner circle of the Parisian art world. It was the first public praise that Vincent's work had ever received. 10 years later, at the turn of the 20th century, Vincent was world-famous. This was partly due to the interest Bernard's article had sparked, partly due to the mystique imparted by Vincent's tragic end, and not least due to the great efforts of Theo's widow Johanna to promote Vincent's work (which in turn conveniently transformed her late husband's worthless stockpile of Vincent's paintings into a remarkable endowment).
[After returning from the trip, I learned of an intriguing new theory proposed by a pair of Van Gogh biographers that Vincent may actually have been accidentally killed by a drunk teenager who lived in the village and who was known to get drunk and play cowboy with a malfunctioning pistol. They make a compelling case and have won some experts to their side, but most still hold to the accepted story that Vincent shot himself.]
As we left the museum, I struggled to wrap my mind around everything we'd seen and learned. I had always appreciated Van Gogh in the sort of abstract way of someone who only had a passing familiarity with his story and most famous paintings. Back in the Orsay Museum in Paris, I'd been mesmerized by his most famous self portrait. When I stared into the gaze of that painting, I could feel the intensity of his melancholy and unease welling up in my stomach. It was then that I really started to appreciate his talent.
Having visited the museum, I could make plenty of comparisons to other artists we'd learned about. Like Rodin, Vincent was a late bloomer obsessed with refining his craft to perfection. Like Michelangelo, Vincent had an eye for seeing beauty in ugliness and ambiguity. And like Picasso who came after him, Vincent was constantly struggling to find new ways of seeing the world through art. You can't take each piece of art he made as an aesthetic masterpiece but as one link in a chain of artistic experiments. Some will fall flat for some people, while others manage to pierce the veil into an emotional world beyond the mere physical.
I also couldn’t help comparisons with Tommy Wiseau–creator of the famously terrible movie The Room. Van Gogh was obsessed with ideology and symbolism in his art, and even when he gave up on commercial success, he always believed himself to be on the cusp of transcendence. Sometimes it’s a fine line between genius and out-of-touch narcissism.
Going back to Vincent's self portrait in the Orsay museum for a moment… At the Van Gogh Museum, we learned that many of the paints Vincent used weren't permanent, so the colors we see on the canvas today aren't necessarily the colors he had intended us to see. I didn't think much of that at the time, but months later when we were back in California and I was touching up some photos, I made an interesting discovery.
As it is today, the self-portrait looks greenish and a little washed out. But when I tweaked the saturation just a little, this happened:
With the more intense colors, the flesh of Vincent's face is transformed into something uncannily lifelike. I can almost see the sweat gathering on his forehead. I can't say if this is anything like what the painting actually looked like when it was first painted, but if it was, I'd be all the more impressed with Vincent's talent.
Back outside, we walked around the museum quarter, which was filled with beautiful houses and wide avenues. After grabbing some lunch at a coffee shop, we decided took a quick stroll through picturesque Vondelpark before heading back to the hotel.
We had left our bags at the hotel after checking out, and it now time for us to get them and head on up to our Airbnb where we would be staying for the next week.
The first part went fine. We took the metro down to the hotel, picked up our backs, and took the metro back up to Amsterdam Central. All of that was stuff we could do on an Amsterdam city transit day pass. Once we got to Central, however, things got a bit more frustrating.
As we'd learned back in Oberwesel, our Airbnb was outside the coverage of an Amsterdam transit pass, so we'd have to buy full-price tickets to take the commuter train in and out of the city each day. We'd already resigned ourselves to that, but when we went to buy our tickets at Amsterdam Central, none of the machines would take any of our credit cards. So instead, we waited in line at the ticket counter to buy train tickets for a commuter train ride that barely took longer than the time we were stuck in line waiting. The attendant was able to take our cards, but we were never able to get the machines to take them. So not only would we have to buy these expensive tickets, we'd have to wait in line to buy them too.
As the attendant was printing out our tickets, I had the fortunate stroke of insight to ask whether there was actually an attendant at the train stop for our Airbnb that we could buy tickets from. And, of course, the answer was that there wouldn't. So, we'd have to buy our tickets back into town, too, if we didn't want to accidentally get stranded in the suburbs and have to beg an innocent passerby to help us buy tickets from one of the machines.
Luckily, I had an ace in the hole. Back in Oberwesel, I'd also found an app for the Dutch rail service. We'd had spotty luck with public transit apps in the past (the Lothian app in Edinburgh comes to mind…), so I didn't want to risk putting money into the app unless it proved absolutely necessary.
We had now reached that point.
The app worked perfectly. All of our cards worked fine, and we could buy tickets at our leisure and not have to worry about planning all of our rides a day or more in advance at the ticket counter in Amsterdam.
All that drama settled, we boarded the next commuter train for a very short ride out to the suburbs of Zaanstad. Just northwest of Amsterdam, it's home to the Zaanse Schans neighborhood, where Monet painted those gorgeous paintings of windmills. We were staying in a town called Koog (pronounced like "Coke" but with a "g" sound instead of a "k" sound at the end). While certainly charming in its own way, Koog is very much an unromantic residential suburb.
Our Airbnb was very nice, but I had gotten a bit too lazy about reading the host's fine print. Even though there were three beds and three of us, our host would only let us use two of the beds unless we paid for five people. Also, there was a local guest tax that hadn't been included in the Airbnb pricing. We'd run into that before, but it always amounted to a small handful of Euros. Here, however, the tax was 3 Euros per person per night. Not a fortune, I'll admit, but between that and the cost of the commuter train, we'd have been far better off just staying inside the city to begin with.
Since then, the tax rate has apparently more than doubled to 7 Euros per person per night.
One last thing we need to mention about the Airbnb was the stairs. The place was a three-story townhouse, and the stairs connecting them were the steepest, narrowest stairs we'd seen since Fes. At least these stairs were evenly spaced.
Minor complaints and inconveniences aside, it was a very comfortable place to stay, and we still had a packed week of activities planned in and around Amsterdam.
After nearly six months abroad, one of the most bittersweet days of the trip was finally upon us. When Jessica and I checked out of our Airbnb, it would be our last checkout out as a duo. When we boarded the train out of Bruges, it would be our last major train ride of the trip. In one more day, we'd have finally made it 180 days abroad. They hadn't all been easy, but every one of them was a precious experience in its own right---at least in retrospect. And there are very few people either of us can imagine having done it with instead.
But we weren't done yet. For our final week in Europe, we'd be taking a victory lap around Holland, and we'd be doing it with family.
Jessica's brother Nic had already landed in Amsterdam and had been keeping our hotel room warm for us the past two nights. Literally, since Amsterdam was cool and rainy at the moment. As we sipped coffee with our Belgian host and her girlfriend, Jessica was on the phone with Nic arranging the details of our rendezvous in Amsterdam that afternoon. Or at least, she was trying to.
Our host's girlfriend's dog, a chihuahua whose name we've sadly forgotten, would not stop yapping throughout the entire conversation. She was wearing a shock collar that gave her a little zap whenever she barked, but it didn't seem to discourage her from making her voice heard.
Our host's lab Louis, meanwhile, was happily occupied with rolling around quietly on the floor. Jessica mentioned that Nic's girlfriend has a labrador-chihuahua mix. Without saying a word, they looked from the 70-pound lab to the 5-pound chihuahua. Then back to the lab, and back again to the chihuahua, their faces steadily adopting a dubious cast. "They had help," Jessica clarified.Â
The ride to Amsterdam was smooth and unremarkable, with an easy change in Antwerp. Along the way, we laughed to find that we were passing through a town named Sint-Niklaas, the Belgian name for Saint Nick. Appropriate, given our upcoming rendezvous.
Antwerp Central was really impressive, and it became even more so as we descended further and further and further down until we reached the lowest level where the bullet trains ran. Thanks to the station's open design, we could still gaze up at the main floor far above us.
It was raining hard in Amsterdam when we arrived. Nic had been waiting for us at the station, but it took us an unusually long time to find each other. Still, it was a happy reunion.
We took the metro back to our hotel in the Bijlmer neighborhood of southern Amsterdam, right across the tracks from the stadium where we'd be seeing the soccer game---a friendly match between the Dutch and Peruvian national teams. But even though they weren't playing for stakes, the excitement was still palpable amidst the throngs of orange and red clad fans filling the streets in anticipation of the match still hours away.
After dropping off our bags and relaxing in the hotel room for a bit, we took in the drizzly ambiance of the area and settled on an Italian place for dinner.
Finally, it was time to enter the Arena.
We had great seats near one of the goals, and the game itself was spectacular. The fans were great, too. Perhaps it helped that it was just a friendly match, but it was cool to see people showing off their national pride in a positive, lighthearted way.
Our seats ended up being right in front of a rogue Dutch pep band filled with trumpets and drums. Thankfully, they handed out earplugs to everyone in front of them. They were fun, but they were also loud and annoying. They might have been less annoying if they had played in tune.
With friendly games I tend to wonder how hard the teams will actually play, but both sides really brought their A game. Peru was more consistent and coordinated, earning the first goal. But while the Dutch missed a lot of big opportunities, they took so many more shots that they ended up winning 2-1.
After the game, the Dutch team honored their captain Wesley Sneijder, who was retiring from the national team after this game. They set up a little family room scene in the middle of the field–complete with couch, coffee table, potted plants, and a big screen TV. With Sneijder and his family sitting on the couch, they played them a farewell video. Even though we couldn’t understand the video or Sneijder’s own goodbye speech to the fans, it was clearly heartfelt and sincere.
Back at the hotel, we got our stuff ready for an early morning checkout. We had timed tickets to visit the Van Gogh Museum in the morning, and we weren't about to miss it.
After a pretty intense day visiting the WWI battlefields and memorials of Flanders Fields, Jessica and I decided to spend our last day in Bruges enjoying some of the lighter things it had to offer: chocolate, fries, and a whopping bell tower.
After a return trip to the I Love Coffee espresso bar and a walk through the market square---this time filled with stalls of flowers and produce---we started the day with a trip to Bruges's Choco-Story museum.
We'd visited a different chocolate museum back in York, so we were interested to see how the chocolate museum in this other world capital of chocolate compared. A lot of the subject material was similar---obviously---but we found the Bruges museum much more interesting. Instead of a flashy guided presentation like we experienced at the York Chocolate Story, the Bruges Choco-Story is an actual museum filled with informational displays that we could take in at our own pace.
As we already knew, the earliest form of chocolate was a sort of cold bitter tea brewed in Central America from cocoa nuts.. What I hadn't known is that the word chocolate is derived from the Nahuatl (Aztec) word cacahuatl, meaning "cocoa water." The earliest known use of cocoa was by the Shuar people of Ecuador around 5,000 years ago. Archeologists have found traces of Shuar pottery still coated with traces of brewed cocoa.
The later Mayan and Aztec civilizations especially favored a type of foamed cocoa made by churning it with a special whisk. The foam apparently cut down the bitter taste of the unsweetened chocolate.
In addition to the more typical museum displays, the Choco-Story also had some delightful Duplo block dioramas.
Much later, Spanish nuns in Oaxaca were the first to add sugar to their cocoa. The drink became so popular among female Spanish colonists that they couldn’t even make it through church services without taking a break for their servants to bring them more. A local bishop tried to crack down on the problem by banning cocoa in church and was found murdered shortly thereafter. (An important lesson about men trying to get between a woman and her chocolate…)
It was nearly a century after Columbus’s first voyage before cocoa made it back to Spain, and it was another century after that before it became popular outside of Spain. But when it finally did, it quickly became a sensation across the continent. In the 1700s, the French philosopher Voltaire mixed cocoa with coffee to create the world’s first mocha. He drank over 40 cups of it per day---to his doctor’s great distress.
