In Amsterdam they say: if you don't like our climate, wait five minutes. And indeed, the weather here is prone to change. You leave the house - it's dry and serene, you turn the corner - a piercing wind blows, and not from above but from somewhere sideways, cold raindrops lash. Fine ripples cover the surface of the canals, tram wires ring, leaves fall from the trees. But as soon as you open your umbrella and raise your collar, the clouds scatter in different directions, and bright sun appears in the sky. The climate in the Netherlands is maritime, unstable, capricious. But the character of the country's residents, on the contrary, is calm and imperturbable.
On a Sunday afternoon in Vondelpark you will see an exotic and motley crowd - a collective portrait of the Dutch. You will be surrounded by curly-haired bourgeois old ladies and vulgarly made-up transvestites, dazzling Surinamese mulatto women and tipsy football fans. The dissimilar residents of the Netherlands respect the personal space of their neighbors and try never to be surprised by anything. In this country, paparazzi do not run after the queen, and local celebrities casually ride bicycles to the shops.
It is unlikely that anywhere else foreigners are treated so cordially and friendly. I became convinced of this myself as soon as I arrived in Amsterdam and started learning Dutch. At first it was difficult for me to overcome embarrassment, saying to passersby “Hue morgen!” - “Good morning!”. I was confused about articles and memorized verbs with separable prefixes, tried to understand the rules for forming numerals. If we say, for example, “thirty-five,” the Dutch say “five and thirty.” So, there was never a case where a single seller got angry because of my illiteracy. They all smiled and unobtrusively corrected: you see, we don't have the expression “one hundred and fifty grams.” It sounds shorter: anderhalfons. I nodded my head and tried to remember - anderhalfons - means “one and a half hundred-gram portions.”
Uncurtained City
At first, the Dutch seemed to me to be complete tightwads. When I told them that in our capital they even heat the stairwells, they incredulously twirled their finger at their temple - in Amsterdam a heater doesn't always work even in apartments. More precisely, the heating itself exists, but it is turned on by some small faucet located in a secret place. This faucet is almost always screwed on all the way, although children constantly sneeze and cough.
The washing machine is used here at night when electricity is cheaper. When brushing teeth, they turn off the water so as not to waste it. The Dutch do not buy new household appliances until the old one is completely broken. Sausage or cheese is cut into slices no thicker than paper, and a tea bag is brewed in a large glass vessel until it turns a yellowish tint, and then set aside for the next time.
Curtains on windows are a separate song. Only in recent years have they begun to appear here and there, but generally, according to Amsterdam tradition, windows on the ground floors must remain open. No one knows exactly when this began - they say it dates back to the time of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands. It was as if Spanish soldiers were so afraid of conspiracies that they forbade covering windows under penalty of death. According to another version, hardworking Dutch have long considered it wrong to hide prosperity and respectability behind curtains. But when I walked the streets in the evenings and studied townspeople's lives through the windows, it seemed to me that people simply considered it unnecessary to spend money on such a trifle as curtains.
After living in Amsterdam for six months, I realized that all this is not stinginess, but a normal ability to make ends meet and preserve what comes with great difficulty. There is no central heating in the Netherlands - each house or apartment has its own personal boiler that heats water in the radiators using gas. Such pleasure is not cheap, so one has to economize. And for household purposes, a large electric boiler is used. The water heats all night, in the morning both children and adults splash in it, and then dishes are washed. In general, there is no freebie here. Taxes eat up more than a third of the salary, almost everything else goes to housing and various deductions - to the pension fund, the bank, the insurance company, to pay off loans. By our standards, salaries in the Netherlands are high, but in fact, free money is only enough for food. So do not think of Holland as a country of the good life, expensive interiors, and European gloss. It looks that way only from the point of view of tourists unfamiliar with the local reality.
On the Waters
The houses in Amsterdam resemble tipsy little men leaving a pub: each one tilts to the side, but all together they huddle against each other. Land in Holland has always been expensive and sold in tiny plots, so the buildings here are narrow and rather cramped inside. Due to the unsteady, marshy soil, buildings begin to lean in different directions over time, and a tilt toward the street is given to them deliberately, even during construction. Notice the beams sticking out under the roof ridges with ropes hanging from them. It didn't immediately occur to me what they were for. But the answer turned out to be simple. The staircases in the houses are so narrow and twisted that you can't carry any furniture up them. So you have to lift refrigerators, wardrobes, and pianos with winches, and then push them into the room through the windows.
