Amsterdam to Moscow to St. Petersbug

I’ve been trying to find a way to talk about Brussels and Amsterdam without breaking the road code. Funny thing is that not much happened, not much that would incriminate me, or cause me any kind of grief per say, still it was an interesting and eye opening experience. I was glad for the company in Amsterdam; Foy took the train with me in the morning from Brussels. He’s spent quite a bit of time in Amsterdam and knows the town inside and out. At one time he worked for Lotus (notes), and would spend 2 weeks in the dam and then four weeks at home.

Before I get into the details of the dam I should back up. The last night of Brussels was absolutely wonderful. We, Dennis, Jennifer (his wife), Greg, Laura, Steve, Madkins, Robin, JD and Foy all went to dinner at our favorite little French haunt in the alley where we had enjoyed three previously successful and gastronomically pleasing meals. The owner recognized us immediately. It was a particularly hot day and the area outside the restaurant was jam packed with people. There was seating for maybe 6, we insisted that we sit outside and so he pushed things around to accommodate our group of surely MAAWGers. I quietly came up to him and said “would it be possible to get a bucket of ice, I’ve brought this Vodka back from Russia and we intend to drink a liter of it with dinner.” He paused for a moment and seemed a little puzzled, perhaps mulling over the ramifications of having a bunch of tourists swilling vodka near his regular patrons. He looked at me and with a half smile and in the thickest and most sonorous of French accents said “Because I know you, I will do it.” With the table set and our vodka found its way into their glass chiller for 5 minutes and then into a bath of ice and water, conveniently located near me, the bar man for the night. Our host gave us 10 tall shot glasses that I filled. The entire table ordered a round of Chimay and we washed down a round of Rusky Standard Platinum with large brimming glasses of divine Chimay and bread with rich sweet and creamy butter. This was the beginning of the end, in a manner of speaking. Our appetizer order was no less extravagant than the previous night: frogs legs, two orders of calamari in olive oil and anis, burgundy snails, crab ravioli, shrimp in a butter garlic cream sauce, the divine monk fish Carpaccio, foirse gras and fried goat cheese with some other delights on the side. For the main course I decided to go with the tar tar, it was high time I had a cannibal sandwich and I trusted this place to serve up a fine piece of ground meat mixed with mustard and herbs. My lump of ground was accompanied by pom frits which were excellent, and of course I drowned them in mayonnaise, but this should come as no surprise as I do this back home. We ordered a round of deserts, then Dennis, Steve and I had Sambuca, they served it to us with ice in the glass, a strange way as I’m used to it lit a blaze to infuse the Sambuca with the flavor of the coffee beans that float in it, it wasn’t bad, turns it milky the way that water turns perenod milky, just different. A double espresso with lemon and sugar to round out the evening and give the stomach a little extra acid for digestion made us all delightfully drunk on food, the warm night and being strangers in a strange land.

From there we wandered up to the bar we went to before, People, as it was called, and Greg ordered another round of Sweet Chateaus, a deadly concoction of vodkas, juices, crushed ice and some other stuff. The floater on top is raspberry vodka that when mixed into the drunk turns it black. There are photos of this alchemical mess on the Flickr page, six of them lined up to do us in.
The next morning I woke and met Foy downstairs. The rest of the conference was to be board meetings and very little pertaining to my job function per say. We headed for the train station and after some difficulty of trying to discern where the hell the Amsterdam train was stopping, found our way to track 13 and headed north.

It doesn’t take long to figure out that you’re in Amsterdam. The city is like a horse shoe that radiates out from the train station. The area directly north is the main hub of the city filled with “coffee” shops, windows and their red neon lights and every other western taboo that you could think of. Not a 100 meters from the train station I passed my first red light and there she was, sitting in a window, in lingerie, smiling at people who passed her and waiting for business. I felt instantly giddy, perhaps not the right word, but trust me, this wore off later, but it was a kind of giddiness because five feet after that came the strong and unmistakable scent of scensimila wafting out of a coffee shop. We headed for the B&B run by Ken & Vlad, that Foy has been staying at, on and off, for years. He went up to drop his stuff, and I headed down and across the Kaisergratt canal to my hotel, Toren. It was very close, and the size of the city became apparent as I walked around. The buildings are narrow, leaning at precariously odd angles. It’s a very small city that Amsterdam and one can get lost and found in the space of a minute. Once you know the canals, you’re set, and can find almost any point you need to go to by way of the name of the canal that you are standing on a few general streets. If you run into any rain track, then you know taking them south should lead you to the train station and or Centrum, the main street that runs out from the train station that the trams run on.