Apparently, people were so afraid of spilling their cocoa that a new type of saucer was invented with a basket or cup for holding the cup secure. Maybe they were so afraid of spilling it because it was so expensive. In 1800, a pound of chocolate cost five times the average daily wage.
It wasn't until the mid-1800s that solid chocolate as we know it was first developed by the Quakers of northern England, whom we'd learned about at the Chocolate Story in York. But even though the English invented solid chocolate, the Belgians would argue that they perfected it.
Belgian chocolatiers pioneered the use of fun shapes and fillings to make chocolates even more enjoyable. Belgium was also one of the first countries to impose strict purity laws governing the production of chocolate---sort of like what Bavaria did with beer centuries earlier.
We also learned a bit about the process of making chocolate. (Or rather, I learned, since Jessica was already well-versed in the making of chocolate as a former chocolatier herself.)
I learned that there are three main varieties of cocoa plant: Criollo, Forastero, and Trinitario. Of these, Criollo makes the best chocolate and Forastero makes the least-good chocolate. Still, Forastero is much easier to grow than the other two, so the vast majority of chocolate is made from Forastero beans.
On average, one cocoa tree produces enough nuts to make just one pound of dark chocolate per year. That means that it takes literally billions of cocoa trees to feed the world's sweet tooth.
They also had a diagram showing the composition of dark, milk, and white chocolate. I knew that milk chocolate has a lot more sugar and less cocoa than dark chocolate, but seeing the pie charts really drove the difference home for me.
We also got to eat as many sample pieces of dark, milk, and white chocolate as we wanted, which was nice.
The museum ended with a walk through some incredible chocolate statuary and a demonstration of how to make Belgian pralines. It was pretty much exactly like the demonstration we saw in York---the chocolatier filled a mold with chocolate, poured it out, filled with filling, then filled with chocolate. But it's always fun to see people make chocolate, and it's even better to get free samples afterward.
On our way out to the gift shop, a set of computer terminals offered to reveal our perfect origin chocolate based on our taste preferences. Apparently mine is Venezuela and Jessica’s is Vietnam.
Our next stop was to climb the iconic bell tower that overlooks the market square. I have to admit that I spent a lot of that time thinking about the movie In Bruges, in which the tower plays a prominent role.
Crowds have apparently become more of an issue in the ten years since the movie was released. It was about a thirty-minute wait in the newly installed queue room before we could climb the tower. The price has also grown along with the crowds–twelve euros per person instead of the five quoted in the movie.
While we waited, we watched a looping video showing how the design of the tower has evolved over time. It was once actually even taller than it is now.
During the Middle Ages, a lot of towns around Belgium made deals with the local lords. The lords gave the towns economic autonomy, and the towns used this freedom to make astronomical amounts of money that the lords could use to raise armies when necessary. Each town had a market hall where local merchants would keep their wares safe during winter, and it became a point of pride for each town to build the biggest, most elaborate tower possible on their market halls.
As we climbed up, we got to see some exhibits along the way. We saw an old lock-box and the original wrought-iron doors dating back over 700 years to the hall’s original construction. Back in the day, this chest would have contained important contracts and decrees, and it would have required multiple respected members of the community to open it together, since they each would carry one of several keys that were all needed to open it.
We also saw the giant brass cylinder that runs the tower’s carillon bells just like a music box. I hadn’t known before this trip that that was how they worked!
It's very clear from the inside how much the tower has been expanded and renovated over the centuries. The designs and angles of the staircase change dramatically every few floors or so, seemingly without any care for convenience or continuity. It clearly feels like a place that was originally intended to be behind the scenes and not seen by visitors.
Also, as far as I could tell, there wasn't any point along climb where the stairway matched the one shown in In Bruges. Oh well.
The view from the top of the tower was just as spectacular as we could have hoped. There was a web of wire mesh covering all the windows, possibly to prevent people from inadvertently reenacting the film’s climactic scene.
Still, we were able to get some spectacular shots of the surrounding town and skyline.
Back on the ground, we bought some fries at one of the stands flanking the entrance and sat down in the bell tower's courtyard. Fries are a big deal in Belgium, and there are dozens of condiments to choose from. There's the American staple of ketchup, the Belgian staple of mayonnaise, and a host of other sauces we'd never heard of before. Thankfully we had plenty of time in line to do some quick research on our phones.
We both settled on “Andalouse sauce”–a blend of mayonnaise, tomato sauce, and peppers. If you've ever tried Red Robin's Campfire sauce before, it is very similar to that. They were easily the best fries either of us have ever had.
After doing a bit of final shopping in town, we headed back to our Airbnb to rest up and get packed for the next day's trip up to Amsterdam, where Jessica’s brother Nic was already waiting for us. We were leaving a day earlier than we had originally planned at the beginning of the trip since we'd gotten tickets to a soccer match in Amsterdam tomorrow night, but we still had a great time. Belgium seems to have a bit of a reputation for being an underwhelming tourist destination, but we had a fantastic time. The people were great, the food was great, the beer was great, and the scenery was great.
Speaking of beer, we didn't do any other beer-related activities after the De Halve Maan brewery tour, but we did our best to sample the local offerings back at our Airbnb in the evenings. We enjoyed a bottle of Kasteel Rouge, the cherry-liqueur-fortified dark ale we'd tasted back in Prague. Just like before, the first sip was heavenly, but each sip afterward was increasingly cloying. It would make a great digestif, but a full bottle---or even half a bottle---is far too much.
Another ale we enjoyed was the ubiquitous but still impressive Leffe Brown. It is the standard dubbel offering of the Belgian abbey-style macrobrewery Leffe, part of the Anheuser-Busch InBev family. But like I said, it is still really good. As long as you like dark ales, that is. The first thing that struck me was just how appropriate the name was. Sure, "Brown" doesn't seem like the most unique or descriptive name for a dark beer, but I can't think of a better word to encapsulate its flavor. It's earthy, bready, and nutty---like drinking a fermented organic bakery.
And of course, we got some Lambic beers. Jessica had gotten me into Lambic beers back when we were first planning this trip. Technically, Lambic beer is just beer that's produced in a very specific part of Belgium using wild yeast instead of brewer's yeast. But commercially, Lambic beers are known for being mixed with fruit syrups to create a deliciously refreshing beverage that even people who don't normally like alcohol can enjoy. The main brand you can find in the US is Lindeman's, and one of the first drinks we opened upon our arrival in Bruges was a Lindeman's Framboise (raspberry). It tasted pretty much the same as it does in the US--which could be seen as either mildly disappointing (since it wasn't any better) or moderately encouraging (we don't have to feel depressed for not getting "the good stuff" back home).
Plus, we also had a ton of chocolates we had to eat our way through. Yeah, life was pretty hard for us in Belgium. But all good things in this life must come to an end, even if it is only to move on to the next good thing. And the next good thing for us was Amsterdam, a family reunion, and my first European soccer match.
We’ve danced around the edges of WWI throughout the trip, but never really hit it head-on. We’ve seen WWII sites, we’ve seen the capital of the Habsburg Empire, whose weakening monarchy and arcane web of alliances helped provoke the war. We’ve seen the Hall of Mirrors where the Treaty of Versailles ended the war. And we’ve seen the ignition point of the National Socialist movement in Bavaria, born in the cinders of a bitter and humiliated Germany suffering under the terms of that treaty.
But today, we would finally get to see the scars of the Great War directly. And it would be one of the most memorable days of the entire trip.
We'd booked our tour with Quasimodo, a tour group recommended by Rick Steves. It's a good service, and we highly recommend it. They offered a complimentary pickup from our Airbnb. We were pleasantly surprised by their generosity, but it turned out they were being more generous than they realized. In other words, they hadn't thought to check how far away from the city center we were actually staying. We were picked up by one of two vans that were splitting the task of collecting the day's tour group, and we got some friendly ribbing for making our van a bit more than fashionably late to the rendezvous.
After an hour's bus ride south, we'd made it to the area of Ypres, near the French border. (It’s pronounced “ee-per,” though the British and American soldiers during WWI often called it “wiper.”) The city's actual Belgian name is Ieper, but Americans use the French spelling---just like we do with Bruges, which the locals prefer to spell Brugge.
Before we dove into the battlegrounds of Ypers, we were given an enlightening introduction to why the area was so heavily fought over during WWI. I'll try to keep it succinct.
We need to start with the domino line of treaties that turned an isolated act of terrorism into a global war of unprecedented scale and lethality.
After the assassination of Austrian heir presumptive Franz Ferdinand by a group of Serbian radicals, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. Serbia was in a defensive alliance with Russia, so Russia declared war against Austria-Hungary in support of Germany. Germany was in a defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary, so Germany was also at war with Serbia and Russia.
France wasn't allied with Serbia, but it was allied with Russia, so it was compelled to join the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary too. The UK was also allied with Russia and France, but it declined to enter the war at that time.
Germany decided to launch a preemptive invasion of France. The border between Germany and France was already heavily fortified, so Germany decided to launch a surprise attack against France's northern border by moving through Belgium. Belgium refused to allow this, so Germany invaded Belgium by force. Belgium was also allied with the UK, so the UK finally enters the war in defense of Belgium.
Now, since the UK is an island, it needed a safe staging area to organize its troops and supplies on the continent. They chose a spot just 5 miles west of Ypres. As long as the Allies controlled Ypres, they could defend the British supply base from German attacks. If the Germans captured Ypres, however, there would be nothing in the way of them cutting off British supply lines and leaving the British troops stranded, unfed, and unarmed.
It's no surprise, then, that Ypres and the surrounding countryside of Flanders became one of the most brutal arenas of the western front. The German forces had the city surrounded on three sides, creating a bulge of Allied territory known as the Ypres Salient. There were five distinct Battles of Ypres over the four years of the war. Together, they resulted in over a million casualties, over a million displaced Belgian citizens, and the total devastation of Ypres.
It's a relatively small area, but it's densely packed with powerful monuments and cemeteries.
Our first stop was the Langemark German cemetery. Nearly 45,000 German soldiers (less than half of whom are identified) are buried in a collection of named and mass graves, and a separate section holds the bodies of 3,000 Belgian students who were killed during the First Battle of Ypres.
The cemetery is located on the site of a battlefield, and the original German bunkers and front line have been preserved in one corner.Â
Our next stop was a monument to the Canadian soldiers who died in one of the first poison gas attacks by the Germans. It happened in April 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres. My understanding had always been that the Germans were the first to use poison gas during WWI, and the effects were so terrible that the use of chemical weapons was banned after the war was over. All of that is true, but the full story is a bit more nuanced.
The use of chemical weapons had already been banned by international treaty before WWI, and it was the French who first violated it. Almost immediately after the fighting started in the summer of 1914, French soldiers started using tear gas in their assaults on German positions. It wasn't until the following April that the Germans upped the ante with deadly chlorine gas.
Because tear gas and other non-lethal irritant gasses were already being used, the Allied soldiers had gas masks to protect them. But the masks didn't protect against this new weapon. The first victims, who didn't seem to have their own monument at the site, were actually African soldiers that had been conscripted from French colonies. They initially mistook it for a smokescreen, but they soon realized their mistake. The Allied front line collapsed as soldiers retreated in terror.