The interior of a typical Amsterdam apartment consists of mismatched items. An expensive porcelain service from Delft stands on a simple lopsided whatnot, a twisted Art Nouveau chandelier casts light on a reproduction of a painting by Van Dyck, a pot-bellied 60s transistor radio coexists with a high-end home theater. In old houses, the vaults are supported by rafters blackened by time, and bunches of fragrant herbs hang from them. Often the apartment is located on two levels, and you can enter it directly from the street. In front of the entrance there is sometimes a flower bed and a sentimental fountain splashes.
But I live not in an ordinary stone house but in a so-called wonbot - on an old barge moored to the embankment of one of the canals. Floating dwellings appeared in the Dutch capital after the war, during the housing crisis. To this day, tens of thousands of Amsterdam residents are registered on former boats, among which there are also modern liners with floor-to-ceiling windows, antiques, fireplaces, and lighting. But most often you come across shabby little boats like mine. Steps lead down to where a tiny kitchen is equipped (in it everything is hung on hooks), there is a tiny shower and a ship's toilet. From the galley you can get into the living room - in my opinion, furnished luxuriously. With furniture in Amsterdam there are no problems. Once a month the municipality organizes the removal of bulky items, and from the evening before people take out unnecessary junk to the sidewalks. Once I picked up a sofa, a floor lamp, a mirror, a carpet, a refrigerator with a vacuum cleaner, and dragged all this stuff to my home. It turned out quite cozy.
I like that water splashes outside the porthole windows, sunbeams skip across the glassed engravings, and when pleasure boats sail past, the apartment sways on the waves. In warm weather I sit in a wicker chair on the deck and feed bread to passing ducks. For all this beauty, together with insurance and utilities (my vessel has telephone, water supply and electricity), I have to pay about 250 euros a month. An equivalent area on land would cost three times as much.
One coffee - one cookie
Once in Amsterdam, you must try beans with crispy cracklings - kantjes, pea soup with smoked sausage, and all sorts of pancakes. By the way, the famous Dutch cheese is used here not only for making sandwiches. It is put into salads, crumbled into soups, fried with fish, baked with fruits and served with pineapples. And another feature. Recipes for a number of local dishes were taken from Indonesia at the time when that distant country was a Dutch colony. Since then, Amsterdam has been preparing fried rice nasi and pasta with vegetables - bami. I am sure you will also like hutspot - boiled beef with vegetable puree.
Two favorite national drinks are light beer Grolsch and strong alcoholic liqueur Genever. The latter resembles a mixture of liqueur and schnapps and is made from various grains with the addition of juniper. There are two types of jenever - a more transparent (young) and a cloudy-yellowish (old). The strength of both can reach 37 degrees. Jenever is drunk chilled, but not frozen. The taste of juniper is very faint in this drink. To my taste, it is much more pleasant than classic English gin.
In Amsterdam they have breakfast with black bread and butter, spreading jam on top or sprinkling hagelslag - chocolate sprinkles. At noon it is acceptable to swallow something more substantial - for example, a piece of white bread with sausage or a salad in a bun. Dinner traditionally starts at 18:00 and includes a full set of dishes. The most popular of them is called patat met appelmoes - French fries with applesauce. The Dutch love this mixture, although from the outside it seems that fried potatoes do not go well with pureed apples.
For dessert, various puddings, yogurts, sometimes ice cream and, of course, a local invention - vla. This cream is made from eggs, milk and various additives; it can be chocolate, vanilla, and hopjes - caramel-coffee. The day of a typical Amsterdammer ends with strong coffee, the drinking of which is considered a national sport. Many families still adhere to the old rule: with one cup of coffee you can eat only one piece of cake or one cookie.
National symbol of Holland
The bicycle can be called a national symbol of Holland along with tulips, windmills and wooden shoes. Young schoolgirls and university professors, homeless drug addicts and members of the royal family ride on 'iron horses'. Even the police in this city have switched to bicycles, and for visitors there are rental points at every step. It is unlikely that anywhere else in Europe will you see such a colorful crowd on creaking two-wheelers. I get real pleasure when I stand in the morning at some busy intersection and watch people turning the pedals. While riding, they warm their hands in their pockets, talk on the phone, chew sandwiches, listen to music, read books and hold on a leash the dogs running alongside.
Mommies carry toddlers in special carts, and lovers ride parallel to each other and kiss, holding hands. The whole city is lined with red paths intended for cyclists and equipped with special traffic lights. But the authorities wage a constant war with motorists. Literally at every step there are posts - Amsterdammertjes with three crosses of St. Andrew - these signs categorically prohibit parking cars within a radius of some meters.
That's the kind of city it is. In some ways a bit criminal, but still safer than many other capitals. Sometimes bright and full of sun, sometimes gray and dank. Exposing intimate life and hiding what lies in the soul. A special world in which every day some new, unexpected facet is revealed.