Yoga, Snow, New Friends

I had planned to wake up and go to a yoga class yesterday morning.  It didn’t start until 10:15, and I went to bed at 11, so I didn’t think I needed to set an alarm.  Wrong.  I woke up at 9:30, and the studio was a 20 minute walk away, so I just gave up on it for the day.

This is one of the most amazing things about my children:  they are not hungry in the morning.  They wake up and play by themselves, sometimes for hours, and rarely wake us up for food or other necessetities.  They don’t even turn on the TV, althought they have now discovered video games, and know how to navigate my laptop better than I do.  I know other parents who set out cereal and bowls on Friday and Saturday nights so that their kids can feed themselves on early weekend mornings.  Once in a while we’ll wake to find C.C.’s face smeared with peanut butter, or nutella, which is fine.  But mostly they just wait for us to get up and feed them. We were lucky with our dog, Hoover, too.  He never needed to go out bright and early.  Until his last few months, he had an amazing bladder.  For that, and for my children’s stomachs, I was grateful.

So on this trip we have rarely gotten out before its time to find a place to have lunch.  Yesterday, our plan was to meet up with friends of our friend John Mollenkopf, so we took the tram to the western part of Amsterdam, where they lived, and had lunch at a place with good sandwiches and smoothies—kind of Dutch with African and Asian influences.

An indie moviehouse—Ketelhuis—in the neighborhood happened to be hosting a children’s film festival—I love children’s film festivals, and try to go to the one at BAM and the New York International Children’s Film Festival (which I think is happening right now) every year.  Well, most of the Amsterdam festival’s films are in Dutch, so we went to the one silent film—a set of VERY old Walt Disney cartoons.  A woman cranked a music contraption by hand to provide a soundtrack, and then taught the kids how to punch the cards to make their own tunes; Milo was absolutely enthralled.  The kids went off to hammer pieces of wood together and make chocolate lollipops while we drank tea. And then Frans and Vera, her almost 10 year old daughter, showed up, and we all liked each other at once. 

We gathered the kids and set off into the cold, across the park to a play area called Het Woeste Westen where some Dutch guys dressed in western gear were making tea and some kind of strange bread cooked on sticks over an open fire.  We skipped that part and went right to the active stuff—bridges and rope swings and lots of things to climb on.  The kids loved it.  When our fingers were frozen stiff, we walked back to the Café Restaurant Amsterdam to meet Frans’s husband, Maurice, for a beer and some fries.  It’s a gorgeous old building that’s been beautifully renovated.

If you find yourself in Amsterdam, I highly recommend checking out the Westerpark area; its not really covered in the guidebooks, which makes it doubly appealing. 

After we had warmed up, we walked to Frans and Maurice’s apartment, an old school that had been taken over by squatters in the 70s.  Frans and Maurice have a very cool setup at the very top of the building.  We met their son, Zeb, and had a lovely meal in front of the fire while the children played.

Today I did make it out in time for yoga.  I went to the Iyengar Yoga Institute here.  Iyengar is the first kind of yoga I practiced, but it’s been awhile since I took a straight up Iyengar class—I’ll make do with just about anything these days.  I walked into the studio and was met by an old man sitting behind the desk.  I told him it was my first time there.  “By the sound of things, it seems you don’t speak Dutch,” he said.

“I don’t,” I replied.  “But I do speak yoga.”

“Well,” he said.  “I will speak both English and Dutch today.”

“Are you teaching the class?” I asked, and tried to conceal my surprise.

“Yes, I am.”

I should not have been surprised.  BKS Iyengar himself is 92 and still a very powerful teacher.  It was a good class, slow but deep, as I remembered Iyengar to be.  I felt good walking out into the cold afterwards. 

Today Amsterdam was more than just cold—it was also damp, and a bit windy, which made it feel much colder than the other days.  It still feels like enough of a novelty to me that I’m not minding it.

Today’s plan was to visit NEMO, the science museum built right on the water.  Our kids love the interactive science museums that have become popular in recent years.  But it seems every other family with children in Amsterdam had the same idea today, and the place was packed.  We wandered around for awhile, getting frustrated by having to wait in line for things, and then finally found an activity are where the kids could make boats and then test drive them in a pool of water.  That worked for awhile, and then we say a “Chain Reaction” show, which was good once the talking stopped and the action started.

We walked out from the museum into the wind and snow—the first snow we’ve seen in a year.  It was fun, and didn’t stick, and now it’s over.  We checked out Droog Design on the way home, and bought some fabulous chocolates—ginger and rhubarb and cranberry—at Puccini.  We decided to eat in—the weather had turned nasty, and I had bought slow food cheese, and some tapenade and pesto yesterday.  So we are snug in our little canal apartment, the kids are getting to sleep at a reasonable hour, and all is right in the world.

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Whatever happened to fondue anyway?

I am completely charmed by this city.  Which is saying something, given that it was 28 degrees Fahrenheit when we set out this morning, and I forgot to pack my long johns.  Winter is not my friend—my nose turns red, my skin becomes reptilian, and I win the hat head contest on a daily basis.  But everyone here wears goofy hats to keep warm, and it just so happens I bought one in France, the last time I found myself colder than I had expected to be.

I love the water, the scale and style of the buildings, the quiet.  Once you get many more people riding bikes than driving in cars, the street becomes a lot more quiet, the air much cleaner.  It’s remarkable.

After another lazy morning, we set off by tram to the Van Gogh museum.  Can I just say how happy I am that by the time I had kids, museums had figured out that they had to entertain children in order to get the adults in the door?  The Van Gogh museum has a fabulous acoustiguide for kids, and a treasure hunt you can pick up at the front desk.  Both are very well done, and our kids were perfectly happy to stroll through the galleries with their headsets on.  They were, of course, fascinated by the whole ear chopping story.

