You Find Great Fries in Amsterdam

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now we’re in Holland.

One day we took a bus into den Hague and rode the inter-city express train to Amsterdam.

The view from the train was as flat as flat – green and wide and growing and we were as deeply agricultural and mentally speaking, as far from the seaside as you can imagine, and there, suddenly, flashing past the train window, was a row of masts.  Closer, and there were sailboats, marooned in the middle of a field. Closer still, and for the briefest flash, we saw a canal, a narrow strip of water, three meters wide and as long and straight as if drawn by a ruler, and the we were past – and there were sails in a field again.

            In Amsterdam one emerges from the train station, crosses a very large road, and enters a terrible tourist zoo- a splendid and picturesque warren of 16th century buildings and alleyways that have been comprehensively touristed out, the elegant bones of the building buried under the bunting and postcard stands and the tie-dyed neon tat of souvenir stands and doner kebab bars and "coffee" shops-

            We escaped as fast as possible. And ate patat -  French fries.

Chileans can’t make French fries. Good French fries are crisp and golden and brown along the edges.  Chilean French fries are pale and flabby and drip fry grease and are limp in the middle when you pick them up and taste like uncooked mashed potatoes, straight from the deep-freezer.

Mr Tabubil and I aren’t very big on fast food, but four or five times a year we get a massive craving for fries, and go out and order shocking amounts of deep fried potato grease from McDonalds and KFC.  The first time we tried that here in Santiago, we found ourselves holding wilting white sticks of uncooked potato, and I (who was PMS-ing something fierce and really really really needed the fat) went and cried under my molded plastic food-court seat. 

It’s turned into a thing – two people who never used to give a damn now go out and order French fries everywhere they’re on the menu – just in case. We’ve tried local restaurants, we’ve tried the big international chains and not once, in more than a year, have we found a French fry that’s half-way eatable.

My father in law – Mr Tabubil’s Dad - finds the situation a terrible big cross to bear.  At least once a month he marches into the local Tip-y-Tap (a national chain of German pub-cum-restaurants) and orders wurst and sauerkraut and a pint of German beer - just to get the waitress interested, and then he orders fries.

            “Real French fries.”  He pleads.  “Gold as the surface of a sunburned surfer and crisp and light as summer clouds-”

            “Si senor.”  The waitress says, and gives him a sour look.  “That’s how we do fries here.”

            “No you don't.”   My father in law scowls at her. “Never mind golden.  Make them brown.  Brown as German beer.  Brown as the sole of my shoe – this one, right here, see?  When the cook says that they’re done, tell him to put them back in the batter and do them again. Burn them if you have to! But brown!”

            “Si Senor.”  The waitress says again, and she rolls her eyes, and flees.

He  catches the corner of her apron and drags her back.  “Forget brown – make them black.  Leave them in the oil until they’re grilled through and the oil won’t stick any more, then throw them in the oven until they’re black, and smoking and when the smoke alarms are going off all over the kitchen, then bring them to the table.  Please?”

            “SI, senor.”  And the waitress extricates her apron from his clinging fingers, and escapes. 

           He waits in an agony of anticipation, convinced that this time – at last – the waitress has understood his terrible need.  He plays nervously with his napkin.  He arranges – and re-arranges - the salt and the ketchup and the mayonnaise.  And when the fries come, heaped as high as the ceiling on a platter the size of a wagon wheel, they come as a limp, sticky pile of pale, undercooked undersalted  -

             “Tubes of frozen mash!”  He breathes.  He can’t believe his eyes.  He can’t look away from the terrible plate before him – can’t stop staring at the wreckage of his dashed and wilted hopes -

And my darling mother in lawhas to forcibly restrain the dear man from calling a manager, challenging the waitress to fisticuffs in the alley, and threatening to bring the chef into forcible conjunction with his fry-vat - “an instrument that he clearly doesn’t recognize is even located in his kitchen, because if those things have ever been near a deep-fryer in their lives, I’m not a Dutchman!”*

Having now been to Holland, and having eaten the French fries that he was raised upon, I can sympathize with his point of view.  I’m even tempted to do a little fryer-introducing to the fry-cook at our local McDonalds myself. 