My hotel was lovely, at least the lobby was. The building was several hundred years old and I was greeted by two Scandinavian beauties with thick accents. They told me my room wasn’t ready and that I could leave my luggage and or wait at the bar as it would be no more than 20 minutes or so before I could check into my room. I opted for the bar and called Foy to let him know where I was. I had Heineken on tap, from its homeland, and guess what; it’s the same damn thing. I suppose there must be some consolation knowing that the consistency of the beer is the same wherever you go, but that’s not what I hear about Guinness, if you’re fortunate enough to have it on tap in a pub on the same side of the street as Dubliner’s Gate in Ireland. After a spell I went to my room, dropped of my stuff, left the credit cards and what not in the safe and headed out on the town. The first order of business was lunch which we had sitting at a table right on a canal overpass. As I looked around I was dumb struck by the number of bicycles in town, and everyone rides them. They are strapped to everything that they could be, canal railings, sign posts, trees, anywhere you can park one, one is parked. Bicycles have the right of way in Amsterdam, you make room, and the majority of them are like beach cruisers. I saw a handful of mountain and ten speeds. Everyone from the young to the old rides a bicycle through the city. You’ll see business men, fresh from the office, with their briefcases dangling from the handle bars peddling aside grandmothers in sundresses and girls in miniskirts. People ride on the bars and on the back where there’s a place for goods to be stored and put atop in case you have to carry a large quantity of groceries home. Back in SF we have critical mass, great, yeah, whoop, but here, critical mass is a way of life and even cars make way for passing bicycles. I tell you, it’s the way to go in that city. The trams are great, but a bike is absolutely perfect.
From there it was off to a “coffee shop”, The Cricket, which came highly recommended to me on two continents. The “menu” is hidden behind a two way glass mirror, one hits the big red button to backlight and expose the “specials”. The selection is wide and by the look of it, quite good. And that’s all I’ll say about that.

The rest of the day was spent wandering the canals and streets until we made our way into the Van Gogh exhibit. The 2nd floor is the collection which spans about 100 pieces from different epochs of the great Dutch painter’s life. I saw the sunflowers, right there, in the flesh, or the canvas as the case was. I stood there and stared at those yellows and felt as if sunlight had penetrated the air. The Japanese influenced paintings were stunning. I didn’t know that he was so influenced by wood block cuts, but they were amazing. I contemplated bringing home a print of “The Courtesan”, but decided against it. I settled on a catalogue of the museums collection and some magnets for the fridge, yes I know, I have too many already, but allow me a silly obsession.

From the Van Gogh we stopped for a hot dog, quite good, and then headed to wander around down town, pausing at the flower market, which sells everything from Tulip buds to marijuana seeds. Everything you need for a healthy and vivacious garden of edibles and smokeables can be had at the flower market on the canal. I must say, I never tire of canals, and cities with waterways seem like ethereal places. San Francisco has its ocean and bay side which are nothing short of spectacular, and Chicago has its river which is nice too, but canals, they’re far more picturesque; they offer the very stones that you walk upon the chance to fall in love with another element. It seems like a forced meeting, or bed partner, the earth and the water, channeled, into somewhat straight lines, flowing, transporting, and giving those on both land and water a chance see life through the frame of a postcard every single day. There are houseboats that flank the canals, wonderful and small little dwellings with flowers in the windows bringing everything to life. I’d live on one of those, and probably break my neck in the winter time when the canals turn to ice and the entire city is covered in frozen dog shit. Oh yes, the Dutch are strange, they have a beautiful city, not as dirty, well by comparison as St. Petersburg with its dust and exhaust fumes, but they refuse to clean up dog shit. Dogs do their business and it stays there until some kind of street sweeper comes along to “take out the trash.” I was also informed that Dutch men have a funny habit of pissing in the streets. I didn’t see any evidence of this, but I wouldn’t put it past them with their obsession for dog shit land mines on the boulevards and avenues. The city, in the spring, smells like a giant turd. The dogs shit all winter long, the shit freezes and come the spring thaw, the odor of that shit returns with a pungent vengeance. Wait till summer, that’s all I have to say.

From there it was off to the Anne Franke house which was around the corner from my hotel. We walked through the annex that she described where she lived incarcerated from the world beyond, a prisoner for her own good until her final betrayal and capture. The entire house is tactfully preserved. The rooms where they lived are bare of any kind of furniture, only small objects in cases. The walls she pasted with pictures are still there, with faces of Greta Garbo, Jack Benny, Rita Hayworth and stars of European cinema. Finally, after passing through the attic you come to the notebooks, three volumes, in her own hand, sitting under glass. There’s something so terribly tragic about seeing those three little books that today contain the brief expanse of her life which has continued on well beyond her timely and all too young death. Is Anne unique? No. She’s as unique and anonymous as any other victim, but she left us a story, one of many, and we should respect it as representative of the many stories that were lost and the ones that we know about. I have a hard time going to Holocaust museums and memorials. I hate the one in DC, it’s like Disneyland, it’s pulls on your heart strings and glazes over things, you walk out with a days of our lives kind of spun head full of images without any kind of understand of the bureaucracy behind extermination, the methods, the how and why and shock of knowing that Jews being transported to the camps paid their own way. You’re left with a catered mythology of horror without the understanding of why it was horrible, or how a business was formed around it. It wasn’t senseless and the reasons behind it are the most frightening of all. The Franke house seemed tactful in contrast to DC, I’m curious, when I go to Israel, and see the memorials there, how I will react to them. A statue is one thing, a display; the commodification of that event though is something completely different.

