The “Magere Bruge” — the Skinny Bridge
The view of the Seven Bridges (looking down Reguliersgracht)
“Father and Son” warehouses
Houseboat with patio
Houseboat with roof garden
Dancing Houses with major tilts
Joost van den Vondel and his bird
Henk the bar cat at dinner
Nemo Science building
Skyline with Ij from the Nemo building
I started the day with a panel and a half–a panel on the graphic novel and one more paper on Victorian serial fiction by my friend Robyn. But then I ducked out and walked back the two minutes from the conference to the hotel to gather Mark, and we embarked on another adventure. We went on a boat tour through the canals, a pretty standard tourist thing to do, but the boat wasn’t too crowded and the starting point right outside our hotel, so it was really quite fun. We would have loved more information than the canned Dutch-German-English messages yielded, but at least we got a little bit of context for what we saw. Most of the views are of course similar to what we have been seeing while walking, but it was fun to watch the captain maneuver the many bridges, and we saw some rows of houses we hadn’t looked at before. The tilting due to the soft marshland below, the many gable styles, and the “servant doors” directly underneath the official doors of the wealthier merchant houses were fun to watch. And of course the waterways themselves are fun. We saw the “skinny bridge,” one of the remaining bridges that opens up in the middle, as well as a lot of houseboats (most are official registered residences), other boats taking smaller and bigger tours, and the Ij, the former main harbor which is now mostly residences on both sides, with boats and cruise ships and ferries everywhere. Because it was gray and occasionally started spitting, it was really a great way to spend an hour NOT on our feet and under a protective glass cover, and still see lots of Amsterdam.
We then found ourselves a teeny three-tier traditional Dutch restaurant for lunch (we had pancakes again, but the coffee is still not my friend) and then walked down to the Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s big city park. We saw the monument of Mr. Vondel, whom I had, to my shame, never heard of, although he was a famous Dutch poet of the 17th century, and we observed that his monument always seems to have a bird on it, and of course also the inevitable signs of bird presence. Since he died a bitter and half-forgotten man, that seemed rather sad. We didn’t spend a lot of time in the park, but enough to see a few minutes of a free open air concert (with a no-name band called “The Yukon Club,” of all things), and on the way back we saw people play large-piece chess. We walked the mile or so back to the hotel and took a little rest before we left for an evening out–dinner at a hastily picked bar as it started to rain, and then the famous Narrative Conference dance that happens every year. The dinner took way too long for the unremarkable food, but the bar had a black cat named Henk who didn’t care about people at all, and so that was fun. The walk to the dance venue was a bit of a haul, but the venue was great–the Nemo (New Modern) Science center, a huge building in the shape of a huge boat, designed by the architect who designed the famous Centre Pompidou in Paris, that sits atop the entrance of a freeway tunnel under the Ij. We had to take an elevator to the top, but the dance was on the bar that sits at the higher end of the tilted roof, in a nice bar that even gave out free cups of water after we had used up our free drink chips. That was very much needed because we got pretty warm from dancing–the DJ did a great job of mixing 70s and 80s music with a handful of contemporary hits and we had tons of people on the dance floor. From years of going to the Narrative dances, I know this is always an interesting demographics challenge, because the DJ has to make people in their 50s and 60s all the way down to the super cool grad students in their late 20s happy. But a lot of people seemed to appreciate the heavily 70s-based pop he played. We certainly were, and we wrapped up at 11 pm with somewhat sore feet, but we still managed to walk the 20 minutes home–thankfully, on fairly quiet streets away from the bustling city center.