            Dutch French fries, are quite extraordinarily good:  light as summer clouds, crisp and golden as the surface of the sun, with a textural flavor that hints wonderfully at the sort of oil that olives and peanuts dream of becoming when they die.

In a small misunderstanding, Mr Tabubil ordered a Size Large to feed the both of us, and we’d both forgotten what ‘large’ means a country where they super-size their teenagers and feed ‘em up by weight –

A smiling blonde giant handed Mr Tabubil a twisted paper cone fully eleven inches high, ten inches in diameter and overflowing with golden fries, and half a metric cup of ketchup and half a metric cup of mayonnaise poured over the top of it. 

The both of us – he wallowing in nostalgia, and I wallowing in the bliss of my very first time, and neither of us having had any breakfast – even together we didn’t get through more than half of them.

The only fries better than the fries in Holland, mi Suegro says, are the fries from Belgium, and he has been known, while driving from Rotterdam to the German border, to take a detour south into an entire different country for a mid-afternoon snack.

“You ought to try it next time you’re in Holland.”  He told me.  “Best six hours you’ll ever spend in your life.”

* I invite anyone who doubts the absolute veracity of the above accounting to apply to Mr Tabubil, my mother in law, or any waitperson working an evening shift between Santiago and La Serena.

Bicycle Parking

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now we’re in Holland.

 

Train stations in Holland have more bicycle parking that I DREAMED possible – even after half a week in Holland.

Example:  the bicycle parking-facility outside the central train station in Amsterdam is a four storey structure - it holds thousands of bicycles, parked handle to handle, seat to seat, and double-decker and every single one looks identical; the feats of memory that the average Dutch commuter performs on a twice-daily basis are PRODIGIOUS.

“How DO you remember where you left your bike?”

Anneke is vague.  She doesn’t quite meet my eyes.  “Well, you don’t ALWAYS.  Sometimes you spend a very long time – a whole night maybe – trying to remember that.”

I began to look at the bicycle garages with different eyes – noticing the bicycles with outrageous neon saddlebags, or plastic flowers twisted around the seats, and wondering how many of the others there simply WERE there, had been there for days, weeks, months, years –

How many people had given up, and bought another one, and lost that one too, and given up again and bought another one  -

I imagine that annually the city breaks the chains and holds an EXTREMELY lucrative auction -  

SENSIBLE people rent a locker.  Two lockers.  They ride a nice bike from their home to their home station, store it there in their very own numbered closet, ride the train to the town where they work, go to their other numbered locker and take out their beater and ride that one to the office  –

The bicycle-parking facility at the central train station in den Hague is somewhat more modest.  But large enough  - we watched an elderly couple, combing through one level of the bicycle garage, then climbing the ramp to the level above and searching through that.  They decided that they must have been mistaken, and climbed back down the ramp to the lower level and went through it again, bicycle by bicycle – we had to go and catch our train and couldn’t stay and watch.  I imagine that they’re still there.

An Instant Expert’s Guide to a Foreign Country: Netherlands Edition. We’ve done the cities, now let’s typecast the countryside.

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy.  Right now we’re in Holland.

Holland, as seen in postcards, is as flat as a board.  But it’s locally flat – polder fields are flat, and canals and their adjacent towpaths are flat, but the canals are flat a storey or two above the fields.  It feels backward.

Chile – the part of Chile where Santiago lies – is a desert country.  Water is a luxury, something to be celebrated and cherished.  It certainly doesn’t lie around any old how for any old someone to use and splash about in.  Holland is a very pleasant contrast.  Holland is as green and verdant  as an Irish whiskey advertisement, with showers every afternoon, and sunny skies for the rest of the day – a phenomenon which everyone I met took great pains to point out in English, Dutch, Spanish and even Esperanto - is NOT typical.  Holland isn’t normally like this – Holland goes in for sodden, grey and grizzly, I was told.  How did I think the fields got Irish Whiskey look?  I smiled and enjoyed and tuned them out and soaked up the sun.  After a winter under Santiago’s soupy grey skies, I wasn’t going to quibble over semantics or climatology. I was going to WALLOW in it.  Soak up the rain and fresh washes skies until I was as green as the polder-fields.   

On our first day morning in Leidschendam, Mr Tabubil and I slept till a ridiculous hour, and after a breakfast of good Dutch bread and cheese and sausage that had Mr Tabubil weeping mistily nostalgic into his open faced sandwiches, Anneke and Pieter took us for a long bicycle ride – out of the town and into the countryside.