It was then that the 1st Canadian Division (18,000 men) stepped up and held the line against the coming German assault. The attack never came---the German soldiers were just as scared of the gas as the Allies were---but the Canadians held firm even as 2,000 of their brethren fell to this new and horrifying weapon.
This monument honors those soldiers. It was built from Canadian granite and sits in a circle of Canadian soil.
From that point on, both the Allies and the Central Powers used lethal gas without reservation. As better and better gas masks were invented to protect against them, deadlier and deadlier gases were also invented. The Allies developed a gas called phosgene. It was colorless, virtually odorless among the smells of a battlefield, and its deadly effects didn't manifest until hours after exposure---long after the window for treatment had passed. The Germans started using phosgene, too, and it was responsible for the vast majority of poison gas deaths during WWI.
The Germans also developed a variant of chlorine gas that came to be known as "mustard gas" because of its acrid smell and yellowish color. Mustard gas is the most famous gas from WWI, but it wasn't nearly as deadly as phosgene. It could kill, but mainly it was used as a demoralizing weapon. Exposure to mustard gas caused painful burns and blisters, sickness, and difficulty breathing. Soldiers unfortunate enough to receive a fatal dose could spend weeks suffering before they died.
And mustard gas didn't dissipate after it was released. It would settle on the ground where it could continue to affect people for weeks or even months afterwards. If you were a WWI soldier, how would you feel about being ordered to charge through a muddy field covered in potentially still-active mustard gas?
Of course, the mustard gas eventually did dissipate, but not all of the shells, casings, and barbed wire. Our next stop was a small farm, where we got a first-hand look at the ongoing legacy of the Battles of Ypres.
During WWI, over one billion explosive artillery shells were fired in Belgium alone. One in three were duds that failed to explode upon landing, leaving hundreds of millions of potential bombs scattered throughout the countryside. Most of them have yet to be found, and even a hundred years later, they can still detonate with deadly results.
The Flemish countryside is largely dedicated to farmland, and each year, the plowing season is referred to as the "iron harvest" with somewhat grim irony. Mostly, the stuff that gets dug up is worthless barbed wire or potentially collectable shell casings. But often enough, what comes out of the ground is an unexploded artillery shell.
The Belgian government has a dedicated task force to just for disposing of these shells, and it can be a harrowing job. Around 5-10% of all the shells fired around Ypres were filled with poison gas instead of explosives, and it's not always possible to tell which one is which. And you don't want to guess wrong.
But despite the presence of this task force and the fact that trying to disarm a shell yourself is not only incredibly dangerous but very illegal, a lot of farmers still do it. A defused WWI shell can go for a lot of money in the souvenir market, and some farmers feel entitled to the payout. After all, if a shell goes off and damages their tractor while they're tilling their field, there's no compensation from anyone---they have to pay for the damages out of pocket.
It's not surprising, then, that some Belgians have come to resent their larger neighbors of Britain, France, and Germany, feeling like they've been stuck with the bill for cleaning up a mess they had no say in creating.
Our next stop was the beautifully somber Tyne Cot Cemetery. It is located on the site of a major German fortification that was captured by Australian forces during the Third Battle of Ypres in the fall of 1917. Dedicated to the British and Commonwealth forces who died in the Ypres Salient, it is the largest Commonwealth military cemetery in the world.
As at Langemark, the original German fortifications were kept in place, with the central bunker used as the foundation for the cemetery's central monument.
While it doesn't have the sprawling grandeur of the American Cemetery in Normandy, there are actually more soldiers buried in Tyne Cot---11,965 compared to 9,388.
But for me, at least, the most powerful element of the cemetery is its Memorial to the Missing. Framing the back of the cemetery is a long semi-circular wall, and on that wall are inscribed the names of nearly 35,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and whose bodies were never identified.
The Third Battle of Ypres is also known as the Battle of Passchendaele. Essentially, the British wanted to push the front line about five miles eastward and capture an area of German-occupied high ground around the Flemish village of Passchendaele, just down the road from Tyne Cot.
The British generals anticipated that the battle could be won in 72 hours. The battle was won, but it took over three months and 100,000 deaths.
At least the way our guide explained it, much of the blame for the battle's cost can be laid at the feet of the generals, who planned the operation weeks in advance in a far-away city without any regard or flexibility for changing situations on the ground.
For two weeks before the assault, the British artillery fired millions of explosive shells into the German lines. They did a fair amount of damage to the German forces, but it also completely wrecked the local drainage systems. Belgium is part of the Lowlands; without proper drainage systems, the land would be a swamp.
And that's exactly what it turned into.
When the planned day of the attack finally came, the British soldiers didn't face the quick sprint against a softened enemy that they'd been promised. Instead, they faced a slow, muddy slog into a line of 3,000 fortified German machine gunners. Of the hundred-thousand soldiers who died in the battle, about a third of them are believed to have drowned in the mud after being wounded.
After three hellish months of this, the British finally managed to take those five miles of land back from the Germans. They held it for about three months before the Germans retook it in a counterattack.
It sounds more like a story from Vietnam than from the Great War, but in a lot of ways, the two wars were similar. Unable to achieve any lasting, concrete victories in battle, the generals and politicians began to define success in terms of kill ratios. It didn't really matter how many boys died in the mud, or even whether their deaths accomplished anything, as long as even more boys on the other side died, too. It was a gory, shameful race to the bottom.
Over the course of the battle, the village of Passchendaele changed hands five times. It was so devastated by artillery that by the end of the war, it basically didn't exist anymore. Not a single building was standing, and not a single foundation intact. The entire village had to be cleared out and rebuilt from the dirt up. Even today, sinkholes occasionally appear in the village overnight, revealing buried trenches and tunnels that had been dug during the war.
It was getting close to lunchtime, but first we made a quick stop at the nearby Polygon Wood. It was an artificial hill that the generals on both sides considered a perfect spot for artillery. Both sides were determined to have it---or at least to deny it to their enemy. The Germans ended up holding it for most of the war, for whatever good it did them. The titular woods were quickly destroyed by artillery fire, and the trees standing there now were planted after the war.
As we left, we couldn't help but be cheered by a friendly donkey in the yard of a neighboring farm.
Moving onward, we stopped for lunch at the Hooge Crater Museum. The crater is certainly quite large, but the name actually comes from the adjacent village of Hooge. I can't tell you what the proper way to pronounce it is, but I do know it isn't even remotely how an American would or could pronounce it.
Before going into the museum, we enjoyed some tasty if austere open-faced sandwiches, as well as a delicious glass of St. Bernardus Prior 8 dubbel ale straight from the tap. Covering every wall of the restaurant were decorated shell casings of various calibers---there was no shortage of material to work with in the area.
After lunch, we took a quick tour through the Hooge Crater Museum. It was an interesting if somewhat overwhelming experience. Like many of the WWII museums we visited in Normandy, it was less focused on teaching the context of the war and more focused on immersing people in the small details. Display case after crammed display case was filled with artifacts like uniforms, weapons, gas masks, and spent ammunition recovered from the soil over the years.
There was also a collection of reproduced photos taken during the fighting around Ypres.
Many were chilling, to say the least.
In the field behind the museum, we got to see and walk through a set of recreated trenches. And we learned that there was a lot more to trench design than simply digging out lines in the earth.
Because the water table around Ypres is so shallow, water was a constant problem even when it wasn't raining. It would seep up from the ground, turning the bottom of the trenches into muddy bogs. Less than a day of standing in this muck was enough to risk a case of trench foot, and a normal rotation in the trenches was over two weeks. For sixteen days, a soldier would be given a single uniform---no chance to change or shower until they rotated back from their post.
The filthy conditions also fostered other diseases like typhus and trench fever, a brutally painful lice-born disease that afflicted  J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and A. A. Milne during their service on the front. The trenches may have also fostered the outbreak of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed over 50 million people around the world, far more than were killed by the war itself.
Both sides had plenty of motivation to improve the design of their trenches to make them less miserable and unhealthy. The Germans, who mainly occupied areas that were slightly higher and less wet, were able to get away with simply lining the trenches with plank floors and wicker walls. The British, on the other hand, reinforced their trench walls with corrugated iron and floored them with an ingeniously simple bit of engineering called the "A-frame."
Imagine a picnic table or sawhorse with a cross-section like a flat-topped letter A. There's the top, the legs that stick out at an angle, and horizontal support bars reinforcing each pair of legs. Now, flip that imaginary table or sawhorse upside-down and imagine a set of planks laid down over the horizontal support bars to create a sort of catwalk with a hollow space underneath it.
That's the A-frame. Â The water seeping up from the ground would pool up underneath the suspended floorboards, from which it could be pumped out as needed. Of course, miles of trenches filled with stagnant water still isn't the healthiest environment even when you aren't standing in it, but it was a massive improvement over the alternative that no-doubt saved countless lives from sickness, amputation, and death.
Leaving Hooge, we passed by an intersection that the British dubbed Hellfire Corner. It was an essential crossroads that the British forces had no alternative but to use. The Germans were able to lay in on it immediately, and Hellfire Corner became the deadliest and most-bombarded piece of land in the entire Ypres Salient.
Our next stop was the Hill 60 Battlefield Memorial. The name immediately brought back my earlier thoughts about the echoes between WWI and the Vietnam War, in which numerically named hills also played an infamous role.
Like virtually every other significant battlefield, Hill 60 was a slightly elevated piece of land compared to its surroundings. This meant that the ground was marginally drier and that any artillery placed there would be marginally more effective. And that meant that the generals on both sides were willing to spill as much blood as it took to either take it for themselves or render it useless to the other side.
Hill 60 was part of a larger range of elevated ground that came to be called the Messines Ridge after a nearby village. Messines was an especially tantalizing target to the Allies, but it was also especially well-fortified by the Germans. So, as a prelude to the Third Battle of Ypres---the muddy, bloody battle we'd learned about at Tyne Cot---the British decided to blow the whole thing up.
What resulted was one of the most intense tunneling and mining operations of the entire war.
Over the course of five months, British, Canadian, and ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand, forces dug miles of tunnels and planted hundreds of tons of explosives under German fortified positions. Tunneling and counter-tunneling had become standard practice by this point, and when the German and Allied tunnels crossed paths, the result was a nightmarish fight---often hand-to-hand and in pitch darkness. And that was on top of the constant risk of cave-ins that came with the job of tunneling through sopping wet mud and clay. Our guide specifically and emphatically recommended the novel Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks for a look at what it was like to be a British tunneler during WWI.
So many British and German dead were left in the tunnels that Hill 60 is officially designated as a war grave.
Somehow, though, the Allied forces ultimately managed to plant the mines successfully. And in the predawn morning of June 16, 1917, the Allies detonated them. In an instant, over ten-thousand German soldiers were killed, and Hill 60 was transformed into a crater. The explosion could be heard from hundreds of miles away, and it remains one of the largest non-nuclear detonations of all time.
Hours before the detonation, a British general joked to a group of journalists that regardless of whether or not the operation ended up changing history, it would most certainly change geography.
Hill 60 has been left in state since the end of the war, except for when it had to be fought over again during WWII. The ground is so wrinkled and pocked by the explosions that much of the path is on elevated walkways.
After crossing the rim of the crater, we saw the remains of a concrete pillbox that had been built by the Germans before the detonation. After being captured by Australian forces, they had to modify it so that the gun holes were facing the German lines.
