Eating pancakes and fish in the Waterlands (and a couple more boats)

On our last full day in Amsterdam, we decided to explore some of the watery hinterland behind the city, around the shores of the IJsselmeer, which used to be the Zuiderzee. We didn't know much about this really, though I remember doing a primary school project about the Netherlands and lots of things about dykes and polders and the Zuiderzee and such like; we did not, for instance know whether it was fresh, salt or brackish water. I did know though, that by going to the other side of Amsterdam Central station, there was a ticket office where, for €10 you could obtain a paper copy of this map,

and a ticket which would allow you unlimited access for a day to a network of bus routes which would take you into the Waterlands. (More information here).

They were smart red buses with comfortable seats and good visibility out, and moreover they were clearly functional transport used by locals which is always kind of fun in an inverted-snobbish, I'm-not-your-average-tourist kind of way. I think in fact you could really spend a week or two just pottering about on them and hopping off at the various Waterland towns and villages; the countryside between is, of course, flat and undramatic, but there's the odd windmill, lots of happy looking cows and sheep, and big skies. The outskirts of the villages themselves have a look of unremarkable, pleasant and prosperous suburbs (with an unusual number of watercourses running through them) but many of them have interesting old centres I think.

As we only had a shortish day, and Tom was feeling a bit rough with a cold and cough, we decided to head to Marken, once an island now joined to the mainland by an impressively long causeway.

It's a popular boaty place, with pretty lapboard former fishermen's cottages almost all a uniform dark green, and plenty of bars and ice cream stands and restaurants along the harbour.

We stopped in one of the latter and had lunch, we were quite bold: Tom had 'mustard soup' which was thick and potatoey but also quite strongly mustardy, with a good amount of smoked salmon in it, and I had smoked eel in a sandwich. I'd read about the excellence of smoked eel, that it's the best of all smoked fish, and it really was very good. We came to see a lot of it, there were stalls all over the place, and a dear little smokery selling it further on in Volendam, evidently it's something people like to sample and take back with them while visiting. The proliferation of eels did not help to inform us about the salinity of the water, since we knew eels will swim in both salt and fresh, and probably they're imported from Japan or somewhere for the tourist market anyway. 

This was the view from the window anyway,

and this was the coffee we had afterwards, which I photographed because I love that shade of deep orange-yellow you often find in Dutch coffee cups: 

It's not in fact a very nice colour applied to anything else, except maybe egg yolks, but it's great on coffee cups.

Then we caught the ferry across the water to Volendam. On the way we saw some more lovely boats. The white sailed ones have a kind of hinged bowsprit, and are reminiscent of Thames sailing barges or Norfolk wherries. I very much enjoy spotting connections and similarities between the east of England and the Low Countries, which reinforce what I romantically think of as an atavistic sense of coming home in both places.*

Volendam was very crowded, full of tourists, which we couldn't deny we were too. So I decided the best thing was to give in gracefully and eat some poffertjes from a stand by the harbour. I had to wait for a fresh batch, and enjoyed watching them being made,

It's very hot and they do it very fast. They were delicious too.

So, smoked eel and poffertjes I was able to sample. I had intended to try to eat a raw herring, but the moment never seemed to be right.

Although it was crowded, we were quite easily able to escape the immediate crowds by walking out along the harbour jetty, past the fish smokery, where we saw someone else enjoying the local fish:

I took quite a number of photos of this; I tend to have a compulsion that if I am unusually close to pretty much any wildlife so as to be able to capture it in photos, I must do so. I then got rid of many of them, because they are really rather horrible, though also perhaps, depending on one's personal feeling, somewhat horribly fascinating. It was particularly unsettling for us because earlier in the year we lost a couple of our garden goldfish to the local herons and the two that remain have become fearful and timid to the point of invisibility. Yes I know, they're only fish, and I eat fish. I also eat chicken but that didn't stop me being fond of our hens, and the goldfish seemed to trust us to some extent, in their limited fishy way, and now they don't. Also the mechanism of the heron's beak and the reptilian coldness of its eye are weird, grotesque and disturbing. Don't get me wrong I still admire herons, they are magnificent, prehistoric, marvellous creatures, but I don't believe, because one needs to be accepting and unsentimental about the realities of wildlife and nature, that one should deny, make light of or inure oneself to the terror, horror or general awfulness (awe-fullness) of it either, that's not doing it justice. There are more and closer pictures of this on the web album if you want to see them anyway.

