Europe @ 2.4 km/h (16 page)

419 km

24 July. 19.25 pm AEST. Six weeks before election day, democracy continues to grip the minds of Europe’s most northerly inhabitants.

Hi Ken. We had a great party on Saturday evening, with a good band and lots to drink. Today we had an open day for all at the airport. You were invited to drive firetruck, ambulance and police car. I was testing my car but I had too much speed and almost drived out of the runway. Marius.

421 km

At 26, unemployed and broke, Vincent Van Gogh decided to become an artist, ‘to leave humanity a certain souvenir — to express genuine human feeling’. Who could dispute that, in terms of the goal he set himself, Van Gogh was an unqualified success?

In a single decade — his only decade — of artistic activity, he produced 900 paintings, 1100 drawings and 800 letters, many of which are on display at the Amsterdam museum named after him. Van Gogh’s well-known tragic life provides a stark counterpoint to the sunny colours he brought to the world from the South of France and a teeming brain. If only he had stayed here in the Netherlands, tulips would now be worth €20 million a bunch, I think, but the world would hardly be raving about the creator of
The Potato Eaters
, a dark study of northern Dutch peasants badly received in its day but now an exemplar of Vincent’s worldview ‘before he saw the light’.

In 1887, living in Paris, Van Gogh’s work ‘explodes with light’. To art lovers who worship at his shrine, the
Self-portrait
of that year, with his yellow broad-brimmed hat, is almost iconic. In ’88 Vincent moves to Arles in the South and everything changes. In
The
Bedroom
he displays his most vivid application of colour yet, in such a homely scene. The work ripples with humour — other paintings of his are hung on the bedroom wall — and with irony (he wanted to denote rest and sleep, and used the most lurid colours imaginable, yet the bed draws you in so that you
can
imagine resting there). Obviously, I am not the only visitor so affected. Even while standing before
Sunflowers
a young American woman utters the memorable line, ‘I can’t take my eyes off
The Bedroom
’.

Then you see
The Harvest
, also from Arles in ’88, so uplifting I can imagine it having the same effect as Tolstoy’s championing of harvest-gathering in
War and Peace
. It makes you want to pick up a hoe or rake and get stuck in. And yes, each work is signed, simply, Vincent.

Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin were too headstrong to work together. Gauguin left Arles at the end of 1889, after heated arguments and the famous incident in which Vincent cut off — no, not his ear, you see how a legend grows — part of his left earlobe.

We move towards the end with a sense of sad inevitability. A painting by Gauguin of Van Gogh painting sunflowers in December 1889 sets me wondering whether it was a row over this that broadened into a more dramatic rupture. Vincent was a stickler for painting from observation, and in France there are no sunflowers in December.

After his move north to Auvers-sur-Oise in 1890, Van Gogh became convinced of his waning artistic powers. ‘I feel like a failure,’ he wrote. ‘I feel as though
this is
my fate and that it will no longer
change.’
 (My emphasis.) It is this last aspect — the feeling that a road of intolerable suffering will have no turning — that can will a potential suicide to active self-destruction.

425 km

Growing up in Macao, Gordon — a man so private he will not tell me his real surname — was ‘raised with cats’, so when
Poezenboot
, the Cat Boat founded by an Amsterdam woman in 1966, advertised for someone to act as principal minder to a floating population of felines, he applied straightaway. Inside the barge, moored at Singel Canal to circumvent the city laws against keeping multiple moggies, you can find Gordon’s Wall of Fame, a photo album comprising his pet loves. The rest of the space is taken up by … the pet loves themselves.

