Day Four: Happy Birthday to Peter
Extravagant birthday trip aside, I am still a big believer in the sanctity and enjoyability of birthdays. I know that some people tend to get a bit maudlin and hung up on the whole aging thing, but as far as I'm concerned, that's what the other 364 days of the year are for. Your birthday should be the one day that is all about you, the one day that you let yourself experience life with the unabashed joy and excitement of a child.
We went to the bakery near Rembrandtplein for breakfast waffles and then wandered our way up to Nieumarkt, where we were scheduled to meet up for a unique tour of Amsterdam – a tour by Segway. According to the official web site, the Segway is "a self-balancing personal transportation designed to go anywhere you go." It looks a bit like a skinny podium on wheels. We'd seen them before and always thought it would be a cool thing to try out, so we were happy to have an excuse.
I'd wondered how we were going to find the tour, but it turned out to be a stupid question. A couple of minutes before 10, we saw a young woman motoring around on a Segway. Pretty effective advertising. We met with Michael, the owner and tour guide, and Edith, the safety assistant. Michael gives the talks and leads the way while Edith handles the mop-up duties, including instructing errant Segway-ers and shouting warnings about approaching cars and cyclists.
Michael brought us back to the garage, where we had to sign the obligatory "I won't sue and I will be responsible for anything I break" documents. We were also outfitted with helmets. Well, we would have been but they didn't have a helmet big enough to fit Peter's head. (If we ever have children, I am going to be in so much trouble, between the Scanlan big-head and Peter's giant cranium. I will probably have to birth a baby with a beach ball-sized head.) I thought this might be a sticking point but both Michael and Peter were comfortable with a sans-helmet ride.
We were each assigned a Segway and told how to operate it in "power-assist mode," which basically entails using the motor to help with dragging the Segway behind you like a suitcase. Michael adjusted my Segway so I wouldn't have to drive it like a little old lady in a humungous Cadillac. We dragged our machines over to a basketball court to get our crash-course in learning how to use them. Happily, no crashing was involved.
Since we were the only two people on the tour, we had individualized tutoring. Peter worked with Edith and seemed to learn much more quickly than I did. Michael explained to me how to turn the machine on and make sure it was ready for me. (You get a happy smiley face in a small indicator window on the handlebars.) Stepping onto the Segway for the first time is a step into the unknown. It just doesn't seem possible that this platform will support you weight and remain stable. You expect to fall over, that the cosmic football will be yanked out from in front of you. But somehow, the Segway defies your expectations, even if it is a little wobbly for the couple of minutes that it takes you to work out what it's all about.
I can only imagine the technical and engineering wonders that are working under the platform because using the Segway is remarkably easy and intuitive. The move forward, you lean forward. To move backward, you lead back. Simple. Until you get the hang of how to stand neutrally though, there's a lot of going backwards, which resulted in me bailing out of the Segway a few times.
Turning is also easy although a little less intuitive. You have to twist a ring on one of the handlebars. One direction turns you right and the other direction turns you left. You can probably see the problem here – remembering which twist takes you in which direction. Yeah, I had that problem big-time. I would hope that future generations of the Segway let you lean in the direction you want to go.
Learning to ride a Segway takes about 2 minutes if you're Peter, with his fine motor skills and exquisite understanding of physics and machinery. Or, if you're me – a clumsy, physics-phobic dolt, it takes more like 15 minutes. But it is easily learnable, even for said physics-challenged dolt.
After Michael was satisfied that we were not a danger to ourselves or others, he led us out of the playground and onto the tour. Amsterdam, with its ample cycling lanes, is uniquely suited to this sort of tour. We made our way on the streets and cycle lanes, although I was finding it hard to enjoy the scenery since almost all of my concentration was focused on safely operating the Segway. I rode slowly and mincingly, not actually all that different than an ancient woman in a large Cadillac, except that I could see over the handlebars.
