All Things Holland

So after waking up from delayed sleeping pills, which had been recommended to me by some French friends, we lumbered out to catch our train at the Gare du Nord in Paris.  We got to the train station at 5:45 and our train left at 6:25am.  After our 3 hour train ride we arrived at the busy and beautiful central station in Amsterdam.  Is there any big city that I have felt so at home?  I like the way they talk, I love their style, they have great comfort food, they are 'the' bike people, ecofriendly, and easy going. Amsterdam is also called the Venice of the north, complete with open plazas filled with pigeons, surrounded by beautiful gilded stone buildings, high fashion shops, cafés and this Venice is a bustling one.  Zoom! three heavy black bikes go by brushing beside you with the ring of their bells, stop! there's a tram coming through, wait! there's a car going down the road, watch out! for the rickshaw, make way! for the horse carriage, and even the occasio...

More fast and furious blog entries! I found a neat blog entry on spas in Amsterdam. You could just jump in the canal... http://www.everettpotter.com/2013/07/spawatch-akasha-spa-amsterdam/

Whoa. It's almost been a month since our last post. Sorry. Back to being regular. Here's one I've had in my emails for a while. Full Article So the thought is what do you do if your city is on the coast or below sea level? Prepare for the eventuality and either build higher or make them float. That's exactly what some of these cities have done. And obviously the Netherlands is high on that list. The article above has more pictures and detail but check out a few of these. Amsterdam - Very Futuristic with 2 levels.     Amsterdam - 75 Floating Houses clumped together (video at the link)   The rest on the link are from other areas of the world. But fitting that the Netherlands has the 2 top posts.   

This is neat. Check these out. Yahoo story with pictures Longer story here . Dutch historian Jo Teeuwisse from Amsterdam (hence the reason it's here) discovered 300 negatives in a flea market and began to research the sites of the photos. She overlaid modern pictures of the same sites with the negatives from WWII creating this 'ghost' image. Her Flicker site is here with many more pictures. Her site mentions that originally this began as just a research tool for her job as a historical consultant and grew into her passion/hobby. She believes that linking these pictures to sites we recognize heighten their impact. I agree. Sure we see lots of pictures from WWII all the time but that was then and there is hardly any lasting  physical evidence now, but when you see the sites today and they look so peaceful and nothing like they were then; it adds an extra amount of weight to them.  If you have the time check out her site where she has tons more pictures. If you don...

Check out this slideshow of Amsterdam's Canals from BBC news . I'll summarize the captions on the pictures here if you don't feel like looking at pretty things. But seriously, click on the link and check out the pictures. >>Amsterdam is the most watery city in the world (must be one ahead of Venice then....). 1/4 of it's surface is covered in canals and harbours. Touring the canals has now become a prime tourist attraction with over 200 canal tour companies now operating carrying over 3 million passengers a year. With the growing canal tour industry, locals fear the larger boats and higher number of boats will cause issues with locals and their smaller boats. There are rules about how loud and what you can do on the canals with police patrol boats always call. Houseboats, once the inexpensive way to live in Amsterdam, are now rising in cost and rivals that of small apartments. It is illegal to swim in the canals except for special occasions (...

iTunes free song of the week last week was a song called Amsterdam by Imagine Dragons. I've never heard of them but it's a catchy Alternative song. But it made me think. In my own personal music collection. I have a few songs named Amsterdam. Three to be exact. This may give to much away about my music tastes but hey, I'm out of ideas for posts as evident by the lack thereof. I don't read into song lyrics deep enough sometimes, so not sure what some of these are talking about but most are hardly about the city itself.  1) Amsterdam by Imagine Dragons Just got this one like I said. Not sure yet. Here it is below. Make you want to ride a train.  2) Amsterdam by Guster Couldn't find a good video for this one. But here is the song. I guess, it's easy to get lost in Amsterdam... 3) Amsterdam by Coldplay My favorite of this bunch. Turns out it's called Amsterdam because Chris Martin wrote this in Amsterdam. The song says nothing of the canal fille...

I read this story this morning and it is just too weird to not post here. Normally the loss of a pet is a time to grieve. If it's a goldfish, then there's a ceremonial flush; a dog or cat, a private burial in the backyard. Some people have resorted to having their prized pets stuffed to 'last' forever. Well, Dutch artist Bart Jansen has decided to take the stuffed pet to another level. Headline: Dutch Artist turns dead cat into remote-controlled helicopter, dubbed 'Orvillecopter' . (more pictures and a movie there) Bart lost his beloved feline friend, named Orville, when it was hit by a car. He decided to embrace the influence behind the name of his friend and truly give the Wright brothers something to squirm about. Bart teamed up radio control expert Arjen Beltman and their creation was revealed to the public this last Saturday at the Kunstrai art festival in Amsterdam. Gota love Amsterdam, keeping with the unusual is normal standard. Just imagine this ...

Ok, so i've been slacking. I haven't been looking into Dutch things for a week or two and haven't posted anything in the meantime. So today I thought I would go into the Dutch "tolerance" idea. When people say Amsterdam, we think Red light district and legal marijuana. But... Despite it being legal there, you almost never see a Dutch person getting high. You see TONS of foreigners smoking out in Dutch “coffee shops” (“coffee shop” means marijuana; “cafe” means coffee) but it’s pretty rare to see a Dutch person there. The legalization is tied to a very Dutch concept called “gedoogbeleid” which is difficult to translate but means permissiveness-because-there-are-bigger-fish-to-fry. (Or don't sweat the small stuff when something bigger is out there.) The Dutch live below sea level, so they have plenty of dams & dikes keeping the water out. To relieve pressure on this system, a little water always trickles through – that’s okay as long as they can keep the flo...

( Map ) Both. Kinda. The country is known as the Netherlands (Nederland in Dutch). Holland is the name of the name of two of the twelve provinces that make up the Netherlands. North Holland (Noord Holland) is the home to Amsterdam while South Holland (Zuid Holland) is home to The Hague (Den Haag). The Hague is the "political" capital of the Netherlands while Amsterdam is the "real" capital. You have probably heard on the news about The Hague. It is in a way the political capital wester Europe. The European Union Courts are located there. I guess in a way the next powerful political establishment outside the UN. So the Dutch are Nederlanders but translated into english it is just Dutch. The reason that Holland is used interchangeably as the name of the country is that that is the most influential province of the country. We really don't have an example here in America. It would be like if the United States would be called Texas or something. I'm sure Texans w...