A happy hop to Holland

The Lonely Planet entry on the Netherlands (which, as always, I spent part of the train ride there reading) was brilliant. The cheapest sleep in Amsterdam is the "Hans Brinker Budget Hotel". The country's liberal attitudes on almost everything have begun to conflict: banning smoking in bars restricts freedom of weed. And Amsterdam's very picturesque, but you should stay away from canal edges once you've had a few drinks.

On arrival I installed myself in a hostel and went to bed. I had a day and a half for sightseeing, seven hours' train trip there and seven hours back taking up the rest of my weekend, so on Saturday I was up early for my day in Amsterdam.

My first destination in the morning was the Rijksmuseum, and accordingly from the city centre I headed south. Walking, I got my first taste of Amsterdam. Apart from the canals, which I'd expected, I discovered it to be a city that specialises in brick buildings of various shades of brown, all with chunky white windowframes in not-quite-perfect alignment that make it feel like a drawing by a kindergartener. It was rather drab, and like nowhere I've seen so far in Europe, but as charming as I'd been told.

The canals, aside from being pretty, force a labyrinthine layout on the place. After forty minutes of walking straight, I ended up -- to my great surprise -- exactly at the train station where I'd started. Resorting to the street map in Lonely Planet, I headed south again, more carefully, and eventually made it to the museum.

So I found out about what the Netherlands has done with itself for the last four hundred years, looked at some Rembrandts, and then occupied myself outside for the rest of the day, getting back to the hostel lateish that evening. I spent some time in the afternoon browsing in a tiny secondhand bookshop, enjoying being in a country whose national language is minor enough for the selection of English reading material to be extensive. I found a wonderful history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American attempts at demography. (Quoting a guide for new immigrants from Europe: "In the old countries an average family has perhaps four births; in America the figure must be more like eight. Now, if we assume that half of these births reach adulthood . . . .")

On Sunday I went to the (Lonely Planet: "refreshing and vibrant") town of Leiden, slightly south of Amsterdam, to meet Birgit, whom I know from Vietnam, for a few hours of sightseeing and deadpan harebrained nonsense. She's doing a Ph.D. at the university there, which is one of the Netherlands' largest. We climbed up to a circular fortress on a mound near the town centre which was probably high enough to qualify in Netherlands parlance as a hill. Then we nosed through the university (avoiding the maths building, which according to Birgit confirms my theory that every building housing mathematicians is ugly).

I heard about the need to double- or triple-lock even the oldest bikes for safeguard against theft, the cheap government-subsidised housing in Leiden which takes only seven years on the waiting list to obtain, and the Dutch Sinterklaas who rides a white horse onto rooftops and is accompanied by by a troop of Black Petes (pictured below, as seen in toyshop window).We went to the local museum, where I found out what the Netherlands did with itself for the ten thousand years immediately preceeding the last four hundred. (It made ceramic pots, of increasingly large size.) Then we climbed up a windmill. Then I had to hurry back to Amsterdam to catch the train back to Germany.