AMSTERDAM. 23rd-28th September

Day One in Amsterdam. At the laundry, it is okay to upload photos, but I am unable to make the proper connection to do this. So I just add text. The Sikh man later rings his son to come over after work and have a look. He manages to do it by going through my e-mail address, but by then it is 6.30 and time for the laundry to close. The bar at the hostel has a different (pre-planned for the week) menu each night, and tonight is a 3-course Indonesian meal, which really hits the spot.

Next day, Wednesday, I lie long in bed, and then return to the laundry, (with my laundry, strangely enough), and though again I'm unable to upload photos, I do some blogging and laundering, and then decide to pop out for something to eat. There is a 'coffee shop' across the road, and while I realise from my Lonely Planet that a 'coffee shop' is where you don't go in Amsterdam if you want a coffee, but where you do go if you want a smoke, I ask anyway if they have anything to eat. They don't, but the barman comes outside and points me in the direction of the 'Frenzi Cucina', a place with a Mediterreanean menu. There I have two of the best coffees I've ever tasted, and a 'Mozza', which is a toasted pie sort of thing, based on Mozzarella cheese, plus lots of other goodies besides. I am served by the humourous and delightful Annika, a sometime traveller who is planning a long trip to South America next year, and as it's a slow day customer-wise, we talk some, and swap traveller's tales. (However, she found it hard to believe that my day-pack of freshly-laundered clothing contained all the clothes that I have on this trip, plus what I have on). I had been suffering a bit from the post-'flu blahs, and this long lunch really elevated my mood, (and I gained another blog-spotter). When the laundry closed I went to the other internet shop near the hostel until it was time to go to bed.

This is night three in the hostel, and so far I haven't met any of the 3 bodies that are in the other bunks when I leave of a morning. When I arrived on the Monday evening there was someone asleep in the bunk above mine, and they were still asleep when I took off next day. The occupants of the other two bunks arrived about one'ish. The next night I am a long time in bed before I'm conscious of anyone else arriving, and all are supine when I leave. Now I'm starting to wonder if maybe I'm really the only occupant of the room, and the others are figments of my imagination, or phantoms, perhaps. However when I arrive on Wednesday night, the occupant of my top bunk, a young bearded Swiss guy, is padding around, and we have quite a chat. He is doing some sort of PhD in art history. Then the other two arrive. They are middle-aged, one a short really ugly-looking guy, and the other a great bear of a man, something like a shambling Boris Karloff, and to really improve things, neither of them speaks, just nods. I'm thinking Eastern Europeans, or possibly backblocks Scandinavians.

The next morning we all have to move out anyway, and I never see any of them again. Our old room is pre-booked, and I have to put my gear in a storage locker, and then move into a new
4-bed dorm at 2 o'clock. I decide to go to the internet at the laundry, which was lucky, because another younger, smart as paint guy is working with my Sikh friend, and he lets me use their own computer to upload a stack of photos. I return to the hostel to move in. All the beds are numbered, and when I move my stuff in I find a young Spanish guy asleep in 'my' lower bunk, and as I don't fancy shinning in and out of a top bunk for the next three nights, I decide to set things to rights without delay. This isn't so easy, as he doesn't have one word of English, plus he appears to be constantly drifting in and out of consciousness. I feel a bit like Basil with Manuel as I point to the '2' on the bed, and to the '2' on my (hostel-issued) card, and keep insisting that he show me his card, which turns out to have a '1' on it (the top bunk number), and then the penny drops.

A bit later, Jake, a hotel manager from Bournemouth, arrives. Although he's lived all his life about 40 miles from where I grew up, we find each other quite difficult to understand. I still don't feel a hundred percent, and after another stab at blogging during this rather disjointed day, I get early to bed. I don't know if Anneka put something in those coffees, but on the Wednesday night I literally slept like a baby, so much so that when my bladder woke me up in the middle of the night I didn't have a clue where I was, and had to lie for a while, telling myself 'you're on holiday - in Europe' until I got myself oriented. Plus, since then, I haven't noticed other people coming to bed in the small hours, and I wake up in the morning thinking 'who are these people?'

Friday, I get out early and go to the Van Gogh Museum, which is only a 5 minute walk from the Stay-Okay Hostel. It was a bit mind-blowing seeing all those paintings in the flesh, as it were,
instead of as prints. And they had a lot of paintings of contemporaries that had influenced him. Also an interesting display of prints from the Stuydelyk Museum (which is being extensively renovated till next year).

I go back to the hostel, and as both Jake and I are hungry we wander down nearby Spiegelgraht
to a cafe called the Hans and Grietje where he'd had a coffee the day before, and noticed that the meals looked good-oh. This introduced me to the club sandwich, something I've seen on menus from time to time, but had never been curious enough to try. And I highly recommend the ones at this establishment, especially if you haven't eaten for a while. The cafe is on a corner by a canal, and most of the outdoor tables are separated from it by a narrow road, so that you are sometimes almost touching elbows with the riders of passing push bikes and motor scooters ; but it was almost the last day of Amsterdam's Indian summer, and very relaxing to just sit in the sun and watch the passers-by.