As I mentioned above, this Battle of Messines was meant to distract and disorient the German forces as a prelude to launching the Third Battle of Ypres against German fortifications around Passchendaele a few miles to the northeast. But due to political bickering, the battle was delayed for seven weeks, largely squandering any advantage they had gained while the Germans regrouped.
Less than a year later, the Germans recaptured Messines during the Fourth Battle of Ypres.
Finally, it was time to visit the city of Ypres itself, the city whose tactical position was the reason for all of this fighting. Approaching the city from the east, the first thing you see is a moat, an old city wall, and the massive Menin Gate memorial.
Like the Tyne Cot Memorial to the Missing, the Menin Gate is dedicated to the missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and whose remains were never identified. The Menin Gate was originally meant to hold the names of all the British missing dead, but they ran out of room after carving the first 55,000 names.
The names are organized by division. And since the divisions of the British army were largely organized around the cities and counties that the soldiers came from, the memorial also gave us an indication of where each of the named soldiers came from. Having just been to so many of these places made it all the more powerful to the two us.
After touring the Menin Gate, we had about a half hour to wander the city before regrouping at the bus. Jessica and I made our way down the cobbled high street and soon found ourselves in the stunning market square.
The giant stone building that looks like a Gothic cathedral is actually the Ypres Cloth Hall, the city's medieval merchant hall and one of the largest commercial buildings in all of Europe. While most medieval cities were centered around castles and cathedrals, Flemish cities were centered around their market halls.
But as I mentioned earlier, Ypres was totally destroyed during the war. So how is it still standing now? The answer is as simple as it is incredible: After the war, the city was rebuilt, brick by brick. The reconstruction was extraordinarily expensive, and the money came from the reparations that Germany had been ordered to pay in the Treaty of Versailles. I don't know if rebuilding Ypres was worth instigating WWII, but they did a truly stunning job.
For reference, this is what the market square looked liked immediately after the war:
As I edit this now in the summer of 2019, the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris stands tragically gutted by a fire that tore through it on April 15. Watching the videos of the spire collapsing while smoke poured from shattered stained-glass windows made my stomach wrench. But as I think back to the wonder of Ypres, I feel a tremendous sense of peace and reassurance. As good as humans are at destroying things---either by choice or by negligence---we are also fantastically good at putting them back together again when we're determined to.
Our last stop of the day was at the Essex Farm Cemetery. It was small and peaceful compared to the larger cemeteries and monuments we'd seen earlier in the day---one of many that dot the countryside around Ypres.
During the war, Essex Farm was used as an aid station. Our guide told us about how the shortages of antiseptic iodine---true antibiotics wouldn't be invented until WWII---were so severe that nurses resorted to using boiled garlic water as the best alternative at hand.
At the same time, the brutality of the war also spurred tremendous advances in medical technology. Blood transfusions, prostheses, and cosmetic surgery all existed before the war, but the war provided an explosion of case studies and opportunities for innovation.
Essex Farm also holds the grave of the youngest known military casualty of the war.
Like many boys, Valentine Strudwick lied about his age so that he could join the army. And those many boys, the adult recruiters looked the other way and let him do it. He was fourteen years old. And almost a year later to the day, he was shot and killed in Flanders.
Essex Farm is also the site where John McCrae, a Canadian medical doctor and a lieutenant colonel, composed the famous poem In Flanders Fields. McCrae was there during the Second Battle of Ypres when the German army launched poison gas into the steadfast Canadian line. McCrae saw the effects of the gas firsthand, not to mention the more conventional horrors wrought by bullets and bayonets.
One of the boys who died was Alexis Helmer, a young officer with whom McCrae had become close friends. Helmer had stepped out his trench to go on patrol one morning when he was hit by an explosive artillery shell. What was left of him was bundled up in an army blanket and buried. McCrae lead the service himself.
Shortly thereafter, McCrae composed one of the most famous wartime poems in the history of the English language:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
  That mark our place; and in the sky
  The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
  Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
    In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
  The torch; be yours to hold it high.
  If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
    In Flanders fields.
If you've ever noticed or wondered why red poppies are the symbol of Remembrance Day (or Veterans Day, as it's known in the US), this is why. Our guide explained that poppies grow best in wet, freshly churned soil. In the Ypres Salient, poppies flourished. On the newly dug graves and in shell-scarred battlefields, these bright red flowers bloomed like fields of blood when spring arrived---a natural monument to an unnatural tragedy.
After a somewhat heated evening---both literally and interpersonally---it was a fresh new morning, and Jessica and I were champing at the bit to go out and explore the historic heart of Bruges.
Not having saved anything for breakfast, we caught a morning bus to the city center and began hunting for a cafe. Even on the relatively unremarkable outskirts of the old town, we could instantly feel the history-laden aura of the cobbled streets and gabled brick storefronts.
We soon found the perfect breakfast stop: a trendy coffee-lover's espresso bar called---appropriately enough---I Love Coffee. It was expensive, but arguably worth the price. There was an intimidating selection of flavors---enough to require a multi-page table menu---plus a lot of charming little touches, like using espresso filters for door handles.
Coffee and muffins consumed, we were ready to continue on to the city's iconic market square, just a couple blocks away. From outside the espresso bar's door, we could already see the bell tower piercing up through the skyline.
We've seen a lot of beautiful market squares in Europe, but Bruges' has to be one of the prettiest. Standing there, it was one of those moments where I was hit by a sudden wave of renewed awe and appreciation for the fact that we were actually in Europe.
Jessica noted that the shops and houses lining the square don't actually stand in straight lines. Some sides bow in while others bow out. Jessica half-jokingly bemoaned that---charming though this was---it made it virtually impossible to take a pano shot without it looking unfairly distorted.
We spent the rest of the morning wandering around the town and poking into shops---mostly chocolate shops.
Finding a chocolate shop in Bruges is a bit like finding a winery in Napa---it's hard to walk 20 yards without finding one. The big companies like Godiva and Leonidas have huge shops on seemingly every street corner, and the space between the corners is littered with smaller independent shops.
We poked into one of the first smaller shops we saw, and even their selection was overwhelming. The lady tending the shop was more than happy to explain what everything was and help us fill a pick-and-mix box, though she wasn't able to tell us much about where the chocolates actually came from. I imagine there are plenty of factories in the country pumping out generic chocolates for all of these little shops to sell as their own, but even mass-produced Belgian chocolate is pretty dang good.
We were especially impressed by the huge variety of chocolates every shop had to offer. Apparently, it’s a popular trick in Belgium to make chocolates that look like rusty old tools. And apparently it’s also popular to make much more adult-themed chocolates and display them prominently in the shop windows---right next to cute Disney-themed chocolates.
And all the while that we walked around, we couldn't get over just how picturesque the place was. Even with all the tourists. Marketers and guide books love to call Bruges the "Paris of the North," and with all its canals and old architecture, it's not hard to see why. Still, I'd argue that Bruges stands well enough apart. It can't compete with Venice in terms of sheer grandeur or history, but it has done one thing that Venice couldn't---remain a socially and economically vibrant city in its own right.
In the sea of Bruges's many excellent and reasonably good chocolate shops, there are a few chocolateries that stand out from the crowd. One of the ones that stands out the most is The Chocolate Line. It's mentioned in all the guidebooks, and Jessica had gotten a recommendation for it from our host as well.
The Chocolate Line has a gastronomic, borderline-hipster aesthetic, and it specializes in single-origin chocolates as well as chocolate pralines with bold flavors like wasabi, Coca-Cola, and hemp seed.
I should probably clarify a bit of terminology. Pretty much everywhere in the world except Belgium, the word "praline" refers to a broad class of confections made from nuts and sugar. In Belgium, however, a praline is what we would call a chocolate truffle or bonbon.
We didn't buy any of their chocolates just then, but we made a note to definitely come back when we didn't have quite so much lugging-around time left ahead of us. Jessica was especially interested in the hemp chocolates---for a friend, of course.
Continuing to enjoy the fairy-tale cityscape, we made our way over to the De Halve Maan Brewery, the last continuously family-owned brewery in Bruges. The brewery has been a local institution for generations, but it gained new international fame in recent years for creating the world's first beer pipeline.
The tour started in a glass-walled room containing the brewery's four mash tuns. Every drop of De Halve Maan beer goes through one of these tuns and is fermented on-site before being piped out to their modern facility just outside of town for aging and bottling. It was almost exactly like visiting a whisky distillery, which makes sense since the first step of making whisky is technically making beer.
Stepping back a bit, we learned a bit about what makes Belgian beer unique. Unlike in the ultra-conservative breweries of Bavaria, it is common for Belgian brewers to add seasonings like cardamom and orange peel to their beers. A Bavarian would say that such adulterations are simply made to hide the faults of an inferior beer, to which a Belgian would reply, "What's so wrong with adding more ingredients if it makes the beer taste better?"
While I can't say that I necessarily prefer Belgian beers to Bavarian ones, I can certainly appreciate their spirit. And they can be very, very good.
We also learned a bit more about the Belgian beer terminology of enkel, dubbel, tripel, etc. Essentially, it has to do with the amount of grain used to make the beer. The more grain you add to your mash, the heavier and more alcoholic the beer will be. Dubbel and tripel beers don’t actually have exactly double or triple the amount of grain as a regular beer, but they do have more---enough to raise the ABV from around 5% to 7% or 9%, respectively. Double and triple beers tend to be darker, but that's only a stylistic choice determined by the ratio of toasted and untoasted grain used in the mash. If a brewer wanted to, they could make a pale 9% ale using all untoasted grain or a dark 5% one by using all toasted grain.
As late as the 1950s, Belgian beer was still being transported by horse carts from the breweries to the taverns. This meant that no one brewery could distribute their beer very far, and every town had its own local brews. With the arrival of supermarkets and delivery trucks in the late 1950s, only the best (and best-marketed) breweries survived.
While De Halve Maan beer is still brewed and given its initial aging at old brewery, the company now buys its malt from suppliers. Similarly to most of the Scotch whisky distilleries we’ve visited, that allowed De Halve Maan to convert the old malting rooms in the attic into a museum and visitor center.
Inside the old malting oven, we came to a narrow spiral-staircase leading up through the chimney and out onto the roof for a gorgeous view of the town and the brewery below.
Around this time, the movie In Bruges somehow got brought up. I sheepishly admitted along with nearly everyone else that I had seen the movie before. Apparently, though, the people of Bruges love the movie. Not necessarily because of its quality---though it is a great film---but because of what it's done for local business. Much like Inverness after the premier of Outlander, Bruges has seen an explosion of tourism year after year since In Bruges was first released in 2008.
After ducking under a remarkably low doorway into the next room of the visitor area, we Learned a bit more about the beer pipeline as well. It runs 3km underground from the historic brewery to their new bottling facility just outside the city center.
Inside the pipeline are five separate conduits: two to send the beer out from the brewery to the bottling plant, two to bring fresh water back from the plant to the brewery, and one filled with sensors for detecting leaks. The pipeline lies about five feet underground and was dug using very expensive laser guidance systems to minimize the amount of damage that had to be done to the streets---sort of like endoscopic surgery for the ground.
A little further on, we actually got to see all the various conduits feeding into the end of the pipeline.
The reason for building the pipeline was simple. Demand was increasing beyond what the brewery could handle at the original plant. There was no room to expand, and the ceaseless caravan of De Halve Maan tanker trucks were already a blight on the old town’s cobbled streets. The company could shut down their operations in the original building and move everything out to their new plant, but that would be tantamount to killing a valuable piece of the city's history and culture. Faced with that alternative, the city finally approved the brewery's five million Euro pipeline as a the least-bad solution.
