11.24.03
Utrecht
On Saturday I went to Utrecht, home town of Marrije Schaake, the wonderful English-language book blogger who had sacrificed a precious day out of [Inter]national Novel Writing Month to show me around her city.
Utrecht is about half an hour's train ride south of Amsterdam, and everyone from Amsterdam seemed to be going to Utrecht with me. Holland has zippy bright yellow trains that look just right under the leaden November skies, and I enjoyed my first glimpse of the Dutch countryside, squeezed in for five minutes between endless Amsterdam suburbs and endless Utrecht suburbs. It was all misty green fields with grazing cattle, a sight that would have looked just like a steam-pressed Vermont if not for the occasional windmill, the total absence of orange plaster reindeer, and the stately canal that ran along the railway, with banana-shaped barges each pushing along a fearsome bow wave.
Utrecht looks like it was built in two phases - the first sometime in the seventeenth century, and the second in 1962. I was particularly taken with a somewhat Orwellian building along the town perimiter that looked like it was being boarded by a flying saucer - the result of an art competition that made everyone so happy they decided to keep the look, creepy intergalactic al-Qaeda connotations be damned.
Not to be outdone, central Utrecht countered with a building that had come down with some kind of architectural Ebola. One day, the mystery of what people spiked the water with at 1960's planning board meetings will be exposed, and then perhaps there will be justice.
But the rest of old Utrecht was wonderful. I was particularly taken with the canals, which have a kind of landing along one side and doors that lead directly to house cellars across the streets, so that goods can be moved directly from the boats, without having to hoist anything into the street.
The Dutch have this genius for making good use of available space - the whole country reminds me of one of those tiny but chic Manhattan studio apartments where the bed, kitchen, and most of the major furniture seem to fold away into the walls when not in use.
Our first stop in Utrecht was the Centraal Museum, which has a number of very nice paintings and an amazing 12th century canal boat that had been perfectly preserved in the local muck until someone accidentally dug a hole above it in the 1930's. Marrije told me that a pair of Roman boats had also recently been found (and when I say 'boat' in all these cases, I mean something that would easily fill a hockey rink). I would love to know what this part of the world must have looked like then, right on the edges of the Roman Empire, with great canal boats plying their trade around the countryside. It was warmer then, too - a veritable toga climate. But I guess you can never go back.
The Centraal Museum has a quirky collection of paintings - some Pink-Floydy surrealist stuff, some forgettable modern pieces, but also a whole slew of wonderful pictures from earlier times (17th-19th century). I particularly liked one room, where they had hung pictures on a transparent central divider, so you could see both the front and the back of each canvas with its multitude of museum stickers and collector's stamps.
One of the best exhibits was a period dollhouse from the 1600's [?? - I am terrified in advance of all the corrections Marrije is going to send in], which had been commissioned for The Most Spoiled Child in Holland. Everything was done to scale, in overwhelming detail, including miniature paintings special-ordered from well-known painters of the time, delftware, furniture, kitchen tools, carpets, fabrics, tapestries, and hand-sewn books. Not only was it neat to see the craftsmanship that went into the dollhouse, but it showed that all of the artifacts we were seeing in austere isolation - pictures, porcelain, decorative art - had originally been displayed in a huge overwhelming ostentatious heap. I am impressed by this idea of turning art into kitsch through sheer accretion.
In a typical touch, the dollhouse had a little flashlight in a plexiglas holder next to it, so you could peer into its depths. Little conveniences like this pop up everywhere in Holland. The country has user interfaces down pat, with the sole exception of the mystifying Amsterdam doors whose top and bottom halves operate independently. I got a letterbox flap right in the goolies the first time I tried to enter my Amsterdam hotel.
Our second stop was the Universiteitmuseum, a marvelous brains-in-formaldehyde institution with all kinds of horrific specimens floating colorless in jars, motley deformed baby skeletons, and an awesome array of medical and period dental tools that made you clutch your mouth in reflexive pain. Particularly arresting was the collection of wax body part replicas of various skin diseases, which Marrije pointed out was the most useful way to teach diagnosis in the days before color photography. The mold of a penis with second-stage syphillis belongs on the front cover of any "Sex Can Wait!" curriculum.