Before we'd even reached our first point of interest, I had an Incident. We had just made a turn onto a narrow-ish street when Edith announced an approaching car, which turned out to be a big blue van. I felt like I was too close to the van and attempted to steer closer to the curb, but I operated the steering ring wrong and started to veer into the van, which made me panic and over-correct so instead I bumped into the curb, which sent me back into the side of the van. I managed to jump off and pull the Segway back with one arm while hold the other out to stop our crashing into the van. I actually made contact with the van, enough that when the driver was clear, he stopped to make sure he hadn't hit me. All I could think of in that moment was how close I came to owing Michael $10,000 to replace the Segway.
Edith pulled up next to me and told me that I had plenty of room and that the street wasn't as narrow as I thought it was. She suggested that if I was worried about a passing car, that I should just stop and let the car pass. She said "That was pretty scary, wasn't it?" which was the exact perfect thing to say and I felt a lot better after that.
For the next two and a bit hours, we glided through Amsterdam, stopping periodically to learn more about a particular sight. At just about every stop, someone would come up and ask questions about the Segway. Edith would field these and hand out business cards while Michael did the tour-guide thing. Tourists took photographs of us, which is sort of weird to think that you're in some stranger's vacation slides.
We hit just about every major sight within 10 kilometers of the city centre – the Rembrandt house, the Rijksmuseum, the Leidseplein, the Anne Frank Huis, the Dam, the Neiuwe Kerk, the Oude Kerk, and the Red Light District. The weather ranged from pleasant but brisk to raining and freezing. Luckily, we are no strangers to quickly changeable weather and we both adhere to the "if you let a little rain stop you, you'd never do anything" philosophy.
We had a great time and I'd certainly recommend a Segway tour. The only downside is that it sort of ruins you for walking for a while after you do it. We were both starving when the tour was over so we walked over to a beer café, which happened to be closed. We poked around a bit and found two nearby alternatives – an Argentinean steakhouse or a bruin café. The steakhouse was a bit too meat-heavy for me, so we went with the café. It was suitably rustic yet cozy inside and was staffed by a single waiter who was much less hassled than you might expect, largely because he seemed to operate on his own timetable, regardless of how many people he had waiting for him. Let's just say that it was a long lunch.
Even though we'd both been there before, I was hoping we'd get a chance to go to the Van Gogh museum. He's my favourite painter and I remember really enjoying the museum. But the Birthday Boy is a photographer and had a professional interest in going to FOAM (Fotografie Museum Amsterdam). In retrospect, I should have pushed Van Gogh, as light plays such a large part of his paintings, Peter have seen lots of thought-provoking images. But, you know, birthdays are sacred and all of that.
FOAM turned out to be a miserable waste of time. We spent more time in the café slaking my ravaged thirst with 2 bottles of diet Coke than we did in the exhibits. To me, it seems like photography is sort of like the fringe theatre of the visual arts world – a very small percentage of it is great, technically-competent, cutting-edge, mind-expanding stuff and the rest is horribly pretentious crap masquerading as Art. FOAM was loaded with the second category. One exhibit, by Philip-Lorca diCorcia was good if a little unsettling. He had two series of large photographs, each in separate rooms. In the first room we went into, it was a series of portraits of rent boys, with each one's name, hometown, and price listed as part of the title information. They were well-composed and well-lit. The other series was of pole dancers, mid-dance, taken in a dark club with a sort of amorphous dark background. Again, very well-composed and showing interesting feats of acrobatics and flexibility. Both series had an element of desperation and sadness but also of getting on with things, which made the pictures resonate.
The other two exhibits we saw were crap. One was a sort of photo-journalist reportage of Palestinians and Israelis. Not great composition and nothing earth-shatteringly new about them. They were almost visual clichés, in some respects. The other was some minimalist exploration of lines in disused classrooms. Very senior-art-school-assignment.
We left FOAM and headed out to another nearby photography museum, whose name is escaping me. Probably because we weren't able to go into the museum because it was closed while they put up the next exhibition. Our final stop on our photographic tour was a gallery about a mile from our hotel. We hiked out there, our legs aching after 3 hours of standing on Segways and another few hours of walking around, only to find the place was closed. Argh.
So, it was a long walk back to the hotel, with me saying things like "Carry me!" We hung out in the hotel until it was time for dinner. Are you seeing a trend here, with our evenings? We had dinner at a , a great place located in a historic building that's been many things in its life. It was a weighing station where tax was assessed on goods going into the city. One of its towers was an operating theatre/lecture hall where Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. It was also the location of Rembrandt's artist guild.