Later we wandered into Centraal (the centre district) via the Dam (square), where there is always some sort of free outdoor entertainment going on, and a bombastic Canadian guy was doing a Houdini-style act there before a large audience. Later still we went to a busy coffee house, as Jake wanted to stock up on smokes. Picture if you will, your humble narrator, surrounded on all sides by smokers and clouds of smoke, sitting there drinking his milk shake. On the way back we cut through the Red Light District, not at all what I'd imagined : hordes of tourists and many (reasonably) ordinary cafes and pubs, and only a couple of girls in windows (must have been a busy night). I thought I'd wander through, for Lynette's sake, as she is sure this is my sole reason for visiting Amsterdam. Back at the hostel we spend a couple of hours in the bar, me sipping my favourite Assam tea, as we get into a debate with Cachil, a young Irish philosophical. And you think I'm close - this guy was bemoaning the fact that he'd been spending money staying at the hostel for the past couple of weeks, when he should have been sleeping for free on friend's couches. Maybe his young Finnish girlfriend was the cause of this lapse.

Bikes rule in Amsterdam. Heaven help the unwary pedestrian who inadvertently steps onto a bike lane without looking both ways (all streets either have dedicated bike lanes or a different-coloured part of the footpath is the bike lane). And that goes for any motorist who dares to stick his nose into a bike lane out of turn. I have been wanting to try out Amsterdam's streets myself, so Saturday lunchtime I hire a bike. It comes with two locks, one to lock the back wheel, and the other a 2 foot length of heavy chain that you have to put through the front wheel, then through the frame, and then around some solid immovable object. I must admit to a lack of confidence in the initial stages of this endeavour, so I PUSH it to Vondel Park, and then ride the length and back of the whole park, before feeling ready for the real thing. I cut my teeth on a ride to the RAI, which I miss by a country mile, and have to backtrack after asking directions. Then on to the Tropical Museum, where a whole floor is devoted to Indonesia and the former Dutch East Indies, and another to Africa. A lot of people of Ambonese descent live in Amsterdam, as well as many from Surinam (a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean), whose people are of African origins. I stay until chuck-out time, and then decide to tick off another box by visiting the Jordaan, formerly a raucous working class neighbourhood, with strong leftist leanings
and a revolutionary history, which has now been gentrified to some extent. After zigzagging all its streets, I find that I am not far from the Anne Frank house and arrive just too late to go in, though I was not all that keen anyway, but wanted to photograph it from the outside, by one of the canals.

Judi wanted me to look up one of her relatives that she thought lived in Amsterdam, though it turns out that he lives the other side of Rotterdam. She gave me a couple of 'phone numbers, which I'd tried, speaking in halting Indonesian, but the people at the other end each time only seemed to speak Dutch. There is still a good hour of daylight, so I hatch a cunning plan, which is to return to the 'Fritzi Cucina', on the off-chance that Annike is working tonight, and ask her to ring and speak to them in Dutch. It turns out that she isn't there, but I am by now very hungry, as I've forgotten to eat since breakfast. I really fancy pasta, but the only pasta I like is amatrichiana, which isn't on the menu. Nevertheless, the Mexican chef cooked one up after I explained that I like lots of bacon and tomatoes through it, and very nice it was too. Katerina, (the sauciest waitress in Amsterdam), very kindly phoned for me, and I was able to speak with Irwan (in English) for a while. (Maybe I should have tried English the first time). Unfortunately he is going to be out of town for a while, so that was a no-goer anyway (I have this effect on people). Margot and Inga, two friends of Katerina's, were eating there too, and we all end up staying till after closing time, chatting, as all three of them like to travel the globe, and we swopped stories and had some laughs. Anyway, thanks guys, it was really nice meeting you, and I enjoyed the night immensely. (3 more blogspotters).

Sunday, I still have the bike till lunchtime, and go to the Jewish Museum for a couple of hours. There are actually four former synagogues very close to each other there. Left derelict in the decades immediately after the war, the buildings have now been rejuvenated, and at least two of them form the museum. One part was devoted to Jewish life in pre-war Holland, and another covered the war years. An elderly lady, obviously a Holocaust survivor, was taking a small group of Dutch-speaking tourists around, which was reminiscent of a visit I made to the Holocaust Museum in Elsternwick some years ago. What really spooked me was a documentary film that was being continuously run in one corner of this part of the museum, of people being deported from Amsterdam. Deportees, carrying suitcases, were climbing into the cattle trucks on a sunny afternoon, shaking hands with people who'd come to see them off, almost as if they were off on a trip to the seaside.

On my return to the hostel I find that somebody else has moved into my bed, and into the top bunk too. Maigret then notices pink pajama trousers on the top bunk and thinks, either they belong to a female, or we're in trouble. A couple of large Italian suitcases are in evidence, and I think that if they're a couple, and she's a bit shy, they probably want to be together, so, ever the gallant, I get the guy at the desk to change the numbers on his records, and I move into the empty bunk under Jake's.

There was a book I read last year, by a Japanese author with a name I can never remember, and in it two platonic young lovers spend every Sunday walking aimlessly right across Tokyo, and then have to find their way home after it gets dark. This idea appealed to me, and I thought I'd try it in Amsterdam (very platonicly) in the afternoon. Trouble is that the interesting parts of Amsterdam are all in a rough semi-circle criss-crossed by canals, and you inevitably seem to end up back where you started. This happened to me, and after doubling back on myself I end up in an Irish pub not far from the hostel, and had a feed and watched Muenster playing some other German team on a wide screen.