To the North, Part II

Other than seeing the Wadden Sea, the primary mission of my self-directed northern adventure was to visit the rest of the Netherlands' World Heritage sites.  All five (including the Wadden Sea) are variations on the same theme: how the Dutch fought the Sea.  The five sites were, collectively, rather anti-climatic.  (Spoiler alert: the Dutch won.)

But in the right order, they do tell the arch of the defining Dutch story.  It goes something like this:

In the beginning, there was land, and there was Sea.  And then the Sea breached the land, and the land was flooded.  This was understandably frustrating to the people who thought they lived there.  (The Wadden Sea will remain permanently stuck in this stage of the story, now that it is protected as a World Heritage site.  But no one really wants to live that far north anyway.)

At first the people tried to fight the Sea by building their houses and churches on terps (mounds of earth) and constructing sea walls and sand bars.   This was not very successful. Eventually the ingenuous Dutch realized they could use windmills to pump water up and out of low-lying land.

Thus the polders were born: land drained and kept dry by orderly systems of dikes and windmills.  The very first, Beemster Polder, was drained in 1612 (!!!), and was designated a World Heritage site a mere 387 years later.  But it is a particularly difficult site to visit because - other than the pretty lines of trees and tidy grid of roads and canals - there's not really any there there.  It's like the Greenwich, CT of Amsterdam.  (This stage in the battle between the Dutch and the Sea is much better represented by Kinderdijk.)

Although great for postcards and Dutch branding, the windmills alone were not enough. Terrible floods racked the lower Delta region of the country, while the large bay of the Zuiderzee (the "Southern Sea" that in fact lay north of Amsterdam) stubbornly ate away at the interior of the country.  In the mid-1800s, the government forced the evacuation of one large island in the Zuiderzee, Schokland, having grown tired of funding the fight for such a lost cause.

Maritime Greenwich, or How To Declare Yourself the Center of the Universe

(This is the last of my belated posts about our February travels...)

You know me, I like my World Heritage sites. Westminster is on the List, as is the Tower of London. But those are so obvious. My London World Heritage adventure of choice? Maritime Greenwich.

Maritime Greenwich is easily accessible by public transit, about 30 minutes south of central London. But when we emerged from the Cutty Sark station into grey misty wetness, we realized we hadn't a clue as to what we had actually come to see.

Greenwich on the Thames: I know there was a palace here, related somehow to Elizabeth I; and there's Greenwich Mean Time, which might or might not be the same thing as the Prime Meridian; and there's an "old royal naval college", but I don't know why it was important, other than that it sounds slightly familiar. Like my vague sense of literary deja-vu in the rest of London, I had the disconcerting feeling that I knew all about Greenwich without knowing anything: my history and science, all muddled up.

The weather didn't help: a fine drizzle that blurred the edges of the landscape and made it hard to discern buildings that were closer than they seemed. We followed signs to the campus of the Old Royal Naval College and its "interpretive center" (built to justify Maritime Greenwich's inscription on the World Heritage List), which helped unpack the layers of history. The Greenwich I had read about as a child - the palace of the Tudors, where Henry VIII lived and Elizabeth I was born - had fallen into disrepair during the Civil War and was torn down after the Restoration; "modern" Greenwich is a baroque complex, designed in parts by Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren during the 1600s.

The palatial buildings along the river are distinct from the Royal Observatory up on the overlooking hill, which was what we had really come to see. So we fumbled our way through the wet parkland to the seventeenth-century red brick observatory, rounded and ornate. With the low-hanging clouds of misting rain, we could barely make out from the scenic overlook the nearby sites in Greenwich (like the Millennium Dome), much less those of London in the distance.

Disclaimer: Not my feet.

It turns out that the observatory is a popular tourist destination, and the site was crowded despite the weather. I am still uncertain what it meant to stand astride the Prime Meridian that passes through the observatory's courtyard (to straddle the eastern and western hemispheres at the same time?), but we did piece together from the exhibits the connection between astronomy, longitude, and the keeping of time:

Once upon a time, before the advent of GPS, ship captains could not measure where they were, horizontally-speaking, on the globe. Latitude - the distance from the equator - was a simple matter of geometry (the angle of the sun from the horizon at noon). But longitude required a reference point back home - either time or, less reliably, the relative position of stars.

So the royal astronomers stayed up every night at the Greenwich observatory diligently mapping the stars as seen from London. But time was a more difficult matter: Sony didn't make digital watches back in the 1700s - and a clock that measures time using a pendulum doesn't exactly work on a ship at sea. Even after Parliament announced a ridiculously large prize for developing an effective time keeper for sea-faring ships, it still took 80 years - 80 years - to develop the spring-loaded clock. This clock would be set to the time back home - a standardized time - and thereby allow sailors to measure their horizontal distance from home (their longitude) by comparing the standardized time with the local time (as measured by the sun).

It being the height of the British Empire, the Brits set the standardized time (Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT) and longitude 0 (the Prime Meridian) to Greenwich. If you can, do.

As for the naval college (originally a naval hospital), I still don't understand its historical importance, but I was soothed by its serene, symmetric geometry and its long lines of perspective from the river up to the surrounding green English hillsides. These are the sort of massive uniform buildings of greyed stone that look elegantly simple from afar but overwhelm and dwarf you when you stand alongside them. Some of the more ornate halls are open to the public, but its real benefit to the visitor is the beauty of its campus spread out alongside the river.

Bonn, c'est bon.

I feel kind of sorry for Bonn. One day, you're the capital of a major global power, backed by a booming economy and the moral righteousness of upholding democracy in the face of totalitarian evil; the next you're just another sleepy little town hardly worth a pit stop on Rick Steves' itinerary.