Although the interior wasn't quite what I was expecting (I was picturing the atmospheric and slightly creepy interiors of The Witchery in Edinburgh), the food was quite delicious. Peter had the lobster started while I had the Waag salad with the vegetarian option in full effect. (It came with quail eggs, but minus the calf tongue of the regular Waag salad.) Peter's main was fillet mignon and mine was a big bucket of melted cheese. OK, I exaggerate a little. It was a ceramic pot of melted cheese, with vegetables and bread. Practically a fondue but without the open flame. When we left the restaurant, I announced to Peter, "I have a belly full of cheese!" which made him laugh.
Since it was our last night, we decided there was one more thing we had to check off our Amsterdam to-do list, a walk through the Red Light District. I'd been there before, although since I was traveling by myself, I just made a quick scamper through at about 7am on a Sunday morning. My overriding memory was being shocked when the "mannequins" in the window moved, revealing themselves to be real women. That kind of freaked me out. Peter had never been through there, since on his first trip to Amsterdam he was about 12 and traveling with his parents.
You could pretty much go to Amsterdam and never go through the Red Light District and not really miss out on anything. It's an undeniably weird place. You have these women, wearing pretty much just bikinis (I swear that 12 years ago they were wearing lingerie that was less revealing), advertising their services by sitting in windows. It seems wrong to look at them, but you can't help it. The softie liberal side of me says that this sort of thing happens anyway, so you might as well provide a mechanism for the women to work safely. If you do the math - € 50 for 15 minutes of work, conservatively estimate 3 customers an hour, 7 hour day, that's € 1050 a day, minus the € 100 to rent the window for a net of € 950. Conservatively say 4 days in a week, for 42 weeks a year, that's just a shade under € 160,000.
So, that's the pragmatic side of it, but I can't help getting sucked into the emotional side of it. There's a tawdry depressing side of it that makes me want to take a shower and have a nap so I don't have to think about it anymore. So, that was my impression of the place – logically, it makes perfect sense, but emotionally, it does my head in and makes me very glad that I'm on the street side of the glass.
We went to the bakery near Rembrandtplein for breakfast waffles and then wandered our way up to Nieumarkt, where we were scheduled to meet up for a unique tour of Amsterdam – a tour by Segway. According to the official web site, the Segway is "a self-balancing personal transportation designed to go anywhere you go." It looks a bit like a skinny podium on wheels. We'd seen them before and always thought it would be a cool thing to try out, so we were happy to have an excuse.
I'd wondered how we were going to find the tour, but it turned out to be a stupid question. A couple of minutes before 10, we saw a young woman motoring around on a Segway. Pretty effective advertising. We met with Michael, the owner and tour guide, and Edith, the safety assistant. Michael gives the talks and leads the way while Edith handles the mop-up duties, including instructing errant Segway-ers and shouting warnings about approaching cars and cyclists.
Michael brought us back to the garage, where we had to sign the obligatory "I won't sue and I will be responsible for anything I break" documents. We were also outfitted with helmets. Well, we would have been but they didn't have a helmet big enough to fit Peter's head. (If we ever have children, I am going to be in so much trouble, between the Scanlan big-head and Peter's giant cranium. I will probably have to birth a baby with a beach ball-sized head.) I thought this might be a sticking point but both Michael and Peter were comfortable with a sans-helmet ride.
We were each assigned a Segway and told how to operate it in "power-assist mode," which basically entails using the motor to help with dragging the Segway behind you like a suitcase. Michael adjusted my Segway so I wouldn't have to drive it like a little old lady in a humungous Cadillac. We dragged our machines over to a basketball court to get our crash-course in learning how to use them. Happily, no crashing was involved.
Since we were the only two people on the tour, we had individualized tutoring. Peter worked with Edith and seemed to learn much more quickly than I did. Michael explained to me how to turn the machine on and make sure it was ready for me. (You get a happy smiley face in a small indicator window on the handlebars.) Stepping onto the Segway for the first time is a step into the unknown. It just doesn't seem possible that this platform will support you weight and remain stable. You expect to fall over, that the cosmic football will be yanked out from in front of you. But somehow, the Segway defies your expectations, even if it is a little wobbly for the couple of minutes that it takes you to work out what it's all about.
