People. Haarlem gets me.
Guest blogger Margaret (Allison’s lucky sister) here, sharing little observations and experiences that have been interesting to me. The Shermans, intrepid travellers as they are, may not notice the idiosyncrasies of culture that I have observed and enjoyed. Let’s get started.
The Dutch are tall people. Being not tall myself, I like this about them. Alison and I speculate that they have a sort of Calvinist heartiness which makes things like bathrooms in Amsterdam unnecessary. Instead of “just do it,” their motto might be “just hold it.” However, today we ventured into another smaller city (Haarlem) and these are my kinds of folks! I saw not one, but TWO signs for bathrooms today! Granted, I had to pay 40 cents to use one of them, but I’m good with that as long as there are supplies and everything is in working order (which it was).
As this has already been addressed in another blog post, I will not belabor the topic except to say that if you go to Amsterdam, bring your own Depends. It’s a BYOD city. Not even sending Zoe looking as cute as possible doing the potty dance gets you any grace.
Why, you might wonder, am I so focused on the physicality of travel? Well, Gentle Readers, it’s like this: When one matures, as one is apt to do, there are things that happen. One of those things is OPN. Old Person Noises. This is especially common when rising from a seated position. Allison & I have assigned the girls the task of calling us out anytime we made an OPN before 6:30 pm. Less than a day later, we amended that to add OR unless we’ve reached 10,000 steps. I’m proud to say that there’s only been 1 day that we didn’t reach the 10,000 step mark, and one day we blew past 15,000 steps.
With those steps, we encountered the circle of life as evidenced by tulips and cheese. Stick with me, this will work. Yesterday we visited 3 museums in Amsterdam: the Cheese Museum, the Tulip Museum (yes, it’s a real thing), and the Prostitution Museum (sadly, that’s a real thing too). The Cheese Museum wasn’t so much a museum as a small room in the basement of a cheese store explaining how cheese is made, and then another very large room with soooo many cheese samples! Personal observation: the stinkier the cheese, the tastier it is. That’s just the way cheese rolls. We did have a good time dressing up as Dutch milking maids (minus the height) as you can see from the pic below.
We then moved on to the Tulip Museum which was quite well done considering it’s about a flower, albeit a very special little flower. And guess what we learned? There are flower farmers and there are bulb farmers! And the bulb farmers will cut off the head of the tulip shortly after it blooms so that the plant focuses its nutrients on the bulb, not the bloom, thus eventually producing an impressive size bulb thankyouverymuch. But what to do with all the petals from the blooms that were taken before their time? Well the bulb farmers dump them along the edges of the canals where the cows eat them (they prefer the red petals) and cows, as we know, make stinky cheese! Circle of life right here in Holland! Gotta love the efficiency.
Idiosyncratic observation: The tulip museum, like so many structures in Amsterdam, was a tall and skinny building. Apparently, per legend or law (not sure which), the wider your building is, the bigger the tax. So people built up and back. They even designed the windows to accentuate the height of the building to make it more impressive. This necessitates the invention and frequent use of the Death Spiral Staircase, as can be seen from a photo of the airbnb in which I reside this week:
The death spiral staircase, or DSS for short, is not suited for those who are faint of knee or heart. And for the love of all things holy, DO NOT try to go down it in the dark! Or with your hands full! We have encountered said staircases multiple times. They seem to be substantially more frequent than bathrooms in Amsterdam. (Just teasing Amsterdam; I still love you.)
As an aside: Yes, we visited the Prostitution Museum (without the kids) and it is indeed in the middle of the Red Light District. Both Allison & I had a similar reaction: Sad. The profession is sad, and the museum which seeks to glamorize the profession is sad. We did learn some interesting statistics though which I trust will make us more sensitive to the plight of these workers.
What’s in store? Tomorrow we pick up the rental car and explore the countryside – windmills, more tulips, and the famous Delft pottery is on the agenda. Bathrooms and Old Person Noises are always on the agenda.