After a final glance at a very earnest exhibit on modern dental retainers (complete with a 'build your own retainer' interactive table with wire and pliers), we headed out back to the Old Botanical Garden, and from there into the center of the old town.
Utrecht is bustling, old, and very pretty. The central landmark is two thirds of the Domkerk, a beautiful 14th century church that lost its nave in a 1674 hurricane. Rather than rebuild, the locals patched up the nave-shaped hole with bricks, and so the church and its tower remain separated by a nice plaza.
I walked around Utrecht in a pleasant tourist reverie, the kind you fall into when someone trustworthy is ferrying you around an unknown place. The town was packed with shoppers, and the store windows were doing their best to attract them, with beautiful displays of marzipan fruits, antiques, and somewhat mystifying juxtapositions like a giant wooden clog with carrots in it.
As we stood in line for Italian sandwiches in one store, Marrije casually turned to me and said "So do you know about Sinterklaas?". Suppressing the urge to ask if she meant Santa Claus, I confessed that I had never heard of the chap.
A shocked hush descended over the store. The shop girl stared at me and tittered. Long seconds passed in silence. We all stood around the vast chasm of my ignorance, looking down. Somewhere a baby started to cry.
Safely back on the streets, Marrije gave me a crash course on the Dutch St. Nicholas tradition.
Sinterklaas lives somewhere in Spain, with his trusty sidekick Zwarte Piet (Black Peter), who presents all sorts of thorny racial problems. Once a year, Sinterklaas hitches up his horse and heads for Holland, to the great delight of the country's children. To hear the nice website tell it:
In the first weeks of November, Sinterklaas gets on his white horse, [loyal Sinterklaas sidekick Black] Peter ("Piet") swings a huge sack full of gifts over his shoulder, and the three of them board a steamship headed for the Netherlands. Around mid-November they arrive in a harbour town - a different one every year - where they are formally greeted by the Mayor and a delegation of citizens. Their parade through town is watched live on television by the whole country and marks the beginning of the "Sinterklaas season".
Sinterklaas and Black Peter roam the Netherlands for a few weeks, deputizing assistants (the English-language Amsterdam Times had a headline yesterday that read "Sinterklaas Assistants Assaulted") to help them cover the entire country. Zwarte Piet roams around ducking down chimneys (one reason he is so zwarte) and checking to see if the kids have left a treat for Sinterklaas's horse in their shoes (hence the carrots-in-clogs display above). If he finds a treat, Piet swaps it for a gift.
On December 5th, the whole country celebrates the holiday:
] Most places of business close a bit earlier than normal. The Dutch head home to a table laden with the same traditional sweets and baked goods eaten for St. Nicholas as shown in the 17th-century paintings of the Old Masters. Large chocolate letters - the first initial of each person present - serve as place settings. They share the table along with large gingerbread men and women known as "lovers" . A basket filled with mysterious packages stands close by and scissors are at hand. Early in the evening sweets are eaten while those gathered take turns unwrapping their gifts and reading their poems out loud so that everyone can enjoy the impact of the surprise. The emphasis is on originality and personal effort rather than the commercial value of the gift, which is one reason why Sinterklaas is such a delightful event for young and old alike.
(There's another good explanatory site on Sinterklaas, as well as another blogger's view of the Belgian version of the tradition, both worth a visit)
Not five minutes after Marrije dropped me off at the train station for my return trip to Amsterdam, I ran into an entire band of Zwarte Pieten, white guys in blackface playing New Orleans-style funeral jazz as they danced their way through the pavilion, and boy was I grateful for the context.
Back in Amsterdam, I could suddenly see Sinterklaas artifacts everywhere. They had been there all along, but I just didn't notice. I wonder what else I'm missing?
A big, big thanks to Marrije for her hospitality!