I can only imagine the technical and engineering wonders that are working under the platform because using the Segway is remarkably easy and intuitive. The move forward, you lean forward. To move backward, you lead back. Simple. Until you get the hang of how to stand neutrally though, there's a lot of going backwards, which resulted in me bailing out of the Segway a few times.
Turning is also easy although a little less intuitive. You have to twist a ring on one of the handlebars. One direction turns you right and the other direction turns you left. You can probably see the problem here – remembering which twist takes you in which direction. Yeah, I had that problem big-time. I would hope that future generations of the Segway let you lean in the direction you want to go.
Learning to ride a Segway takes about 2 minutes if you're Peter, with his fine motor skills and exquisite understanding of physics and machinery. Or, if you're me – a clumsy, physics-phobic dolt, it takes more like 15 minutes. But it is easily learnable, even for said physics-challenged dolt.
After Michael was satisfied that we were not a danger to ourselves or others, he led us out of the playground and onto the tour. Amsterdam, with its ample cycling lanes, is uniquely suited to this sort of tour. We made our way on the streets and cycle lanes, although I was finding it hard to enjoy the scenery since almost all of my concentration was focused on safely operating the Segway. I rode slowly and mincingly, not actually all that different than an ancient woman in a large Cadillac, except that I could see over the handlebars.
Before we'd even reached our first point of interest, I had an Incident. We had just made a turn onto a narrow-ish street when Edith announced an approaching car, which turned out to be a big blue van. I felt like I was too close to the van and attempted to steer closer to the curb, but I operated the steering ring wrong and started to veer into the van, which made me panic and over-correct so instead I bumped into the curb, which sent me back into the side of the van. I managed to jump off and pull the Segway back with one arm while hold the other out to stop our crashing into the van. I actually made contact with the van, enough that when the driver was clear, he stopped to make sure he hadn't hit me. All I could think of in that moment was how close I came to owing Michael $10,000 to replace the Segway.
Edith pulled up next to me and told me that I had plenty of room and that the street wasn't as narrow as I thought it was. She suggested that if I was worried about a passing car, that I should just stop and let the car pass. She said "That was pretty scary, wasn't it?" which was the exact perfect thing to say and I felt a lot better after that.
For the next two and a bit hours, we glided through Amsterdam, stopping periodically to learn more about a particular sight. At just about every stop, someone would come up and ask questions about the Segway. Edith would field these and hand out business cards while Michael did the tour-guide thing. Tourists took photographs of us, which is sort of weird to think that you're in some stranger's vacation slides.
We hit just about every major sight within 10 kilometers of the city centre – the Rembrandt house, the Rijksmuseum, the Leidseplein, the Anne Frank Huis, the Dam, the Neiuwe Kerk, the Oude Kerk, and the Red Light District. The weather ranged from pleasant but brisk to raining and freezing. Luckily, we are no strangers to quickly changeable weather and we both adhere to the "if you let a little rain stop you, you'd never do anything" philosophy.
We had a great time and I'd certainly recommend a Segway tour. The only downside is that it sort of ruins you for walking for a while after you do it. We were both starving when the tour was over so we walked over to a beer café, which happened to be closed. We poked around a bit and found two nearby alternatives – an Argentinean steakhouse or a bruin café. The steakhouse was a bit too meat-heavy for me, so we went with the café. It was suitably rustic yet cozy inside and was staffed by a single waiter who was much less hassled than you might expect, largely because he seemed to operate on his own timetable, regardless of how many people he had waiting for him. Let's just say that it was a long lunch.
Even though we'd both been there before, I was hoping we'd get a chance to go to the Van Gogh museum. He's my favourite painter and I remember really enjoying the museum. But the Birthday Boy is a photographer and had a professional interest in going to FOAM (Fotografie Museum Amsterdam). In retrospect, I should have pushed Van Gogh, as light plays such a large part of his paintings, Peter have seen lots of thought-provoking images. But, you know, birthdays are sacred and all of that.