This part of Holland was once a sand dune, and all of it is still at sea level.  Over the centuries, the dunes have been planted and fields laid down, but it is a very  MAINTAINED landscape, the water held at bay by a network of pumps and interlaced canals.  Worked land is divided into polders – strip fields with narrow canals instead of fences  - a meter’s width of water holds a horse or cow as well as a fence does.  The small canals between polder fields drain into larger canals, whose water is pumped into the great canals that run from town to town and city to city .

The Vliet - the great canal that runs through the center of Leidschendam

Anneke lend me her bike for the afternoon.  Even with the seat and the handlebars set as far down as they would go, her bike was far too tall for me. The learning curve was tight and wobbly and relied on the reliability of sturdy garden walls, but eventually I caught the knack of it and pedaled off behind the others – out of their suburban lanes, through old Leidschendam and its cobbled streets and lopsided 16^th century houses, across the great intercity canal, and into countryside.

The Netherlands takes its countryside seriously.  Country is more than terrain – it seems to be a state of mind.  Perhaps because they live so dense, they prize it so highly and build it so determinedly pastoral – as if possessed by a communal mind that clings ferociously to a nostalgic understanding of RURAL.  There are hobby farms, and beer gardens, and sweeping country vistas, and manor houses, and caravan parks.  Or perhaps it is only nostalgic for me - because it is a Rural that has never existed in America or Australia – we’re too large, too spread out, and we grew too quickly.

Two of three sixteenth century windmills - the pumping now happens from that small red shed.

We bowled along the top of a dike alongside a canal, with the sides of the dike sloping away down to polder fields and thatched cottages on either side.  In the distance we could see skyscrapers – on the near horizon the towers of Rotterdam, and ninety degrees away the towers of den Hague – but we spun along between polder fields and copses of trees, and windmills (the old thatched sort, right out of Dutch old master paintings, AND shiny new wind turbines) and little lanes running away to thatched cottages.

And Shetland ponies.  Every field has a horse or two, or a half-dozen cows or sheep, and every front garden has a chicken run or flock of ducks, and every dozen meters or so we passed a herd of Shetland ponies.

Good lord - horses that come up exactly as far as your KNEES-  it suited somehow.  A small and manageable sort of animal for a landscape that maintained and manicured for its very life-

Yup.  A Shetland Pony.

We rode  home along a long winding way through greenhouse farms  - miles and miles of glass houses -  and into suburban Leidschendam through another way than the one we had left by.  We came through rows and rows of terrace houses, set around narrow curving streets and stretches of thick parkland.  Parkland everywhere. 

This canal-side house has a few subsistence problems.

Passing by an ornamental canal, we saw Mr Tabubil’s Oma (his grandma) sitting on a park bench, taking a little rest on her way to Anneke and Pieter’s house for dinner. Mr Tabubil was off his bike and had his arms around her before the rest of us had begun to brake.  He left us there and walked with Oma the rest of the way, while Pieter home, driving two bikes at once. Dutch people can do that.  They have mad skilz.

Looking at how knackily Pieter was handling those two bikes, I felt a wave of vicarious confidence and did something very clever on my own great big loaner.  With no hands on the handlebars because I have such a splendid and innate sense of balance.  I fell off almost immediately.  And trapped my foot between the pedal and the wheel, and did something very nasty to my ankle. 

It’s almost entirely back to normal now.

An Instant Expert’s Guide to a Foreign Country: Netherlands Edition

(Insert photo of windmill HERE. For local flavor.)

Mr Tabubil and I have just returned from three weeks holiday – a week in Holland, so that I might see a bit of his country and meet his family, and two weeks together after that in Italy. 

Holland is composed thusly: canals, windmills, polder fields, progressive urban engineering, glasshouses farms, and bicycles.

Mr. Tabubil’s parents grew up in a satellite city of den Hague named Leidschendam - one of the buckles in the Netherlands’ industrialized belt.  From Amsterdam down to Rotterdam, the country is densely farmed, densely factoried and densely populated. People live tightly, in towns built up of small houses and small gardens in the shadows of megalithic post-war housing blocks. 