From there it was definitely time eat, a nice meal, simple, with pom frits, and then off to the infamous red light district. How can I describe this? Well its kind of like a never ending spring break punctuated by scantily clad women in windows wreathed with red lights, men in dark corners that whisper “coca, ecstasy, heroine” as you walk and clubs and bars that tout live sex shows. Hard drugs are illegal in Amsterdam, so the dealers who are working the streets are exclusively dealing in hard drugs. There are smart shops, seemingly concentrated in the red light district, that sell magic mushrooms, pre ground tea bags of mushrooms to make psychedelic teas and hallucinogenic truffles, which from an account I heard are somewhat stronger than mushrooms. As with other vices for sale, there are selections and grades and your local proprietor will tell you which are the strongest and most potent.

There’s a famous alley in the red light district that is flanked by windows on both sides. The alley is the narrowest in all of Amsterdam and is so narrow at some points that two people walking opposite directions can not pass through without turning sideways. The women, the more brave, or desperate, depending on your perspective, or the look in their eyes, reach out of the doorways grabbing passerbys to try and coax them into their dens. We walked all over the alleys and after a while, I have to say, I became depressed. I watched as men emerged with a kind of satisfied, if not glorious expression on their faces. I understand the pull, and the fascination, but something in me found it all rather depressing as I kept seeing more and more of the store fronts that had women with rather dower looks in their eyes, expressions of complete disinterest if not a somewhat victimized air about them. Now and again you could spot a man that seemed to be in charge, it was all there, glossy and glowing in red neon, but it was there, the undercurrent of disgust that makes the sex industry a less than glamorous profession. I wondered about the motivations, or rather the reasons that these women were there. From the look of it, the majority weren’t Dutch, so you have to ask if there’s even a choice for them. Every fetish and every kink can be satisfied in those alleys for a price, but there’s a human toll there too and I found it somewhat depressing after a while. Good god! Have I really gotten that old??!

The next day was hectic and devoted to the travel Gods. I ran to catch my plane in Amsterdam, woke up on time, but took my time packing and getting to the train station as there was a lovely breakfast served in the hotel lobby, and for 135 Euro for the night I’d be damned if I was going to pass that up.

The airport in Amsterdam is the largest in Europe, and is very well setup. There are yellow information signs that lead you to your gate, every yellow sign is directional. There’s a meditation center, showers and new age what not in the airport. More shopping in one place than I’ve seen in my entire life. The only part I found frustrating was the very very very long run I had to my gate. I made it on time, and with a bit to spare, but missing that plane would’ve really jacked the rest of the day. The flight was painless; I slept most of the way and woke up the gloom and doom of Moscow. It was raining. I came out of the plane to a 1 hour wait at passport control where, yeah, ya’ll guessed it, I had a problem. It seems as though that when the diplomat at Pulkova issued me the corrected visa to correct the SF consulate mistake, they stamped my passport twice. When I left Moscow I received a 3rd stamp, which closed the visa. The clerk behind the desk called the superior; she came, took the passport and disappeared with it. I began to think about the 200 Euro in my wallet and if that would be enough to bribe the guy to let me through. She came back and said it could be resolved; they wound up cancelling, by hand, one of the stamps and sent me on my way. At this point I wanted a beer, but that was still a ways off.

I changed the Euros and headed through the airport to catch the shuttle. I was flocked by a sea of cab drivers who wanted to charge me 1000 rubles to get to the domestic terminal. I said I wouldn’t pay more than 300, they complained that parking was 200, but the guy at passport control said 300 was a normal price. Finally I got one, we settled on 400 and thank God I decided to take a car for the firs time. Well mostly thank god, his car was parked outside of the bloody airport and to save time, instead of waiting for him to drive in and fight through early evening traffic, I walked with him out to his car, which was a little nerve wracking, I kept thinking this is where I get jumped, but that’s just my paranoia. It was fine, I got in and he started driving, off roading in the bloody lada, on the shoulder, in the other lane, the traffic was terrible and it took seemingly forever to drive the 7 kilometers between the two airports.