434 km

I could not see the bulk of Rembrandthuis without organising a lifting party that would only have distracted other visitors from the enjoyment of their time here. Never mind, there is much to see in the accessible part. The great painter and etcher lived here from 1639 — when he bought this house on Jodenbreestraat at the height of his fame — until 1658 when it, and everything of value in it, were sold at auction to pay off debts after he had been declared bankrupt. Like his compatriot Van Gogh, Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt was a textbook case of an artist not appreciated — and hopelessly under-remunerated — in his own lifetime. The estate of his principal creditor, Christoffel Thiesz, dominates his 1651 etching of Haarlem, with St Bavo’s Great Church shown at left. It is natural to assume he produced this work in a desperate attempt to propitiate the man.

440 km

Sign at the Happy Inn laundrette on Warmoestraat, ‘Yes. The washer starts with a spinning. It’s a part of the process. Don’t worry.’ I love Dutch signs. They make the routine sound like a branch of philosophy. I suppose this even applies to one in black paint on white canvas at Koningsplein, hanging from what looks like a bank converted into a squat. It reads, IK STUDEER KRAAK (I STUDY COCAINE).

443 km

Exactly two weeks after it opened, I visit Openbare Bibliotheek, the grand new national library opposite a floating Chinese restaurant. Featured attractions are free books, free Internet (and unlimited access to it: no one will come round to kick you off even if you spend ten hours at a terminal) and free music. Inside the entrance is a piano for the use of anyone who cares to play it. In the few hours I am there not one child of three is allowed to clunk all over it, not one adult whose playing skills peaked with
Chopsticks
dares to show off his or her talentlessness. On the contrary, we are treated to thoughtful, well-executed pieces from the pop and classical repertoires. Sheer delight.

448 km

Where else could this be but in Amsterdam? Here we are at the Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum. They also call it asa, bhang, cañamo, chanure, dagga, ganja, hanf, hemp, hennef, kannabis, konoroli, marijuana, qinnab and ta ma. Take your pick of the crop.

A series of still photos is enticingly titled PLANT SEX. The banner headline seems a trifle sensationalist.
They’ve been doing it
for a long time
, I think, and find immediate confirmation with a quotation from Shen Nang, a Han Dynasty official who opined back in 3727 BC, ‘
Ta ma
is one of the superior elixirs for health’.

In 1994, we are told, the Netherlands resumed cultivation of industrial hemp and since then ‘more than 100 countries have followed suit’. (I find this improbable, but then my critical faculties are still intact, maybe because I haven’t done much inhaling lately.) Tolerance has been state policy on ‘soft drugs’ since 1976. Coffee shops have sprouted across the city. In some of them you can even buy coffee.

Outside a display room of hydroponic plants that are forced to floracate under constant fanning and bright lights, my eye is caught by a newspaper article about Eagle Bill, a Cherokee ‘half hippie, half rocker’ who moved to Amsterdam in the Seventies and praises the health benefits of a superior bong known as a Vaporiser
^TM
. The first time Eagle Bill was busted, poetic justice saved him. The cops apparently succumbed to temptation and from the whole crop not a single lab sample remained, so ‘the charges were dropped due to a lack of evidence’. E.B. insists, ‘This plant has done so much for me, and I want to do everything for it. It’s given me everything in the world that I’ve ever wanted’. (Has Eagle Bill been having plant sex too? I can’t wait to ask him.)

The article proceeds, ‘This love and respect for cannabis obviously runs deep. When Eagle Bill leaves this planet’ — hey, who said he’s going anywhere? — ‘he wishes to be cremated and have his ashes distributed in mason jars to friends, so that he can be combined with the earth that nurtures their cannabis gardens.’ This is one step short of Keef Richards snorting his old man.

On my way out, I ask the receptionist, ‘Could I meet Eagle Bill?’

‘No,’ she says curtly, eyes averted. ‘He passed away two years ago.’

‘Oh, what of?’ But I sense the answer before she can even utter the words ‘Lung cancer’.

452-454 km

The enchanting town of Leiden is famous for De Valk — a gigantic 250-year-old windmill. A couple of hundred metres from the modernistic railway station I pop into Cafe Eigenzorg, which has been in business since 1850 and run by the same family continuously since the 1930s — even while the Dutch were under Nazi occupation. When I tell the free spirit who serves me where I have come from today, she says, ‘I don’t like Amsterdam. When I go there, shopkeepers address me in English and say, “Can I help you?” This is my country!’

