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.