It could be terribly urban, and unpleasantly citified, except that the Dutch decided that they weren’t going to Do That – and they Didn’t.

The years immediately after WW2 were a time of serious social planning for the Netherlands- the Germans had blown much of urban Holland to rubble, and in many ways, planners were left to start from scratch. 

Obliged to build a lot of housing for a lot of people in a terrible hurry, they threw up megalithic tower-blocks in every town, but once those were out of the way, they sat down and started thinking.  They looked at mid-century modernism, and decided that they didn’t like it.  Instead they planned villages centered on common-land parks and plazas;  between the rows of row-houses are strips of green land, dotted canals and copses of trees and pockets of woodland.   Each little house has a garden - be it so small as a pocket handkerchief, or the span of a patio deck behind the back door, but houses all must have their green rooms.  It is a way of existing in the pockets of your neighbors without living inner-city style, anonymous and concrete-bound. 

Modern housing has grown denser over the decades, but the same planning philosophy still governs: streets meander, housing blocks include back-gardens, or roof-decks for all, and canals take the place of front stoops or divide you from your extremely-next-door neighbors.

Which can be a blessing of an unexpected sort.  In Holland, houses are spaced only a step or two back from the street, and people live their whole lives with their curtains open. 

For a person accustomed to the large yards and grandiose personal footprints of North America and Australia, living like this could come as a terrible shock.  It’s a way of life that I don’t fathom, and don’t particularly care to fathom: the absence of privacy is so comprehensive that it appears almost invisible.  People fill their front window with plants and pretty objects to make a pleasing panorama for people passing by –

(I imagine that there is a highly competitive side to front-window keeping that visitors don’t see.  A world where ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ is honed to a very fine edge.  And a world of pressure to keep the edge polished.  For the use of the pointed purposes of a knife.)

Leidschendam is an early post-war town. Trees and bushes have had sixty years to grow up across windows and shade the edges of things.  More recent developments are less pleasant to live in.  The newest are raw and wide open, the trees are saplings - knee-high, and views are direct – right inside the houses and out through the other side.

On an enormously positive side -  the design of the urban belt of Holland has given it the most child-friendly community vibe I’ve felt or seen since I was a child growing up in a little mining town in the middle of the Papua New Guinea jungle.   Children are everywhere, and the streets are full of PEOPLE –

Public Transport is a fact of life here - not a luxury, not an afterthought, but a major and intrinsic aspect of urban planning. 

When I lived in Northern California, our local bus service made one stop an hour - once in each sprawling post-war suburban town.  Having a car was a fact of necessity, and everywhere was too far to walk.   Or ride a bike, on the car-centric roads.

In Holland, the desired baseline seems put every urban, or even semi-rural, dwelling within a ten minute walk of at least two different forms of urban transport.  Anneke and Pieter have the option of the tram, the metro (both run on rails, but the tram runs through the streets and is beholden to traffic lights and turn signals, while the metro has a dedicated line and goes several time faster.  It’s tremendous fun.) several different bus lines, and the big inter-city train lines. 

And bicycles of course.  They can ride their bicycles EVERYWHERE.

The story about how Holland grew a bicycle culture has been told other-where and better – HERE is a short, and fantastic video documentary on the subject.

I’ll wait while you watch it and catch up.

Dutch bicycles aren’t the serious sports models that we ride in American and Australia, bent over racing handlebars on our special sprung saddles and mountain shocks.  Dutch bikes are inexpensive upright models, cheerful and reliable, with enclosed chains and limited gear-shifting -  a bike that will get you (and a friend or two )From A to B and up a low hill.

Everyone rides: kids ride their bikes to school(two and three on every bike, pillion style) mums ride bikes with baby seats -fore AND aft, grandparents zip past on electric models, just enough buzz in the motor to give you the advantage of a following wind, and shoppers ride models with modified frames, with a wagon bed mounted between the handlebars and the front wheel.  You see the basket piled high with shopping bags, but more often, a small blonde head or two, a baby in a bassinet, or a pair of toddlers, belted in.

Every road has a designated bike lane – with its own designated place in the traffic cycle, and because the country is so flat and close, people RIDE.  And because public transport is so universally accessible, when they aren’t riding, they WALK.   Streets are public places, not car-clubs.  And villages are communities.

(Here’s the windmill.)