(Friday, Sept. 25) Cindy and I had both overslept, and then rushed to shower, dress, eat breakfast and get ready for our walking tour we’d arranged with local guide, Albert Walet, to show us around Amsterdam. Our three guided tours (Prague, Berlin, and Munich) all took place on the morning of the first full day we were in town. so I had this tour down in my iPhone calendar for today. When Albert still hadn’t showed up at our hotel 15 minutes after the scheduled start time for the tour, I called him on his cell phone. As it turned out, I’d screwed up and put the tour down for today instead of tomorrow as our exchange of e-mail clearly showed.
So we went back to our room, and asked the maid to hold off for twenty minutes or so on cleaning it while we came up with a sightseeing “Plan B”. Before leaving the hotel we had used the computer made available to guests to book a timed admission to the Anne Frank House museum for 4:30 pm to avoid having to stand in a long, slow moving line of tourists just to get tickets.
By the time we headed out of the hotel’s front door just before 11 am, the bright sunshine that started the day had disappeared behind a layer of clouds, so we tossed our umbrellas into our day pack along with my sweater, maps, brochures for boat tours, and our Rick Steves guidebook.
Our first stop was a few blocks away at the Tourist Information Office where we picked up a map that showed all of the tram lines and bought ourselves a strippenkaart of fifteen tickets good on all forms of public transportation. Originally we thought about taking a tram to the Hermitage Museum (a sister entity that swaps art treasures back and forth with its Tsarist-created namesake in St. Petersburg), but the “TI lady” said we could easily walk there, and indeed all around the central part of the city, in twenty minutes or so.
Our second stop was the Bloemenmarkt (flower market), a block long string of flower stalls running along one side of the Singel Canal. Patronized largely by tourists, the market sells some cut flowers, but also offers –pre-packaged bags of tulip bulbs (some of which can be imported to the U.S. and Canada pursuant to an official Phytosanitary Certificate issued by the Plant Protection Service of the Netherlands), as well as a “Cannabis Starter Kit” (forget about bringing these back to the States).
I guess that just looking at the marijuana seed packets gave us a case of the munchies, so we walked into a little café and sat at a counter next to the window giving us a view of the flower market scene while we downed our omelets. This wasn’t a “coffee shop” (where Mary Jane is sold and smoked), but we did see a woman on a bicycle sail by with a joint between her lips.
After lunch we did a circuit around the Singel Canal, stopped to get a “Secret Swirl” cone (“Sorry”, said the lady in the ice cream store, “but if I tell you what’s in it, I’ll have to kill you, and that’s bad for business.”), and then cut across town to the Prinsengracht canal to visit the Houseboat Museum. Twenty-five hundred cargo vessels of different types and sizes have been converted into floating homes tied up along the city’s canals. Some look quite spiffy with flower boxes on deck and on the quays, others are a bit down at the heel. The museum vessel is quite tidy and cozy, and the on-board host told us that although he lives elsewhere, he will stay aboard for a few days with his girlfriend once in a while.
The Amsterdam houseboat community is much like the one in Sausalito, with the landowners of expensive “waterfront” property sometimes looking down (figuratively, as well as literally) on the houseboaters. . Homes are more expensive than the houseboats by about 20% per square meter, and the houseboaters probably pay less in property taxes (about 1,000 Euros a year). But just as has happened in Marin, the character of the houseboat community in Amsterdam is different today, when the liveaboards are mainly “Yuppies”, than in the past, when houseboat denizens were mainly “Hippies.”