In fact I didn't get the impression the fish was much alive, it wasn't struggling and the heron caught it very close to the water's edge, where I don't think it would have been if it had been OK. Though the bird was clearly not afraid of humans, and though we found it quite scary, it seemed rather unsettled by our presence too, and not quite sure what to do with such a large catch, so we left it to it.

The fish, with its red fins, looked to me to be a freshwater one. The wiki articles I've linked to above confirm that now the IJselmeer is indeed fresh water, though when it was the Zuiderzee it wasn't, being as it was a large shallow bay of the North Sea. It was capped and its name and status changed in 1932, and the rivers that fed it, including the Rhine, gradually changed it from salt to freshwater. Amazing water engineers, the Dutch, for hundreds of years, and the ones we know are all very proud of it. (Also that you have to capitalise both the I and the J at the beginning of the name, since they count as one letter in Dutch, 'a digraph, possibly a ligature').

As with much of the trip, I didn't take that many photos, Tom took more and I may yet pinch some of them. I did just get him to send me this one that he snapped in Volendam, which was one of my favourite images of the trip, and may help to take away the taste of heron-caught fish!

~

Tom's posted more about our Holland and Belgium trip here, here, here, here and here, with many lovely photos and foody details especially.

 

* My ancestors on one side did in fact originate from East Anglia and, it is said, before that from the Low Countries (maybe Dutch Jews at one point) but probably so did a lot of people's ; I'm rather sceptical about the current vogue for ancestors. A lot of people have a sense of feeling at home in Amsterdam in particular, mostly because it's such a friendly, civilised, congenial place to be, who wouldn't? 

Maritime museum, instruments and and art

The museum is divided into three sections, the west, north and east wings leading off from the central courtyard. Once back inside we decided to explore the east wing, which is dedicated to objects. 

I think mostly what I want out of any museum is an aesthetic experience. Learning and reading and lots of words generally don't really grab me much, you can do that at home before or after. Audio-guides we don't bother with, though I'm sure they are often very good, and I prefer the silent company of people plugged into then than the intrusive voices of tour guides. The use of space and light and colour is important, though it doesn't have to be anything fancy; many years ago I was so smitten with the elegant simplicity of the Cycladic art museum in Athens I almost felt I could move in and live there (don't know what it's like now, it looks rather more extensive than I remember it). However, I do like to see objects, preferably close up; often a quaint and cosy small town local history museum can be just as enjoyable, but I've been to some exhibitions which seem to be very set on impressing with lots interactive hi-tech stuff - holographic figures talking to you, projected spatial stuff, lots of touch screens etc - yet I've found myself disappointed and thinking fine, but where's the stuff?

But this section at least of the Maritime museum (we didn't bother with the more pedagogic, interactive, 'explore-and-experience-the-life-of' bits) was brilliant, with creative use of space and light and sound and electronics, but with real solid stuff a-plenty too. We went first to the navigational instruments galleries. The room was darkened midnight blue, with illuminated star maps moving over the ceiling and a low, hypnotic background sound, suggestive of waves and bells and distant voices. An open book with empty pages greeted you in a pool of light as you entered, and this is what happened when you touched it and turn the pages:

(yes, I know he's turning them backwards, I don't think it made much difference)

Then there were the transparent cases of with the instruments, from late mediaeval astrolabes to modern equipment,

most of which I just enjoyed gazing at as objects of mystery and beauty, without taking much trouble to identify their names and purposes. The things below, however, were lead weights, for taking soundings, (and swinging when one was shirking, I suppose. Better look that one up):

while these are clearly compasses:

Then there were the decorations, not only figureheads, but stern and mast decorations, tiller heads and all manner of wild, graceful, fierce, funny and sometimes downright saucy creatures and characters, enough to people a sea-going saga on their own:

(a touch of mise-en-abyme there, a ship within a ship...)

Again the sound and light murmured and shifted and changed around and on the objects.

And after that there were the paintings, dating from the early 17th century, when there were still sea monsters,

with examples in the genre of pen-paintings, which I didn't know about, executed with eye-watering detail and precision with pen and india ink on an oil paint ground,

and moments of high and luminous drama,

~

We only really saw a small part of the whole collection, and this is only a small part of what we saw. It really is a splendid museum. 