FOAM turned out to be a miserable waste of time. We spent more time in the café slaking my ravaged thirst with 2 bottles of diet Coke than we did in the exhibits. To me, it seems like photography is sort of like the fringe theatre of the visual arts world – a very small percentage of it is great, technically-competent, cutting-edge, mind-expanding stuff and the rest is horribly pretentious crap masquerading as Art. FOAM was loaded with the second category. One exhibit, by Philip-Lorca diCorcia was good if a little unsettling. He had two series of large photographs, each in separate rooms. In the first room we went into, it was a series of portraits of rent boys, with each one's name, hometown, and price listed as part of the title information. They were well-composed and well-lit. The other series was of pole dancers, mid-dance, taken in a dark club with a sort of amorphous dark background. Again, very well-composed and showing interesting feats of acrobatics and flexibility. Both series had an element of desperation and sadness but also of getting on with things, which made the pictures resonate.
The other two exhibits we saw were crap. One was a sort of photo-journalist reportage of Palestinians and Israelis. Not great composition and nothing earth-shatteringly new about them. They were almost visual clichés, in some respects. The other was some minimalist exploration of lines in disused classrooms. Very senior-art-school-assignment.
We left FOAM and headed out to another nearby photography museum, whose name is escaping me. Probably because we weren't able to go into the museum because it was closed while they put up the next exhibition. Our final stop on our photographic tour was a gallery about a mile from our hotel. We hiked out there, our legs aching after 3 hours of standing on Segways and another few hours of walking around, only to find the place was closed. Argh.
So, it was a long walk back to the hotel, with me saying things like "Carry me!" We hung out in the hotel until it was time for dinner. Are you seeing a trend here, with our evenings? We had dinner at a , a great place located in a historic building that's been many things in its life. It was a weighing station where tax was assessed on goods going into the city. One of its towers was an operating theatre/lecture hall where Rembrandt painted The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp. It was also the location of Rembrandt's artist guild.
Although the interior wasn't quite what I was expecting (I was picturing the atmospheric and slightly creepy interiors of The Witchery in Edinburgh), the food was quite delicious. Peter had the lobster started while I had the Waag salad with the vegetarian option in full effect. (It came with quail eggs, but minus the calf tongue of the regular Waag salad.) Peter's main was fillet mignon and mine was a big bucket of melted cheese. OK, I exaggerate a little. It was a ceramic pot of melted cheese, with vegetables and bread. Practically a fondue but without the open flame. When we left the restaurant, I announced to Peter, "I have a belly full of cheese!" which made him laugh.
Since it was our last night, we decided there was one more thing we had to check off our Amsterdam to-do list, a walk through the Red Light District. I'd been there before, although since I was traveling by myself, I just made a quick scamper through at about 7am on a Sunday morning. My overriding memory was being shocked when the "mannequins" in the window moved, revealing themselves to be real women. That kind of freaked me out. Peter had never been through there, since on his first trip to Amsterdam he was about 12 and traveling with his parents.
You could pretty much go to Amsterdam and never go through the Red Light District and not really miss out on anything. It's an undeniably weird place. You have these women, wearing pretty much just bikinis (I swear that 12 years ago they were wearing lingerie that was less revealing), advertising their services by sitting in windows. It seems wrong to look at them, but you can't help it. The softie liberal side of me says that this sort of thing happens anyway, so you might as well provide a mechanism for the women to work safely. If you do the math - € 50 for 15 minutes of work, conservatively estimate 3 customers an hour, 7 hour day, that's € 1050 a day, minus the € 100 to rent the window for a net of € 950. Conservatively say 4 days in a week, for 42 weeks a year, that's just a shade under € 160,000.
So, that's the pragmatic side of it, but I can't help getting sucked into the emotional side of it. There's a tawdry depressing side of it that makes me want to take a shower and have a nap so I don't have to think about it anymore. So, that was my impression of the place – logically, it makes perfect sense, but emotionally, it does my head in and makes me very glad that I'm on the street side of the glass.
posted by -Ann at
3:19 PM
1 Comments:
did you go to the Anne Frank musem?
By
Lyss, at 7:10 PM
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