We also saw a display of Belgian beer glasses. This is another point where Belgian and Bavarian beer traditions diverge. While not entirely standardized, Bavarian beer glasses are quite predictable. Lagers come in a plain, slightly flared glass, and weissbiers come in a tall, curvy glass. Unless you buy a liter, in which case it comes in heavy, dimpled pitcher disguised as a glass mug.
Belgians generally favor the "tulip" style glass, with a stem, wide bowl, and narrow mouth. Each brewery makes and promotes its own special variation of the design, however, and a true purist wouldn't dream of drinking Brewery A beer from a Brewery B glass. I guess being a Belgian beer purist requires either a narrow palate or a spacious cabinet.
Back in the gift shop, I picked up a special-edition Straffe Hendrik quadrupel ale as a gift for my dad. Our guide had done an effective job talking it up during the tour. It is a very dark, 11% ABV ale that has been finished in port wine casks to give it a distinctive twist. Apparently, it can be aged for up to ten years to bring out even more of the dark berry flavors from the port wine casks.
(De Halve Maan's standard tripel and quadrupel ales use a more traditional style compared to the Brugse Zot beers and are sold under the name Straffe Hendrik in homage to the head of the family's previous generation.)
The tour completed, we decided to rest our feet and enjoy a glass of their blond ale in the bar before heading out to explore the city some more. We enjoyed the beer (though I preferred the dubbel), but I was a bit miffed when I headed to the bathroom and found that there weren't any stalls that men were allowed to use---only urinals. Apparently the brewery has a "no number 2s" rule for their patrons.
Anyway…
We soon came across a German Christmas store, much like the one we'd missed in Nuremberg. Jessica insisted that we go inside, and I admit that it was fun and incredibly nostalgic to see all the traditional wood and glass decorations.
Taking a roundabout route through parts of the old town that we hadn't seen yet, we eventually made it to the Burg Square.
Just a block away from the market square that serves as the economic and touristic hub of the old city, the opulent Burg Square is the town's civic and governmental heart. There are some historic buildings you can tour, but we decided to give them a pass. It was getting late in the afternoon at this point, we were reaching the limits of our sightseeing energy for the day, and---frankly---my gastric situation was getting a bit distressing. Of course, I could have just paid to use a public restroom, but that would require me to not be a cheap, stubborn jerk when I'm frustrated.
And anyway, there was one more place we absolutely wanted to see before it closed.
While the Chocolate Line is Bruges's number-one choice for experimental gastro-chocolate, Dumon is the place to go if you want classic chocolates done extraordinarily well. Rick Steves recommends them highly, and they're featured in one of his TV specials on Bruges.
There are a few Dumon shops sprinkled around the old town, and the one we visited was charmingly cozy. We had to go down a handful of steps from the street just to get inside, and the shop itself is little more than a landing at the head of another set of stairs going down to the little factory in the basement. Half of the shop is taken up by the counter, and two small groups of visitors are enough to make the place feel crowded.
We asked about making an a la carte box with the flavors we were most interested in, but they were only offering a menu of specific assortments. I can see the reasoning from the business's side. When you have dozens of different chocolates you have to make every day, it would be a nightmare to have to guess how many of each kind you'd have to make. And, as the lady behind the counter pointed out, the assortments encourage you to try out different flavors that you might be surprised to find you like.
Kindly, though, they will let you swap out a few chocolates here and there if there's anything you absolutely can't stand (or can't have because of allergies).
Back home, we talked with host as we heated up our dinners. We'd gotten permission to use her microwave, and we'd picked up some ready-meals from a convenience store before heading back. We learned that in the Middle Ages, the Atlantic Ocean came right up to the edge of Bruges instead the current coastline eight miles away. A church right near where we were staying also doubled as a lighthouse.
We also learned that the local dialect of Flemish is considered hard to understand by other Belgians–even to the point of requiring subtitles when people are interviewed on TV. Apparently it is actually a blend of standard Flemish (similar to Dutch) and Scandinavian. Probably due to Viking settlers along the coast during the Middle Ages.
And, most importantly, we got to meet her delightful chocolate Labrador named Louis.
There was still more Bruges for us to see, but that would come later. Tomorrow, we would be touring the stunning city of Ypres, near the French border, and the surrounding WWI battlegrounds of Flanders Fields.
Having completed our relatively relaxing week on the Rhine, we barreled onward into the final two weeks of the trip. We would be spending a brief but enjoyable few days in Bruges, a fairytale town filled with medieval spires, cobbled streets, tourist-laden canal boats, and some of the world's best beer and chocolate.
Bruges also represented an especially significant milestone for our trip. Not only was it one of the first places we knew we wanted to visit together, but in a way it would be our last. Yes, we still had two more cities to visit after Bruges (Amsterdam and Reykjavik), but Jessica's brother Nicolas would be joining us for both of them and escorting us back home to California. The three of us were going to have an amazing time in those two cities, but it also meant that these next few days in Bruges would be our last as a duo.
As always, experience with the German rail system was blissfully uneventful. As we walked our way to the station from our wonderful flat in Oberwesel, we got to hear the morning bell chimes from the big red Church of Our Lady, which stands as the town's southern counterpart to the big white Church of St. Martin.
Our first transfer was in Cologne. Besides giving its name to male perfume, the city is best known for its magnificent Gothic cathedral--one of the largest and most-visited in all of Europe.
We only had a 40 minute gap between trains, but luckily the cathedral was right next door to the train station. Jessica very kindly offered to stay behind and buy our lunch for the next leg of the trip while I went out and sightsaw for the both of us.
It was only when I reached the station's main entrance that I realized just how close the cathedral really was. It was right there.
The cathedral is strikingly huge, even as someone who's seen enough huge cathedrals to have become fairly jaded to them. The only ones we'd seen that were bigger were St. Peter's in the Vatican, Seville Cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral, and the Duomo in Florence. And that's just by floor space. The Cologne Cathedral is more than six stories taller than any of them. And it doesn't just have a dainty spire but two massive bell towers--giving it the largest façade of any church in the world
Impressively, the church is still mostly original. It was hit by 15 bombs during WWII, but the structure stayed strong, and the people had plenty of time to safely stow the important art and artifacts beforehand.
In the square facing the cathedral façade is an ancient stone archway that marks the northern gate of the city's original Roman settlement. The name Cologne is actually derived from the Latin word colonia, meaning colony.
I knew I was pushing it, but I just had to go inside, even if only for a minute. So I did.
I went in just long enough to look around and snap a few pictures. It wasn't nearly enough time to appreciate the cathedral's impressiveness, but it was still enough time to be thoroughly impressed. On the way out, I noticed a lion-head brass door knocker whose nose apparently serves as a popular good luck charm.
Jessica was looking a bit anxiously for me when I made it back to the station, but I made it in plenty of time with at least several whole minutes to spare.
Our next leg was on a bullet train from Cologne to Brussels. It was hot and crowded, but luckily we had reserved seats. And it wasn't too long of a trip.
The last train from Brussels to Bruges was mercifully cool and empty. Jessica and I had an entire floor of our train car all to ourselves. At least, we did until a middle-aged woman boarded and decided to choose a seat facing us just two rows up. We would have been mildly annoyed, but instead we were mildly worried for her.
The woman was wheezing alarmingly throughout the entire ride and seemed ready to keel over at any second. Jessica and I were mentally preparing ourselves to call for emergency services the moment she did so, but the woman seemed remarkably composed, all things considered. So instead we just spent the rest of the ride pretending everything was totally cool and normal.
Finally, we had arrived in Bruges, and as usual we had a clear set of objectives. We didn't have our tickets out of town yet, so we had to get our tickets out of town. We didn't have a kitchen at our Airbnb, so we needed to buy something for dinner that we could eat cold. And we were staying out in the suburbs, so we needed a bus pass.
After a bit of confused wandering and backtracking, we found the ticket counter and waited in line to buy our tickets to Amsterdam. Check.
Next, we split up. I would go buy our bus passes while Jessica ordered sandwiches at a deli in the station.
My mission did not go as smoothly as I would have hoped. I found the automated kiosks for the local transit system easily enough, but that was just the beginning. Like literally every ticket kiosk we'd come across on our trip, the kiosks had an English language option. Unfortunately for me, these particular kiosks only managed to translate about half the words into English. And it wasn't the half I would have chosen.
Afraid of accidentally choosing the wrong tickets--there were several with close variations of the name I was looking for--my fight-or-flight response kicked in, and I headed back to Jessica to regroup. As we always said, between the two of us we can always constitute the brainpower of one competent traveler.
Meanwhile, Jessica was having no problems buying our sandwiches for dinner. And as we always do, she immediately started noticing the funny little things that differentiate one country from another.
Together, we made it back to the ticket kiosks. It wasn't five minutes after I'd left, but in the meantime they'd all been closed off for the day. Apparently the ticket machines in Bruges work union hours, too.
Buying tickets from the bus driver instead was a non-starter. Even if we were willing to "waste" money on a ticket instead of a pass--which I stubbornly wasn't--the bus drivers didn't take cards and would only accept exact change, which we didn't have.
It was Sunday evening, and everything around us was rapidly shutting down.
Feeling helpless, frustrated, and misused, I got back in the painfully slow line for the train ticket counter to ask if they knew anywhere in walking distance we could buy the bus passes we needed. The man at the counter said that he could sell us some passes, but not the kind of passes I was wanting to buy.
I admit that I came dangerously close to falling into the ugly stereotype of the angry entitled American tourist. I managed to (mostly) hang onto my dignity, however, and after expressing only a few pathetically whiny sentiments, I went ahead and bought the passes he'd offered.
As I did some mental math on the bus ride over to our Airbnb, I realized that the passes we'd gotten were actually a better deal for us than the ones I'd been trying to get. Whoops.
The bus dropped us off right at our place, but we didn't get to see any of the city's historic core. We did find out how to get to the hospital, however, which was nice. But no worries, we would have two full days to explore the city center to our hearts’ content.
Our Airbnb host wasn't home when we arrived, but she had left the keys for us in a bowl outside her door. Not hidden under a mat or anything--just in a bowl. Like dog food. It still surprises me how trusting people are in some parts of the world, especially when dealing with strangers.
The house was nice and thoughtfully furnished, but our room in it was small. It was also hot and full of flies and mosquitoes. We were a little stressed out from the day's adventures, and we had one of our more heated spats of the trip. It was completely stupid, as most spats are, and it resolved itself quickly enough. Thankfully, after nearly six months on the road together, we've learned the importance not just of knowing how to get along but also of how to be angry at each other in the least destructive way possible.
Once our tempers had cooled, we celebrated our arrival by watching In Bruges, the British dark comedy that had first put the city on our mental radar. It feels a little silly to say that we planned part of our itinerary around visiting a city that happened to be featured in a movie we both kind of like, but I'm finding that some of life's best discoveries are made for silly reasons. And as we'd learn the following day, in this case we're apparently far from alone.
Crossing between France and Germany, the Mosel (or Moselle) river valley is known for its sleepy, picturesque villages and premium white wines. Some of the most expensive wines in the world are Mosel Rieslings. But there are plenty of more affordable choices, too, and the Mosel is a popular destination for German wine-lovers and nature-lovers alike.
So of course Jessica and I had to take a look.
Cochem is about as long of a train ride away from Oberwesel as Frankfurt is, but the view is much prettier. After changing trains in Koblenz, we made our way up the Mosel river to Cochem. In his Germany guidebook, Rick Steves describes the Mosel as having the quiet, picturesque calm that people expect the much more industrialized Rhine to have.