There is a large green space right outside the museum that includes a skateboard pipe—which was fun to watch—an ice skating rink, and a playground.  We were smart enough to let the kids run wild for awhile, and then to feed them, before we entered the museum.

We had lunch at the Cobra Café, which is right next to the playground, so we figured out what the kids wanted and let them stay in the playground while we ordered, calling them in only once their food had arrived.  I had a bowl of tomato souple and a very good tuna melt.  The food was good, healthy, and not too expensive.

We walked part of the way back home, but the kids were pooped, so we caught the tram the rest of the way, and Alec took them to the apartment while I checked out the Nine Streets, a well known shopping quarter.  I got some good cheese and some wine for a snack, some chocolates to bring to a dinner tomorrow, and mostly just enjoyed wandering and seeing not a single chain store.

We ate dinner at Café Bern—fabulous cheese and beef fondue; if you go, you have to reserve ahead of time.  Why did fondue ever go out of style in the US after it’s short-lived popularity in the 1970s?  I understand why macramé and decoupage have fallen out of favor, but yoga has come back, so why not fondue? I have a fondue pot on one of my high kitchen shelves back in Brooklyn.  I’ll have to bust it out next winter.

The kids are pooped, and Alec is already snoring with his laptop on his chest, so I suppose I should get my 40 winks as well.

Hamsterdam, the Neverlands

Okay, so maybe it was a tactical error to have Milo go to his first ever sleepover the night before we flew to Amsterdam.  To be fair to young Milo, he had warned us.  On Thursday—the day before his big sleepover—as I drove C.C. and Milo to school, Milo said, “You know, Mama, I’m feeling a little bit nervous about my sleepover.”

“Really, nervous how?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, are you feeling like you might miss your family?  Are you a little bit scared?”

“I don’t know, but some of the things might be different.  Like no Milo time.”

We instituted “Milo time” a while ago to complement C.C.’s “grumpy time,” our nightly attempt to corral her litany of complaints into an evening time slot before bed.  It kind of works. 

“Well, that’s right, you probably won’t have Milo time at Peter’s house.  But you will have a special time with your friend Peter.”

“And we’re going to Amsterdam the next day, and if I don’t get enough sleep I might be cranky.”

Out of the mouths of babes.  In the end, he decided he wanted to go after all.  We kept our phones on in case we got a late night call telling us he wanted to come home.  But he didn’t.  When we picked him up on the way to the airport, Milo was ecstatic—he had had a great time.

But travel days always take more out of all of us than I seem to remember when I am planning trips.  And, before we buzzed the bell at our home exchange apartment, both kids had melted down.  Rather than take a cab from the airport, I figured we should use the excellent Amsterdam public transit system.  There is a train right from the airport to the center, and then it would be only one metro stop from Centraal Station to our neighborhood, and then a “very short walk” according to our home exchange friends.

Well, after much upping and downing on elevators and escalators to buy tickets, ask questions, etc., a stop for a slice of “New York” pizza to keep the energy levels up, and a discussion with some police to figure out how to walk to our apartment (which turned out to be a not so short walk because we ended up going in a roundabout way), I admitted that we should have taken a taxi.  We are not made of the same stuff as these rugged northern Europeans.

We lugged our suitcases up the three flights of twisty steps and collapsed in our home away from home.  We are staying in the apartment of a Scottish director/casting agent and his Dutch wife, who is a jewelry designer, and their two teenaged children.  They are in our Barcelona apartment as I write this.  Have I said before that I LOVE Homeexchange.com?  We have done many exchanges, from the US and from Barcelona, and have always ended up in very cool properties owned by lovely people.

The apartment is in a converted hat factory right on a canal.  The canal has lots of boats and ducks, and all that space in front of the building means we get loads of light.  It’s a great space.

The kids have been excited about coming here since Spain beat the Netherlands in the World Cup.  They had been watching Peter Pan around the same time that the World Cup was happening and, as a result, thought the announcers were saying “Neverlands.”  We have not corrected them.  Similarly, Amsterdam has become Hamsterdam.  So, from their perspective, we are in “Hamsterdam, The Neverlands.”

After a little lie down and some tea, we all recovered and set out for dinner—we went to a place around the corner which translates to the Guardian Angel.  Fondue, spicy carrot soup, a huge selection of beer. Perfect after a long day of travel.

We all slept in today and it was nearly noon before we headed out in search of the Sunday art market I had read about.  The market was nowhere to be found—it seems it must not run in the winter, although the website made no mention of this.  So we got some lunch at an Asian bistro that, fortunately, also had grilled cheese, and then took a boat tour on the canals, which was lovely and almost put the kids to sleep.

Here’s one cool fact about Amsterdam.  Property taxes were based on the width of the houses, which is a key reason for their narrowness and height.  The skinny/tall combo means that stairways are narrow, steep, and twisty, which makes it impossible to move furniture in and out.  So, every house has a large hook jutting out from near its top, which is used to hoist furniture up and through the windows. 

After 6 months in Spain, where I feel like a giant, I am almost short here.  As for other superficial observations?  I was the only person I saw today wearing clogs—I live in my Danskos when I travel. And there are flowers everywhere, beautiful flowers.  Our home exchange family left us a vase full of anemones, my favorites.

We ate dinner at a Thai place called Krua Thai in the neighborhood—the spiciest food I’ve had in a long time that did not come out of my own kitchen.  The history of colonization means that there are a lot of Asian restaurants here, especially Indonesian.  This is just fine by me.

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