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.