I sympathise — in English.

In Sweden they want three days’ notice of intention to travel; in the Netherlands, three hours. But this still complicates the exercise enormously. Much worse than the three-hour rule is an
Alice in
Wonderland
interpretation of just what assistance entails. Instance my departure from Amsterdam.

Nothing is quite as absurd as a post office that won’t sell a stamp — yes, I came across one in the outer suburb of Reigersbos the other day — but what gives it a run for my money is a Tickets and Service Bureau operative who thinks he’s served you by scrawling a phone number for you to ring —
for service
. This morning, at Centraal Station’s ‘service bureau’, clerk No. 4 said (without feeling), ‘Can I help you?’ On my pointing out that I was 75 minutes early and would need help carrying my bags to the platform, he responded with a tight smile but said nothing to indicate this would be problematic. The hapless ‘assistant’ who soon materialised, though, made it clear he
could
not help — why do people say
can’t
when they mean
won’t
? — because ‘it’s not my job’.

In a station with no porters or trolleys, whose job is it? Or must I become a one-man shuttle, leaving one bag at a time on the platform while I fetch the rest? They haven’t yet hired the service assistant who can — or will — answer this. Almost at the point of saying to No. 4, ‘The next time you’re conflicted between obeying the rules and helping a customer, which are you going to choose?’ I hesitated, having been taught since childhood that you should never ask a question to which you already know the answer.

At this point, a woman in her mid-50s with twinkling eyes — Janne, an Eindhoven doctor — offered to carry my bags to Platform 13A for me, saying, ‘Forget those people. It shouldn’t be like that. They won’t help you. Let me do it’. When we got to 13A, Dr Janne refused to supply any contact details. She had just wanted to help.

Murphy and Parkinson are old hat. Here’s a station announcement, call it Haley’s Law, honed in numerous bureaucratic battles. People in service bureaux who wish to help won’t mind telling you their name; those who are determined not to help will.

When the conductor appeared in my compartment, he took one look at me, declined to inspect my Eurail pass and sighed wearily, ‘I know it all’. A Dutch fellow passenger assured me I was only one of many victims of ‘this Amsterdam attitude’, but the assistance provided at Hollandspoor Station in The Hague was so impressive it was as if, instead of travelling a mere 124 km, I had left one country and entered another. Not only did Muhammad and Savash — no shyness about giving their names, they were only too happy to help — carry my bags to the service point, but after a quick confab they decided to keep on carrying them the entire 600 metres to my hostel, on the basis — surely right — that construction work on the Netherlands’ tallest structure which lay between the station and my destination would have made it difficult for me to find my own way there, however well directed.

While on the subject, I should mention that Rotterdam was more Amsterdamned when it came to official unhelpfulness from Tickets and Service staff. One of their number blamed the lack of prior information that I had three bags with me, and a sudden ailment — colloquially known as a bad back — for his inability to help. When I left town, the excuse of the day was, ‘We don’t have trolleys’. While carrying my second piece of luggage through a tunnel I noticed, lying unused and unattended … a trolley! Which I commandeered. When the escorting ‘customer service officer’ saw me, she nearly exploded. ‘That is not for you. It is for the cleaning lady!’

I replied with a brief homily on the virtue of self-help, normally so admired by the Dutch. At that, an information officer (yes, some stations still have people dedicated to helping passengers: this one, it turned out, was a Gambian) stepped in and accompanied me to the main hall for my last bag. ‘Don’t worry about these people,’ he told me. ‘They can smile on the outside but inside their hearts are so hard. These people don’t like their job — and they don’t do a very good job.’ Hence Haley’s Second Law of Railway Service, which goes like this: If you want information, go to the service counter; if you want service, you’re better off going to the information desk.