A hofje in the rear

OK. To set the scene: I’m in a coffeshop, waiting for my washing to finish down the road. I’m writing this but I’m also finding myself transfixed by a show on the automated process of making icecream cones. The guy running the place seemed to be fairly cool but I’m reconsidering, based on how much he’s enjoying a story he's reading in his newspaper about a new fish they’ve discovered in the Mekong Delta, Phallostethus cuulong.

There’s this one Dutch girl I kept seeing everywhere wearing pale green jeans. She was really getting around too, managing to not just keep up with me but consistently end up getting to where I was going before me. It was getting far too co-incidental, straying into suspicious, until I realized the jeans were just trendy. A Dutch version of the scene from Good Morning, Vietnam.

I’ve spent the last few days wandering the streets of the Jordaan with Elly. The Jordaan is an old quarter near the centre of Amsterdam with lots of cool old buildings and history. I am so lucky to have a Dutch speaker to explore with. I probably should be going to museums and galleries but instead I’m drawn to the tie rods anchoring the facades of the local buildings to their frames. Functional, but then also a vehicle for both expression and demonstration of prestige.



Part of the fun with having Elly here is the added autobiographical context she has. She’s found her old car (wellllllll…), shown me some of the haunts from her youth, and insisted we eat traditional Dutch pub food, uitsmijter. When it arrived I thought we had been served a particularly shoddy version. How wrong I was, apparently this was the genuine article – zeer authentiek. Three fried eggs with melted cheese served on ham and white bread. Something to give the English a run for their money on the prestigious stage of world cuisine.



Working as a builder back home gives me a set of eyes to see the city through (hence the tie rods). Even without an interest in building it doesn’t take long to notice how out of whack all the buildings are. It’s not uncommon to see two buildings leaning in on each other, like a couple of drunks supporting each other to stay upright. Further down the street a building will be leaning forward into the street with each building behind it leaning slightly less until by about half a dozen houses down the facades are plumb again. Why are they like this? They had obviously been built before the hash cafes first opened so my next thought was that maybe they had been built during some sort of spirit level makers strike. These sorts of questions kept mounting up for Elly and me - Why is the water in the canals brown if no-one is polluting it anymore? Did they use to use horses to pull the barges? Why have some of the buildings been built using recycled bricks? We decided to go on a guided walking tour of the Jordaan.



It was really nice. We got answers to all our questions and got shown lots of interesting things. Like a stained glass workshop still in use and the hofje, little garden courtyards hidden behind an ordinary door on the street. A form of social welfare provided by the Catholic church (gardens were far too extravagant for the Protestants), with each courtyard surrounded by housing for old women. If I was going to spend more time in Amsterdam I would want a streetscape in the front of the apartment and a hofje in the rear.



Last night I went to a local outdoor film festival, Pluk de Nacht – Seize the night. They show films from international film festivals that didn’t make it to the Netherlands. It’s free to get in, free to get a deck chair and then they make their money on the food and drink. The location is on a flat concrete wharf, disused and covered in weeds and young, funky looking Dutch people. It was a Czech film shown with English subtitles so I was able to keep up, perhaps better than some of the locals, eating pizza and huddled in my chair against the cold wind.

Extra senoritas

I should be taking more pictures. Memories fade. Maybe writing about them will help fix them. The thing is I’m a lazy writer and I haven’t the dedication to thrash out every scene in detail. Instead I dab a few broad brushstrokes and let other people’s imagination do the rest.

I’m three days into my Holland adventure, staying in a little room at the top of the Seven Bridges Hotel, which is delightful. Around the corner from the hotel I’ve found a little Belgian café where I came on my first morning to try and erase the nightmare memories of plane food with the help of coffee and chocolate, croissants and baguettes. It’s a nice place to blog before wandering through town visiting bookstores and looking at interesting things.

The centre of Amsterdam is just Tourist Town, the same as every tourist town all over the world – albeit in a pretty Dutch setting. The culture becomes polarized, both trivialized and amorphous, either women in funny hats selling tulip bulbs or young guys yelling, selling coca cola, phone credit and trying to fill sprawling restaurants. But a short walk away things settle down a bit. The streets behind my hotel remind me of the west end of Fremantle, big old buildings with big windows shoulder to shoulder on wide streets. Except with canals and more bikes. So many bikes, including lots of cargo bikes. And lots of stylish Dutch people riding them.



Yesterday I got out of town and went to a big market in Beverwijk called De Bazaar. I caught the train through the countryside and of all things my eye was drawn to allotments and electric fence tape. It is the beginning of autumn and so the last of the summer crops are finishing and the slow winter crops are taking over valuable space.

The bazaar in Beverwijk was really big and not as good as I was hoping. But there were some gems. Well……two gems. And one of those wasn’t very good. Lots of stalls selling flashing plastic and cheap leather jackets. I had lunch at De Bazaar in an Arabic restaurant, just a cut above the kind of kebab shop I’d find back home only this one was filled with arabs eating lunch and drinking Moroccan mint tea. I sometimes have to remind myself to be a bit more adventurous and not so shy, otherwise I’ll end up just seeking out the familiar and missing the interesting things and experiences. The Moroccan tea was delicious.

In the food section I bought nectarines and Turkish pistachios to sustain me on my wanderings. Eventually I found an antique store where I couldn’t resist the “Extra Senoritas” cigar tins, along with strap on ice skates and a brass door bell. I also found a wooden folding ruler, not the sort of thing you can find in Australia as it unusually combines worn charm with the metric system.

The woman who ran the stall gave a little on the price, gave me the name of another shop to try in Amsterdam and invited me to feel her boobs. All in the name of science of course. She had hers done ten years ago and her friend had hers done twenty years ago and they were giving each other the squeeze test. With my darling wife in mind I politely declined, murmuring a few excuses and feigning disinterest. The Dutch really are good sorts.

The Making of Butter

So it has been a while hasn’t it? It’s not that we haven’t had anything to blog about for the last six months, we just got out of the habit. To bring people up to date : Noah has started school and is loving it. Ryan is working on building Angela’s house and thing are slowly moving forward. And I have been following my usual pursuits as well as finally making some butter!

I bought my butter churn online from a company in the USA that mainly supply the Amish. It’s a 10 litre electric churn called a Gem Dandy, and I love it.

The cream we are getting is very thick and has defeated my churn on the previous two attempts. This time around we added more milk to thin it up bit and it finally came good and made me some butter.

We started with around ten litres of cream and did half at a time adding milk by increments till we ended up adding around 2 litres. The first batch took a long time with much pleading and swearing. We must have finally said the right incantation because somehow it separated. We strained out the butter milk (and saved it to thin out the next batch) worked it, washed it, and salted it. Ryan had a stainless steel butter mould made up at a local steel fabricators for $60. It’s the same shape as a normal 250g stick of butter and it works like a dream.

I was very pleased with the butter from my churn, just like the real thing, only, of course, much better. I wrapped it in unbleached, chlorine-free baking paper and a little label that Ang and I couldn’t help but make up.

The whole thing is a joint effort with Ang and I couldn’t do it without her energy and logic, thanks sis!

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