Nestled along the outside curve of a horseshoe bend in the river, Cochem is a picturesque old town surrounded by vineyards, filled with charming narrow alleys lined with wine shops, and bustling with somewhat less charming tourists. It was still morning, so we decided to explore the town first and taste wine second.
Making our way through the streets, we soon came to the town's central market square. We found a shop selling a beautiful assortment of gemstones, and Jessica picked out a small turtle carved from iridescent gold obsidian.
We continued on up toward the castle that overlooks the town. The current castle is a fanciful 19th-century Neo-Gothic reconstruction. The original castle was destroyed during the Nine Years' War of the late 17th century, when Louis XIV tried to expand France's borders on all sides, invading Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany all at once. The only thing France ended up winning was Alsace---one of the many times in the last 800 years that land was passed between French and German hands.
We didn't go all the way up to the castle. It was a fairly long and steep walk, and we weren't planning to actually take a tour inside the castle. So we went up until we got a satisfactory view of the castle and surrounding vineyards, then headed back into town for some lunch.
On the way back down, we saw some entertaining storefronts, including wilted wine glasses and a wine shop named "Boos."
Back in the main market square, we stopped at a Rick Steves-recommended butcher for some deliciously fresh hamburgers.
Finally, it was finally time to start tasting some wines. This was actually the first time on the trip that we did wine tasting without being part of a tour group, and it proved more difficult than we expected. We didn't really know the best way to go about it, so rather than get bogged down in decision paralysis, we just started going into any wine shop we passed by that looked interesting.
The first couple of shops were misses. The labels and descriptions were all in German, the few shopkeepers seemed busy helping people who already knew what they wanted, and there didn't seem to be any indication that they actually offered tastings.
Refining our search, we picked out a place with a sign that specifically said "tastings" on it. But when we asked the person behind the counter, she seemed confused and insisted that they did not offer tastings. Well, they did offer tastings, but only if you bought the wine first.
And so on. As we were fast learning, Germany---or at least the Mosel region---seems to have a strikingly different wine culture from the US when it comes to tasting and purchasing wines. As far as we could gather, the expected procedure is to go in, tell the proprietor what kind of wines you like, and buy whichever bottles they recommend. Preferably by the case. Visitors are mainly other Germans who travel to the area periodically to vacation and restock their cellars. A couple of American backpackers looking to buy a bottle or two don't really register. A few shops only sold by the case and weren't interested in selling an individual bottle.
And all the while as we walked around the town, we were constantly pushing our way through groups of tourists and schoolchildren. At one point we ducked into a wine shop just to kill time until a particularly large throng of kids had moved well ahead of us.
As it happened, this was the one shop in town where we were actually able to get a tasting. The wines were mostly all Rieslings---the specialty of the region---but we've come to learn that Riesling is a bit of a chameleon grape. In the hands of an expert German vintner, Riesling can be sweet or dry, fresh and crisp or syrupy-rich. We told the woman at the shop that we like dry wines with a balance of fruitiness and minerality, and the first tasting she gave us was excellent. We tasted a couple more wines, then bought a bottle of the first one. The proprietor seemed a little disappointed that we didn't want to at least buy a half-case (6 bottles), but to her credit she didn't balk or complain.
As cute as it is, Cochem's old town is pretty tiny, and it didn't take more than a few hours for us to feel satisfied with our visit. There was a Rick Steves-recommended vineyard (Familienweingut Rademacher) back near the train station, so we decided to make that our last stop of the day. But first, we took a Rick Steves-recommended detour.
A chairlift on the edge of town carries tourists up to the top of the hills overlooking Cochem. A short but scrambly hike took us to an observation point with a spectacular postcard view of the town and its idyllic little horseshoe bend in the Mosel river valley.
After soaking in the views, we hiked down a trail that lead down into the vineyards by the train station.
Rick Steves described the hike as easy-to-moderate, but we found it to be pretty intense---not especially taxing, but fairly treacherous. The path was rocky and narrow, with steep descents and a point where you need to climb down a steep, narrow, uneven set of carved stairs without any handrail. Jessica and I didn't have any trouble, but we hated to imagine what would have happened if we'd taken my mom on this "easy" hike.
We eventually made it down to the winery, but we had to walk around the place a few times before we were confident enough to go in. The place seemed deserted except for a group of workers playing cards by the back door, completely uninterested in our presence.
We eventually ducked our head inside and found that we were, in fact, in the right place. But not at a great time, the proprietor apologetically explained. We had just missed a major wine festival the weekend before, and they weren't really doing walk-in tastings at the moment.
Jessica and I were prepared to accept this small disappointment as a suitable capstone to our fun but confusing visit to the heart of German wine country. The proprietor seemed far more distraught by this development than we were. After a bit of hemming and hawing, he decided that, yes, we could do a tasting after all. He sat us down at a six-person table and popped open four fresh bottles of wine.
We tasted a quartet of Rieslings---two dry, one semi-sweet, and one very sweet. Each one had a completely different flavor profile form the others, and this tasting actually brought out the differences in our individual tastes more than usual. Jessica loved the driest one, which I wasn't as big a fan of, and I loved the flavors of the semi-sweet wine, which was still too sweet for Jessica.
The second dry wine was just right for both of us, however, and we decided to buy a few bottles---partly to show our gratitude to the proprietor for giving us this two-person tasting and partly because we were really looking forward to drinking them.
We got an extremely generous discount and made our way back to the train station, not sure whether to be grateful or concerned that he'd made a mistake. In any case, we were satisfied with our trip. We'd seen some beautiful places, tasted some fantastic wines, and gained a better understanding for German wine culture and how it differs from what we're used to.
If I were to come back, I would probably stay in Cochem for at least a few days, preferably with a couple companions. That way, we could use Cochem home base to explore the nearby towns, castles, and wineries, then come home each night and sample some wines the German way---by the bottle.
From a historical and economic perspective, Frankfurt is fascinating. It was one of the largest and most powerful cities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was where emperors were selected by an electoral college, and it was the home of the first trade fairs in Europe. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankfurt an epicenter of attempted democratic reform. Today, it remains one of the most important cities in Europe for trade and finance. It is home to the EU's central bank and one of Europe's largest stock exchanges. It's train station and airport are likewise among the busiest in all of Europe.
From a tourist perspective, Frankfurt is a bit odd. Despite being such an important city, the historical tourist quarter is quite small. Unlike Munich and Nuremberg, Frankfurt was rebuilt as a fully modern city after WWII, filled with gridded streets and steel skyscrapers. Just a few blocks around the medieval city hall and cathedral were preserved for posterity. Â A few hours proved more than enough for us to feel that we had gotten a good taste.
Of course, it probably didn't help that we visited on a Monday, when most of the tourist shops and attractions were closed.
Yeah, we probably could have planned our visit better, but having planned every other part of the trip to the point of exhaustion, we tried to give ourselves the gift of going with the flow for once and just seeing what happened. I have to admit that it didn't come easily to me, and I constantly had to fight a rising frustration that we were missing out on things because we hadn't planned enough.
We definitely did miss out on some cool things, but that's bound to happen no matter what.
After a calm hour-and-a-half train ride east from Oberwesel, we arrived at Frankfurt's central station. With plenty of time and very little planned, we decided to buy tickets for the City Sightseeing hop-on hop-off tour buses. It was a lot cheaper than it had been in London, but there was also a lot less to see.
The entire route took less than an hour, and the commentary track wasn't nearly as interesting--a lot of pointing out which banks owned which skyscrapers. More interestingly, we did get to appreciate the city's peculiar love of odd statuary.
Still, even if the bus tour was a little underwhelming, it was a nice way to get our bearings. Plus, it dropped us off right at the entrance to the city's historic core.
The first sight to greet us there was the red-brick Church of Saint Paul. Architecturally, it is interesting for being round rather than cross-shaped. Historically, it is interesting for being the site of Germany's first democratically elected parliament.
In 1848, a wave of democratic revolts surged across Europe from Ireland to Romania. Germany (then a confederation of largely independent states) was caught up as well, and Frankfurt became the epicenter of a movement to unite all of Germany into a single democratic nation. A provisional parliament was set up in the Church of St. Paul, and for a while its success seemed inevitable.
But as it so often happens, forming a government proved much harder than forming a revolution. The monarchs and aristocrats stood aside and bided their time while the provisional parliament endlessly bickered over the details of the proposed constitution. Eventually, the parliament collapsed under the weight of its own frustrations and disillusionment. Two decades later, Germany was instead unified under the autocratic rule of the King Wilhelm I of Prussia and his ruthless chief minister Otto von Bismarck.
The church was the first historic structure in the city to be repaired after WWII, and it was honored as a symbol of Germany's commitment to a democratic future.
Upstairs from the ground-floor museum is the church's main hall, a towering and impressively airy space that is now used for concerts instead of religious services. Along the circular wall hang the flags of Germany's 16 federal states.
Moving further into the old town, we soon reached Römerberg, the old town square. At one end stands the Römer building, which as served as the town hall since 1405. It was also where Holy Roman Emperors celebrated after being coronated at the nearby cathedral. Like everything else here, the Römer was almost entirely rebuilt after WWII. As far as we could tell, they did a great job.
At the center of the square stands a statue of Justice without a blindfold, keeping careful watch over the Römer. At least, it usually does. Today it seemed to have gone on vacation--whether voluntary or not, we couldn't say.
On the ground nearby, I found a bronze memorial for a Nazi book burning that took place in the square in 1933. Around the edges of the plaque reads a quote by the 19th-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Roughly translated, it reads: "The burning of books is but foreplay to the burning of people."
I wanted to say something about how chillingly prophetic those words proved to be, but of course they weren't prophetic at all. As we've learned by this point, the Nazis didn't do anything new; they just did it bigger and on camera.
The square was fairly quiet since it was a Monday and most of the tourist shops and exhibitions were closed. After getting a last look around, we headed over the two small blocks to Frankfurt Cathedral.
The cathedral, officially known as the Imperial Cathedral of St. Bartholomew, is a hulking Gothic construction of red stone. Despite the high vaulted ceilings, the atmosphere felt dark and heavy to me. One small but fun design element involved the walls.
See how the walls are made of cleanly cut and squared red stone? Look again.
The walls are actually covered in red plaster and painted with thin red lines to give the illusion of mortared stone. Apparently this was all the rage in medieval German church design.
The church has some beautiful art and altarpieces on display, but the real reason I was so interested to visit was a small room tucked behind a small door in a side chapel, so inconspicuous that I searched up and down the transepts twice before noticing someone going through it.
It was in this small room that the most powerful lords and clergy of the Holy Roman Empire would gather to each time it came to choose a new emperor. Granted, for most of that time it was little more than a rubber stamp to continue the Habsburg dynasty, but still. Imagine if, once in a generation, the governors of all 50 US states gathered to elect a new president for life in a dark little room like this.
Turning south, we walked a couple blocks down the river Main. Walking out onto the 19th-century wrought-iron Eiserner Steg bridge, we were treated to a wonderful view of the city skyline.
The rest of our visit was mostly spent shopping. Jessica had hoped to find a scarf for a somewhat niche German soccer team, but we never did find it. I had better luck at a Samsung store, where I picked up a USB adapter to replace one I'd lost at some point during the previous week. I also made a small detour to look at some pens.