I arrived, gave him a small tip for his fast driving and friendly conversation and proceeded to hop in the wrong inspection line. When I finally reached the front, after a half hour, she tells me to go to hall 1, where I spend another half hour trying to get inspected, yet again, to get to the damn ticket counter to get my seat. Finally, with maybe five minutes to spare, and them not allowing me to take my new rolly polly samsonite that I bought in Amsterdam, on board, I get loaded onto the buss and driven to the Pulkova Air airplane. This was the first time I had taken Pulkova. We arrived to a deafening sound of jet engines at full blast as we walked behind them, up a ladder, into the cargo hold, and up another ladder into the cabin. This was the worst insulated plane I had ever been on. Loading took forever, and then we were delayed on the tarmac, again, yeah, we were delayed in Amsterdam as well, but finally, we get airborne and the girls next to me are checking their cell phones, covertly, for SMS messages about how Germany beat Argentina.

My “homecoming” to St. Pete’s wasn’t terribly glorious, but it was good to see everyone, lots of hugs and “how was Brussels?” I immediately put a liter of beer into me and settled on the 3rd to conversations about what I had missed and what was coming up. The night wore on and I decided to leave Tinkov as I was incredibly hungry by this point. Sam Lipsyte and I wandered over to Lima, expecting to meet James there, but he never showed up. We sat and talked over some blintzes, chicken, tea and salad. It was already light again, the nights are getting a little darker now as we’ve passed the solstice, still nothing like what we have back home, but at this point, it was light out, and we made our careful way back to kazanskaya where I said goodbye to him at the Gherzen and I made it back to the mini and had to bang on my door for five minutes until my metal loving room mate took the fucken head phones off and heard me banging, probably waking up the entire mini hotel, drunk bastard that he was.

Today was a terrific day, almost perfect. I ate at Zoom after waking up quite late, sat with Mariya, Jeny and Tom, trying to figure out how to get Mariya out of this country. She’s stuck here, her Russian passport has expired and they are not letting her leave. We’ve tried bribes, this that and the other, no dice. Jenya is taking her passport to Helsinki on a night bus tomorrow, 9 hours, poor thing, her American passport, to try and score a visa over there, and maybe even fudge an entry stamp. This is the only way she can get out. To get a new updated passport, there’s no overnight service here, you have to wait months. She’s in it deep and we all feel terrible. We’ve even thought about having her leave using Jenya’s passport and dying her hair as they do look somewhat alike, but then there’s the problem of the ticket, so we’re hoping the problem can be solved in Finland, find out in a couple of days I guess.

From there I went to St. Isaac’s and photographed its massive dome from the inside taking my time wandering back and forth along the marbled floors and staring at the majestic icons. Behind St. Isaac’s is the bronze horseman, Peter the Great, on horseaback atop a rock. Newlyweds go there in their wedding gowns to be photographed next to the statue; there were a number of them out as the weather was awesome, cold breeze, no humidity and a bright sun shinning down upon our heads. Glorious I tell you. I walked up the river and made my way to the summer garden where more brides and grooms were walking around. I headed in through Mars field, settled near that wonderful statue of Krylov and had an espresso and an ice cream. The garden was alive with artists and I chatted with one after I asked his permission to take his photograph (soon when I get a bloody fast connection). I must’ve spent nearly an hour just wandering through the garden, looking at the Greek revival statues and enjoying the way the light penetrated the trees and fell in mirror ball like spots here there and everywhere. The gardens were once the domain of the czars and now everyone can feel like an emperor just sitting on a bench in the beautiful summer sun, shaded and cooled by a canopy of green to the sound of children playing in the grass. Mothers and grandmothers sit on the benches with baby carriages by their side, the infants are fast asleep, dreaming about Krylov’s fairy tales, or maybe writing some of their own for when they grow up.

I left the garden by way of the front entrance near the Michelevsky palace. There’s a lake there and two swans were enjoying the sun and the water. Children were craning their necks to get a peak at the majestic birds screaming “lebed lebed!” I walked the canals back and found myself behind Spilled Blood in the chach-ka bazaar of KGB shirts, cheaply made lacquer boxes, soviet watches, World War II memorabilia and every other “russified” object that could be sold or bartered. In the very back I found a stall I had never seen, hand made photographs, of the experimental type, and their creator, a crazy artist named Valentine. We spent a half hour talking, I took his picture and he posed and composed the shots using people near him as objects and props, he was truly a character and quite fascinated by the D200. I bought a few of his photographs that I’ll have framed as a triptych. They’re nice, small, pieces, glued to cardboard with Church Slavonic script framing them.

It was finally time to head back, but not until I took the picture of a waxing crescent near one of the onion domes of the church. It was a good day, and I found my way to Cyliko, the Georgian restaurant for fried pork and potatoes with onion, dill, cilantro and massive quantities of garlic, a beer and a cup of tea. I wound up at the office afterward watching the Brazil and France game, the frogs won, not every day is quite that perfect…

Shislivo!