It started with a late-morning visit to the coffee emporium, where I had another nice long relaxing cup of coffee before setting off to brave the day.
I didn’t bother asking the app what it thought I should do with my day as I’d already decided that ‘follow something green’ was inspiration good enough for the whole week. With that in mind, shortly after breakfast I took a number two tram and had my customary post-breakfast coffee in town. It was all going well up until that point.
I had originally hoped to hunt out some street art, but at some point between finishing my coffee and walking five metres into the street, I decided I’d hunt out the Oude Kerk and have a look around that instead, what with all the disappointment of the Nieuwe Kerk yesterday.
This simple fifteen-minute walk that took a little more than that, given my tendency to get distracted by shiny things, canals, and side-streets but I now know the Oude Kerk is also not a church these days.
The nice woman on the counter was able to tell me that there are still Sunday evening services-cum-concerts, but I’m not here on a Sunday, but I have been to Orgelvespers here before and recommend it as a soothing way to spend 45 minutes getting a bit of a concert.
The Oude not-a-Kerk is the oldest building in Amsterdam and has been in its current form since its consecration in 1306, although there had been deity-related constructions on the site about one hundred years before that. The ceiling of the Oude Kerk is the largest medieval wooden vault in Europe, built with oak from Estonia in 1390.
According to Wikipedia, “the church covers an area of some 3,300 m2 (36,000 sq ft). The foundations were set on an artificial mound, thought to be the most solid ground of the settlement in this marshy province.” And in the context of artificial mounds and marshy provinces, the church happens to stand in the middle of De Wallen, Amsterdam’s red-light district; the city’s oldest building meets the world’s oldest profession. If you need a hand seeing your deity of choice, it’s just round the corner behind a glass window.
I contemplated heading home at this point, and made my way to Centraal thinking I’d get on a tram and have some lunch or something, but ended up being distracted by an inviting-looking passage — stil thinking of those marshy provinces — that runs under the tracks, the Cuyperspassage. This takes bikes and pedestrians from the west side of the station to the bus station and ferry terminal at the back, and I had to walk through it a couple of times before I knew what was going on.
The tunnel was opened in 2015 and is named after Pierre Cuypers, architect of the Central Station. It is tiled with white tiles on the one side and it was only as I was about half-way through the tunnel that I realised that the look of freshly-removed graffiti was actually fired onto the tile I was looking at, and that the entire one hundred-metre side of the tunnel is a giant work of art.
The tableau consists of 70,000 hand-painted 13m² tiles and took five years to complete. It’s called Zeezicht aan het IJ and depicts the warship Rotterdam, which appears three times and fades from south to north; I thought I was tripping (more than was necessary) the first time I walked through. Lots of people seemed not to notice they were walking past art. The artist is Irma Boom.
From there it was a short walk to a free ferry to the other side of the River Ij. I hadn’t inially intended to cross the river, but by the time I’d changed my mind, we were already nearly across and so my fate was sealed. I got off and found somewhere calm to sit to watch the ducks for a bit.
When I was ready to make my way back, I saw the A’DAM Tower and noticed the death-machine at the top, the “Swing over the edge” of the Sky Deck. Even though my brain was telling me that this was not a good idea, I was drawn towards it, but thankfully then rescued by a container containing a mini-exhibition about the disappearence of child migrants in Europe.
The stories are powerful, and there’s some fabulous photography too.
I made it back across the river and made a beeline for something church-looking which turned out also to be an actual church, the Basilica of Saint Nicholas. And, Noodles be praised, it was open! Not only was it open, but it was free, although there’s an NFC card reader next to the door which allowed me to make a free-will donation of an amount of my choosing!
At some point during my wander back to the Vondelpaark, I lost my hat. This was very annoying, but probably brought about in some way by the breakfast left-overs I’d consumed while watching the ducks.
I’m not sure how long it took me to scour the streets of the red-light district, occasionally being startled by nice ladies who kept tapping on their windows — presumably to tell me I’d lost my hat — I had all-but given up hope when I thought to check the meta-data in some photographs. Eventually found it lying on the ground next to a car where I’d obviously stopped to do some art once I thought, “ooh, I think I’ve been here before” and bumbled down a side-street past a cheese-shop.
I had a pint to celebrate, then moseyed back to where I’d started my day and topped up the breakfast intake. The number two tram brought me home, hat (now in bag) and all.