For some reason I was under the impression that Faber-Castell was headquartered in Frankfurt, when actually it is headquartered in a castle just outside of Nuremberg. Still, it was fun to visit this little shop and admire some nice pens. Upstairs, we got to play with a set of watercolor pencils.
Nearby, there was also a broad square dominated by a statue of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt. I'd always just known of Goethe as the guy who wrote Faust, the iconic story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power.
In Germany, however, Goethe isn't any mere writer. Imagine Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci combined, but an even bigger deal--that's what Goethe is to Germany. Not only is Faust often credited as the greatest thing ever written in the German language, Goethe also dabbled extensively in science and philosophy in addition to writing an overwhelming volume of novels, plays, and poems.
Like Mozart, Goethe was a prodigy and recognized for his genius at a young age. Also like Mozart, Goethe spent pretty much all of his adult life far away from the home city that so proudly claims his legacy.
As we made our way back to the train station, we walked through a few blocks of clean, high-density skyscrapers, a lovely park, and then a grim half-mile of brothels and open-air drug use. There are three parallel streets leading from the train station into downtown Frankfurt, and apparently it makes a big difference which one you choose.
Back at the train station, we picked up a couple bottles of "apple wine," a local specialty for us to enjoy on the train ride back. It was basically a very dry, somewhat bitter cider, much like the cidre sec we had in Normandy.
One last bit of excitement for the day: For the most part, Deutsche Bahn--the German train service--was easily the most reliable of all the ones we used in Europe. Even the Swiss trains let us down by comparison. But as we waited for out train home to leave Frankfurt, the departure time came and went. There was some jolting and screeching, and some lights flickering on and off. And more time went by. Our glasses of apple wine were long finished. Then, a voice on the PA system announced something in German, and everyone bolted off the train.
Naturally, we followed.
As it turned out, two cars of the train that needed to be separated had become locked together, and the engineers couldn't get them apart. So the speaker had told us to head over to the next train, which was leaving in just a few minutes--plenty of time for a prompt German traveler. Luckily, we had plenty of prompt German travelers to take our lead from.
Once on the new train, everything was back to clockwork, and we enjoyed a smooth hour and a half ride back to Oberwesel. We didn't get very good seats due to the last minute change. We spent the first twenty minutes or so on fold-down chairs in the bike storage area. The train emptied out quickly enough as we escaped the urban sprawl surrounding Frankfurt, however, and a quiet hour and a half later we were back home.
Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend visiting Frankfurt the way we did, but I'm still glad we went. For anyone interested in visiting Frankfurt, I would recommend either a well-planned day trip that connects its various sights or staying in the city and using it as a base to explore the nearby towns and villages along the Rhine.
After a busy week in Munich, it was time for a scenic and relaxing week on the Rhine. We’d be staying in a charming little medieval town called Oberwesel, halfway between the cities of Frankfurt and Koblenz. None of the Germans we’d talked so far had ever heard of it. Which is a shame because it’s gorgeous–and also dead quiet. But we’ll get to that later.
We didn’t fit in quite as much sightseeing as we’d hoped, but we did get some rest and relaxation that we desperately needed. After nearly six months abroad and with only three weeks left, we were starting to feel the strain of constantly staying on the move.
The train ride from Munich to Oberwesel was long but easy, and toward the end we got to enjoy a lovely preview of the vineyard-laced Rhine river valley.
From the train station, we could just barely see the local castle–now a hotel and restaurant–peeking up from the top of a nearby hill.
Our host kindly offered to pick us up at the station and drive us to our Airbnb. It was only about half a mile away, and it might have been faster just to walk rather than wait, but after five and a half months on the road, we were grateful for any opportunity to not lug our packs across town.
Our Airbnb flat was wonderfully spacious and comfortable, with a large dining/living room, a full kitchen, and two full bedrooms. It was one of our best homes through the entire trip, right up there with those in Avignon and Betws-y-Coed.
After settling in, we set about finding something for dinner. It was a Sunday evening, so the grocery store and most of the restaurants were closed. Luckily, we found a delightful little garden restaurant where we enjoyed some great food and a tasty local wine–a perfect introduction to the region.
After dinner, there was still plenty of summer sunlight left, so we took a relaxing walk around the town.
The Rhine is positively peppered with old castles and walled towns, and Oberwesel has the best-preserved medieval walls of them all. Inside these walls is a charming collection of buildings that mostly date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, but some of the houses and churches date back to the Middle Ages.
In the center of the town is a small but proudly ornamented market square, featuring the beautiful town hall, the local bank, and a statue of a giant wine glass.
Going out through the walls, Jessica and I walked along the waterfront. We spotted the ferry office where we’d need to book tickets for our Rhine cruise on a later date, and we got some more great views of the town.
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The next day we visited Frankfurt. It was a fun if somewhat unstructured day trip to a very historic city, and we had a pretty good time. We’ll cover it all in our next post.
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Our first full day in Oberwesel was a lazy one. We slept in, walked over to the local TI to get some information on the local wineries and wine bars, then went grocery shopping. There are two main grocery stores in Oberwesel, and they're both on the far southern outskirts of town--nearly a mile away from where we were staying. Not having a car, we would have to balance the number of trips we wanted to make with the amount of stuff we wanted to carry each time we went shopping.
After bringing our food haul home and fixing up some lunch--consisting of fresh rolls, knackwurst, and sweet mustard--we went out to wander some more around town.
Even in the middle of a weekday, Oberwesel was almost depressingly quiet. It seems like these Rhine villages only really come alive on Fridays, Saturdays, and festival days, when all the wine shops open. Otherwise, a lot of stores seem to stay closed during the week or else keep very short hours. Many storefronts were boarded up, and "For Lease" signs were visible on almost every corner outside the main market square.
Still, despite the borderline ghost-town atmosphere, it was spectacularly picturesque.
We wandered up toward the northern edge of town and eventually climbed a staircase leading up onto the walls. There was a group of wasps busy at work, but we gave them a wide berth and enjoyed some spectacular views of the town.
We took another path down from the wall and saw a little outdoor chapel, featuring icons of local patron saints.
Making our way back along the wall into town, we stumbled upon an old hotel bearing a commemoration plaque. Apparently, this hotel is the site of one of the first known performances of the German national anthem ("Deutschland, Deutschland uber Alles…").
Ironically, while this song's call to put Germany Above All was tainted by the Nazis, it was originally intended as a call for liberalization. At the time it was written in the 1800s, Germany was divided into a confederation of autocratic states that put their rulers' squabbles and ambitions above the welfare of the people. The anthem's call was meant to encourage a united Germany where the good of the people came above political infighting.
On a corner near the market square, we found another testament to the damage done by the Nazi regime--a holocaust memorial dedicated to the town's Jewish residents who were deported or arrested by the Nazi regime.
On a happier note, Jessica and I were able to make a purchase that we had long been looking forward too--a pair of Rhine wine glasses.
There seemed to be only a single tourist shop in town that was open that day, but they had a great selection of Rhine glasses and other souvenirs.
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A cruise along the Rhine is an absolute must-do for anyone visiting the area. It proved a bit more complicated that we had anticipated, however, and we probably would have had an even better time if we had a bit more sense what we were getting into.
Ferries go up and down the river all day, but it's a long ride with a tight and complex timetable. Trying to figure out which tickets to buy was also a bit of a head-scratcher. You can get a hop-on-hop-off type ticket, but it's expensive and there aren't enough boats that you can take much advantage.
After puzzling it over between ourselves, Jessica and I eventually just decided to ask the ladies at the KD Rhine ticket counter what we should do. The first thing we should have done was to just go up and ask them in the first place, since they were able to sort us out very quickly.
Our plan was to start in Oberwesel, ride north downriver to Koblenz--a medium-sized city at the confluence of the Rhine and Mosel rivers--stop for lunch, then ride back upstream past Oberwesel to the popular tourist town of Bacharach. After exploring to our hearts' content, we would catch a quick train back home to Oberwesel.
After a couple minutes explaining this to the ticket ladies, they recommended a round-trip ticket from Bacharach to Koblenz as the most economical option.
Finally, our boat arrived and it was time to board. We were a little nervous when we first boarded. Far from the luxuriously lazy experience I was expecting, the boat was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with tourists and nowhere to sit down. There was also no wifi onboard, contrary to the cruise company’s advertisements. We had been hoping to get some work done on the return ride, but if the crowds stayed the same, that wouldn’t be an option anyway.
More concerning was the lack of any food service onboard–also contrary to the advertisements.
At one of the next stops, however, a large group disembarked, and there was room for us to sit down, for Jessica to take a Dramamine, and for both of us to just enjoy the ride. A huge chunk of the tourists who got off were Japanese. Apparently, one of the castles is privately owned by a Japanese businessman, and the nearby town of St. Goarshausen has become an object of fascination among Japanese tourists.
It's funny how different places become tourist destinations for different cultures. I'm sure Heidelburg would not have become a mecca for American tourists were it not for the American GI’s stationed there after WWII.
The Japanese castle is called Burg Katz, which means Cat Castle. Close by stands the rival Mouse Castle. And across the river from Burg Katz is the massive Rheinfels Castle in St. Goar, which Burg Katz was built to supplement. Between the two of them, the owners could command an entire stretch of the Rhine.
Because that's what all of these castles were built to do.
As we've learned so thoroughly, Germany spent the vast majority of its history as a constellation of semi-independent states that were allied more in theory than in practice. Local lords had free reign to raise money and fight for their own interests in pretty much any way they saw fit.
The Rhine was one of the busiest trade routes of them all, and everyone wanted a taste. Castles were erected every few miles, and sometimes much closer. Not for war or defense, but for toll collecting. Any trader wishing to raft their goods downstream would need cash for dozens of tolls along the way.
Most of those castles fell into ruin or were destroyed during various border wars with France, but a good handful have survived or been rebuilt by wealthy enthusiasts.
Nature provided its own set of obstacles as well. As idyllic as the sleepy valley seems to us, parts of it were a menace to sailors. Just downriver of Oberwesel lies a cluster of deadly reefs known as the Seven Sisters, followed by a narrow hairpin turn in the shadow of a massive, echoing cliffside known as the Loreley (a sort of Germanic equivalent to the mythological Green sirens). Simply making it the few miles from Oberwesel to St. Goar could be a day-long endeavor and would certainly merit an evening's celebration.
High-contrast signs and kilometer markers posted along the banks of the river make it easy to follow along in a guidebook.
Above St. Goar looms the aforementioned Rheinfels Castle. Now a hollow ruin, it was once one of the mightiest castles in the entire Holy Roman Empire--a bastion of vigilance against the threat of French invasion.
Further downriver stand the twin castles of Sterrenberg and Liebenstein, joined together by a long defensive wall.
Even further downriver are the charming town of Boppard--where we had originally considered staying--and the brilliantly whitewashed Marksburg Castle--possibly the best-looking of all the Rhine castles.
Marksburg was never destroyed, and it has been restored to look more or less like it would have back in the days of the Holy Roman Empire.
Learned from Rick Steves that there are two German words for "castle," each with its own meaning. A burg is a functional castle like pretty much all of the castles on the Rhine once were, whereas a schloss is luxurious castle used primarily as a prestigious residence, like Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau back in Bavaria.
The last stretch of the Rhine is mostly filled with long lonely vineyards and a constant stream of commercial barges going past in both directions. Even in the age of trains, planes, and ultramax cargo ships, the humble river barge remains a mainstay of European trade.