Maritime Museum - the East Indiaman Amsterdam (and a hornet update)

Steve's half-brother proved too elusive to rope him in for hornet eradication; in the end I contacted someone further off who had done a wasp job for us. He arrived the same day, with a ladder and toxic powder, and set to work. People sometimes grumble about the €100 plus flat rate it costs to get rid of these bestioles, but this time he earned his fee; he was here for nearly an hour in his sinister veiled clothing and used one canister after another of The Product while the drunk and furious insects whirled about his head. I ventured into the utility room below while it was going on, and it was filled with infernal noise: a deadly low drone punctuated by high angry buzzing. I invited the Agent of Eradication in to hear it, and he was somewhat surprised and concerned that there was only a thinnish layer of polystyrene insulation between our living space and the arthropod enemy. He advised us to shut the door and not go in there for the rest of the day and night, and call him in the morning if there were still any live hornets around. Luckily there weren't, I can only assume we have a large number of dead hornets, mummifying (I hope) between the insulation and the roof slates. He said it was a very large nest, which had probably been building since the spring, though we had been almost completely unaware of them. In fact they are mostly discreet and peaceable creatures, until the nest reaches critical size and then you can't miss them. I do have some qualms of conscience about initiating such mass murder, but live with them we cannot at this point, and I tell myself hopefully that at least they've had a whole summer of going to and fro quietly, building industriously, chewing up old wood and spitting it out again as nest wall, eating pests (and possibly honey bees), making and feeding baby hornets etc, before they would presumably all die off anyway except for the hibernating queens. I am almost an entomologist manquée, but not quite, the bugs creep me out too much.

~

Neither could I have been an 18th century sailor. Apart from living in the wrong time and being the wrong gender, even if I could have had the head for heights and the constitution, I've concluded I could never have mastered the geometry and other maths and the applied-in-extremis physics, or indeed the knots. I can however contemplate it in smitten wonder, thanks to Patrick O'Brian and places like the Amsterdam maritime museum. 

Oh dear, I took so many photos there, and it's taking me an unconscionable long time to get around to posting them. One of the reasons I find I'm now shying away from photography (and by consequence, blogging*) is the matter of selecting and editing the results afterwards. I can never quite decide between this angle or that, so I keep both, and I can very rarely just leave a photo alone; as well as needing to shrink, export and upload them to web albums I'm almost always sure it needs a trim or a fiddle with the contrast or a tweak of the white balance, maybe it does but it would likely do a blind man good to see it, as my mother used to say. Tom has been cheerfully producing egregiously sunny, extrovert, unexamined-life travel posts for the last week or so, uploading his perfectly good photos without any fiddling with or interference from me (huh, what do you mean you don't need me for tech support, do you want me to have an existential crisis or something?), but I did bags the maritime museum, and will probably need a couple of instalments for them. 

The museum is housed in the old Admiralty building, a grand, elegant, four-square place, on the wharf a little way from the main part of town, twenty minutes walk from the Central Station, or any other tram stop. Its once open courtyard has been glazed, rather like the British museum, with one of those marvellous, attenuated webs that create quiet, softened, outside-in spaces where one instantly stops, breathes and looks upward:

We had already seen the East Indiaman Amsterdam the evening before from the water, floodlit and looming, which impressed us with something of how such vessels might have appeared to the people of the time whose lives they were part of, so we knew we wanted to see more of the ship, and made our way out to the quay.

It is, as most grand sailing vessels you might see now, a replica. The original was built in the middle of the 18th century, but foundered in the Channel near to Hastings in Sussex only a year or two later. The wreck was, by degrees, covered in mud and sand. It was excavated some years ago, and the replica was built with the help of voluntary work and public subscription, a matter of justifiable pride. At very low tides you can still see the remains of the original off the coast at Hastings, they say.

the outside is a riot of colour and carving, from the fearsome-funny lion figurehead,

to the striped sides,

and the florid stern, peopled by rather pale and modest gods: Mercury

and Neptune (who amused me especially by his coy attitude and odd resemblance to our local Dutch vet),

and their attendant animal familiars

(I don't know why Mercury has a chicken either...)

Sailing ships are full of geometry, even before you start any stellar navigation,

and knots and tangles and ropey things (as I say, I don't really do the technical stuff, I just admire it)

The spaces below deck were full of painterly compositions, interiors both grand and humble (the higher your rank the better your head room, on the whole):

and still lifes of objects, attractively and, I imagine, authentically rendered

I was interested in this crate of cargo in the hold, green coffee beans mixed with cinnamon sticks, and wondered how that worked, and if it was what they did, since you couldn't roast them together.

We had a good clamber and wander about, then went on to the next part of the museum, via the café. The Dutch, we found, do good museum cafés. More on what we saw inside next time.

There's more about the Amsterdam on the museum website here

* also because once I start writing I blather on too much and don't know when to stop. QED.