But not us: we are egalitarian travelers, willing to spread our attention even to the humblest of former world capitals. Also, Bonn is just 20 minutes by train from Cologne, and we had some time to kill.

How to spend half a day in Bonn? Four suggestions:

Blue Beethoven at Bonn's TI

1. Beethoven: 

Bonn is the home of Ludwig van Beethoven - and it does not let you forget it. Every house claims that Beethoven slept there; every church claims that Beethoven played there. The (very helpful) Tourist Information office in Bonn gives out free Beethoven walking tour brochures so you, too, can retrace every step Beethoven ever took in this city. We dutifully walked past Beethoven's childhood home, but I generally have a short attention span for the "a famous person slept here" sort of touring.

2. "The Path of Democracy": 

This walking tour, also available from the TI, leads you around the cluster of unremarkable mid-century buildings slightly south of downtown that were once the home of German democracy. We skipped this tour, however, when even the guy giving us the brochure at the TI suggested it would not be worth the time and trouble - which made me feel very sad for Bonn-the-capital, used and discarded by the West Germans like a starter wife.

Not actually part of the Path of Democracy tour, but I thought it was a cool picture.

Getting hands on at the Arithmeum

3. Museums: 

Bonn seems to have a large number of them, probably thanks to its former capital glory. We, however, visited a less traditional museum: the Arithmeum, attached to a research institute for discrete mathematics. (What can I say, I date an engineer.) I for one really needed to see the "bizarre cogwheel mechanisms in mechanical calculating machines" as advertised, and I was not disappointed. The museum traces the history of adding, from the abacus through some rather ingenious renaissance and enlightenment contraptions to the explosion of (really complicated) adding machines before the advent of computers. Being a child of the '80s, it shocked me to see there was life before God invented the handheld calculator.

4. The Good Life: 

What Bonn does well is calm and pretty: pedestrianized streets and squares, parks, cafes, palatial buildings from the 1700s and 1800s (which Cologne severely lacks). The historic center of town, alongside the Rhine, is free of cars and has several squares and some nice winding streets. One could mellow here - which is perhaps the best way to spend an afternoon in Bonn.

All photo credits go to Jeff - thanks, Jeff!

Tales of Haarlem

Some notes from our day trip to Haarlem on Sunday, January 16.

Haarlem's Red Light "district" is not much more than a corner. Still, Jeff was eager to walk through it, based on Rick Steves' description of it being as "cute as a Barbie doll." But at 11 on a Sunday morning, there was nothing to see: the whole town was deserted - even the prostitutes were at church - and only a few lonely red lanterns shone over dark and empty windows.

After one block, we were out of the "district" and at yet another canal. As we stood on a bridge taking the requisite Dutch canal photos, a soft "ooooOoo, ooooOoo" emanated from the street we had just left.

"Jeff, can you hear the birds?"

Jeff gave me a "you poor naive child look" and patiently explained, "I think that's someone having sex."

But then the calls shifted to "trrrrroooOoo, trrrrrooooOoo." "No, Jeff," I patiently explained, "those are pigeons. But that's OK, I'm sure there are some people who sound like pigeons when they're having sex."

***

Haarlem's museum of science is a time capsule from the 1780s. Fossils and rocks are lined up with handwritten labels in glass cases; an entire room is dedicated to technical equipment that was cutting-edge in the 1800s. (The largest electrostatic generator ever built (1791) looks like part of the set design for the Tesla scenes in The Prestige.)

In the 1930s, a curator added a dark room to demonstrate such exotic attributes as fluorescence and phosphorescence and to show off some Geissler tubes (which look like early precursors to neon signs). It's not magic: it's science.

The museum also houses, somewhat randomly, hundreds of drawings by Michaelangelo and Rembradt, a collection of brilliantly illustrated rare books about wildlife, and "one of the most important collections of coins and medals in the Netherlands" (snore).

And best of all, it was covered by our museumkaart.

***

Haarlem loves Frans Hal, a Dutch portrait painter from the country's Golden Age. But my favorite part of the museum dedicated to his large group portraits was the small room that houses the museum's greatest non-Frans treasures: a set of embroidered bed curtains from the 17th century, a giant doll house from the 18th century, and a couple cheeky paintings by two painters with confusingly similar names.

The painting by Jan Breughel the Younger satirizes the tulip bulb craze in Holland in the 1600s, with monkeys buying, trading and "watering" the overvalued plants (see lower right corner). Four hundred years later, not much has changed.

The second, much larger painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger depicts 72 common Dutch sayings, from "pies grow on their roof" (they are well-off) to "grabbing an eel by the tail" (undertaking something bound to fail). This time the scatological humor is located on the far left, with the depiction of that famous Dutch saying, "to shit on the world" (not to give a damn).

It's an eternal truth: bathroom humor sells.

Photo Ops in Delft

Feeling restless after a week in the Hague, we ventured this Sunday to Delft -- all of a twenty minute tram ride away. Indeed, Delft is so close to -- and so much prettier than -- the Hague, Rick Steves recommends that tourists camp out in Delft and only venture into the Hague for short periods of time.

To be honest, Delft's postcard-perfect beauty was rather lost on me: after only a week in the Netherlands, I might already be canal'd out. But I did get the obligatory photo with Hugo Grotius, father of international law:

Other famous Delftians include Vermeer, who spent his whole life in Delft (though none of his paintings currently reside there), and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who invented the microscope and discovered bacteria. Coincidentally, Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were born the same year, but Leeuwenhoek lived more than twice as long - which just goes to show, we should all be scientists (or at least, driven by our curiousity).

Another View of Delft, and Grotius