Finally, we arrived in Koblenz. It seems like a nice city, but we were hungry and in a hurry. Since there hadn't been any food on board, getting something to eat was top priority. Moreover, our boat was behind schedule, so we had just 30 minutes to get off the boat, find something to eat, eat it, and get back on the boat with enough time left to get a good seat.
The closest fast food or grocery store we could find on our phones was over 10 minutes’ walk each way, so we ended up just grabbing a bratwurst from a nearby stand, scarfing it down, and getting back onto the boat. Luckily for me, we had brought some meal bars just in case.
We decided to enjoy the upstream journey below-decks, where we could enjoy some comfortable seats, cold beers, and a table to set up our laptops and get a bit of planning done.
About halfway back, though, it started to rain–driving everyone above-deck down below. Then we picked up a huge crowd of people from one of the towns. Our quiet, comfy booth soon became a crowded, stuffy, and painfully noisy confinement. I must admit that the pressure of all the planning, moving, and sightseeing we'd been doing hit me especially hard that day, and that hour in particular was not my happiest. At least the beer helped once I finally broke down and ordered one, too.
The rain had mostly died down by the time we were nearing Oberwesel, so I went back above-decks to get some views and fresh air.
But remember, we weren't done yet. We'd be heading a few stops further upriver.
Just upriver from Oberwesel lies the painfully postcard-perfect town of Kaub. On the hillside nearby stands Gutenfels Castle, while its sister Pfalz Castle sits right in the river--the ideal spot for collecting tolls.
Finally, with the lowering sun piercing the clouds like a spotlight, we arrived at our final stop--Bacharach, a winemaking town named after the god of wine Bacchus himself.
Bacharach is Rick Steves’ top recommended place for staying on the Rhine, and after visiting it we can see why. It’s not as big as Oberwesel or dramatic as St. Goar, but its sweeping hillsides, cobbled streets, and half-timbered houses are a photographer’s delight. Seriously, if we had an extra day I’d be tempted to come back and spend it all just taking pictures.
Finally, we caught the train back to Oberwesel, arriving home tired and hungry but satisfied with the day’s adventure.
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We spent the next day taking a trip to Cochem, a small town on the Mosel river known for its charming medieval architecture and abundance of wine shops. There was no question that Jessica and I had to go for ourselves. Things didn't all go quite as expected, that just meant that we got to learn a lot we didn't know about German wine tasting culture. It was a fun day, and we'll cover it in it's own post, too.
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We had originally planned to spend the next day visiting St. Goar and Rheinfels Castle, but instead we decided to stay home and relax.
Well, we stayed home, but we didn’t do very much relaxing.
We decided to do some planning for our upcoming stay in Amsterdam, the penultimate destination of our trip. We hashed out our itinerary easily enough, but when it came to planning our transit strategy, things got very frustrating very quickly.
Public transit in Amsterdam is very easy and reasonably affordable, as long as you’re staying inside the city limits. We weren't staying that far outside the city center, but apparently it was enough to put us into a different municipality. Most major cities have transit cards or passes that you can buy and use to get cheap access to local transit and commuter trains. In Amsterdam, however, you can only get one of these cards if you're a resident. Rather than being able to use a discount transit pass like we had in many other European cities, we'd need to buy two sets of full-price tickets for every day we went into the city--one for the commuter train and one for the city transit system.
Lesson learned: If you're going to try and save money by being clever, make sure that you are actually being as clever as you think you are.
In the end, we at least managed to find a smartphone app by the Dutch rail system that would let us buy our tickets digitally--something that would prove far more important than we could have anticipated.
Anyway, all of that proved to be a headache that consumed much of our day.
Things got better that evening, when we went to a wine tasting and cellar tour at a local winery called Lanius-Knabb. We'd heard about the place when we were first researching Oberwesel, and when we visited the TI a few days earlier, they offered to call the place up and let them know we were coming.
We showed up right on time, but the owner didn't seem to have been expecting us. He let us in, however, and we joined a German couple who were already a couple glasses into the tasting. Perhaps the information in the TI brochure was out of date, or maybe Rhine time is just a bit like island time that way.
In any case, we had a great time. The German couple didn't speak much English, but their English was still far better than our German. They seemed very nice, and we learned they were from the town of NĂĽrburg (not to be confused with Nuremberg, which is on the opposite side of the country).
Our first two wines were Pinot Noirs--one red and one white. They were interesting, but not particularly enjoyable (at least to me). The red tasted tight and sour, while the white seemed flat and a little boring. Jessica liked the white better, since it was a bit like an unoaked Chardonnay.
Next came the dry Rieslings, which were spectacular.
Their standard estate wine was light and fruity, with light and refreshing fruity flavors that sparkle and dance on the tongue.
The second Riesling--which they called their "Premier Cru"--was even better. It didn’t dance, but it had a more powerful and cohesive flavor profile.
The third Riesling–which they called their "Grand Cru"–blew everything else away. It was rich, fruity, tart, powerful, and refreshing all at once. And the owner of the winery (who was the one giving the tasting) said that it was still too young to really appreciate. Basic Rieslings should be drunk within a year or two, but he said that this one could be cellared for around ten years before it hits its prime.
This third Riesling was made exclusively with grapes from their Oelsberg vineyard--a distinctive sideways "Y" on the slopes just north of town. We'd seen it plenty of times by then and recognized its picture instantly.
We then moved on to the sweeter Rieslings, with one half-dry, one sweet, and one late harvest (very sweet). I liked them all, but the last two were too sweet for Jessica's taste. She did still appreciate them, though, comparing them favorably to some California dessert wines that failed to reach the same level of balance and delicacy as these Rieslings.
While we were enjoying our tasting, a bit of travel stress managed to force its way back in. Halfway through, our phones buzzed to inform us that our Airbnb host for Iceland had just cancelled our reservation.
Great.
But we couldn’t do anything about it then, so we resolved not to worry about it. It also gave us an excuse to stay in town the following day as well so that we could sort everything out.
After the tasting was finished, we bought two bottles of the Oelsberg Riesling, saddened to learn that the winery doesn't ship to the US. As we'd come to expect, our German friends bought far more wine. Then, unexpectedly, they left. Which left us to enjoy a 1-on-2 tour of the cellar with the owner.
Now, you might have already noticed something a bit strange. Every other time we've done a wine tasting with a cellar tour--at home or in Europe--the cellar tour always came before the tasting. And that seems like a very sensible idea, considering all the stairs, dark corridors, and industrial equipment that one has to traverse along the way.
We made it through just fine, however, and we had a good time listing to the owner. He told us about his passion for winemaking and the story of how he grew the estate from one small vineyard to a relatively large operation over the past twenty-something years.
Jessica particularly appreciated how the cellar reminded us of the ones we saw in Burgundy, filled with natural dust and molds. In the States, everything is sterile. Which isn’t to say that cleanliness is a bad thing, but sterility also means lifeless. And when it comes to things like wine or beer or even milk, cheese, and bread, food is alive. Sterile food is dead food. And it just doesn’t taste as good.
Thoroughly pleased and beginning to sober, we made our way home and enjoyed a nice, simple dinner–with a bottle of wine, of course.
Such a good wine…
—Â
On our last day in Oberwesel--time flies!--we slept in, made a nice big breakfast, and sorted out the Iceland situation. We were able to find a very nice place that was only a bit more expensive than our original place, and we booked it.
We later learned that our original host had to cancel all of her bookings because of an emergency situation that had rendered their home uninhabitable. We made sure to tell them not to worry about us and that we hoped their situation improved soon.
While we hadn't done nearly as much sightseeing as I had originally hoped, I at least wanted see more of Oberwesel itself. Luckily, our Rick Steves guidebook had a great walk mapped out for us, starting at the market square.
Like many towns along the Rhine, Oberwesel started as a Celtic settlement in pre-Roman times. After the Romans displaced the Celts from the European mainland, it became a Roman military base, and then a rest stop for Medieval loggers and traders moving their products downriver.
Today, the Rhine is as economically important as ever, but the diesel-powered barges no longer need to stop for a rest every few miles. The towns of the region are struggling to maintain their relevance and identity through winegrowing and tourism, but it's an uphill battle. The streets are all but abandoned on most days, and many of the vineyards lining the river valley have been left untended in the hope that future generations will have the will and resources to reclaim them.
In a way, it reminds me of all the small, struggling towns you might pass through on the old US Route 66, or any other bypassed backroads.
The main attraction of Oberwesel in particular is its exceptionally well-maintained medieval wall and its many surviving watchtowers--each of which has its own distinctive character.
The Hospital Tower--named for its proximity to the town's medieval hospital--was built too heavy for its foundations and started to lean over like the Tower of Pisa. Rather than start over, the builders simply lopped off the top at an angle to make the roof level.
A little further down is the chapel of the medieval hospital, which is built directly into the walls--perhaps so that the guardsmen of the town could pop in for a quick prayer while on their rounds.
Next is the Stein Tower, named for the town's first paved road. It has a similar canter to the Hospital Tower, but this one is climbable. Steep wooden stairs carried us up to the top, where we enjoyed an absolutely spectacular view.
Apparently, this very spot was enjoyed by some of the most famous Romantic writers and painters of the 19th century, including Victor Hugo.
Further downriver stand the beautiful and now-inaccessible Cat and Ox towers, which marked the northwestern corner of the town.
Having reached the end of this stretch of wall, we climbed down from the wall and climbed up to St. Martin's, the big white church overlooking the northern end of town.
Much like Frankfurt Cathedral (which we'd already seen but will cover in the next post), St. Martin's was built from cheap local stone, then plastered over and given a clever paint job to look like it was made with more exotic foreign stones. It's ironic and a bit telling of the human condition that wealthy people in slate-rich places showed off by building in limestone, while wealthy people in limestone-rich places showed off by building in slate.
The church's bell tower actually predates the rest of the church. It was originally a watchtower along the town wall, and the locals decided to convert it into a belltower and build the rest of the church out from it.
Around the back of the church is a peaceful community garden and a secluded cemetery with a chapel dedicated to the local men and boys who died during WWII.
That left the western town walls. We couldn't walk on top of them, but there is a little hiking path that runs just outside of them. Apparently, the town allows people to lease the old watchtowers and turn them into houses–as long as the buyers agree to restore and maintain the tower with their own money. One of these converted residential towers even has its own drawbridge.
According to Rick Steves, there is a local legend about its owner's then-teenage son. When his parents were away, he threw a big party. Locals complained about the noise, and the cops showed up. Unintimidated, the kids simply raised the drawbridge and kept on partying.
From there, it was a short walk to the end of the western walls, with some great views of the southern part of the town and the castle overlooking it all.
Back inside the old town, we peeked into a lovely little park where they shine lights up on the walls at night. There was a wedding reception going on, however, so we didn’t linger.
The last stop on the Rick Steves tour was the old Franciscan abbey. It was dissolved by Napoleon in the early 1800s and burned down shortly afterwards. But a couple generations later, when the local economy was suffering, desperate locals started moving into the ruins and setting up makeshift homes inside them. Local authorities have done some restoration work to expose the old abbey ruins, but the houses still stand and remain occupied to this day.
Satisfied with our day's walk, we made one last trip to the grocery store and headed home for relaxing afternoon before packing up. We didn’t get to do everything we had planned on doing in the Rhineland, but we had a great time with what we did. The Rhine isn't necessarily at the top of my list of places to visit again--unless as part of a wine tour--but I would still happily visit it again. It definitely feels like the sort of place where it's important to visit on the right days and with the right expectations.
Tomorrow, we would be heading to the Belgian coastal city of Bruges.
