Middagmaal in Amsterdam

An astute commentator suggested it was time for the blog title to change, given my current location. He's right. I started this blog in 2009 after my move to the US in order to keep my Amsterdam friends up-to-date on my doings overseas. Back in Amsterdam its purpose, though not its only one, remains the same, but the definition of "overseas" has changed. However, I can't just rename it to the direct Dutch equivalent. For one thing, the Dutch breakfast is a pale experience at best--there's nothing here like the soon-after-return breakfast that inspired the name originally:

(Felix was and remains a good eater, though we have since met an even better one.) For another, a lot of time has passed: surely breakfast is over? I've chosen the middagmaal instead, which can be quite good hereabouts.

American friends, you will admit that America is as beautiful and arguably even more monstrous than ever, but never fear, we will be back. And while I wrote in my original post that I expected to lose friends once they were far away, my experience has been that you lose connection with very few of the people you care for deeply, and certainly none of my Dutch vrienden have been lost to me in this way. Nor, I now understand, will my American ones be while we are away. Eet smakelijk!

De Microbe Mens

I mentioned in a previous post our fellow travelers on our trip to Ameland. Old friends, stout bicyclers, wonderful company, and microbiological missionaries to boot. I'd known that Remco and Coosje were both deeply involved in (indeed, founded) the Yoba For Life non-profit, but it was not until I arrived in the Netherlands and secured a copy of De Microbe Mens, Remco's paean to bacteria (and, not to be forgotten, yeasts, algae, and fungi, too) that I understood that story in full, along with much else about his career as a microbiologist.

A short but rich book, De Microbe Mens ("The Microbe Man") explores and explains the relationship between the microbial world and our own. Actually, as Remco beautifully illustrates, that distinction is wholly false: we exist under almost all circumstances within a world of microbes, and are ourselves walking ecosystems that they populate and, to a surprising degree, control. Much to his (and my) chagrin, that false distinction has led to a culture of "hygiene" that is patently unhealthy and ecologically destructive. Rather than detail his arguments, let me extract and summarize his advice: don't use everyday products with "antimicrobial" agents; make only very careful use of medical antibiotics; eat with great variety so as to encourage a vibrant internal flora, and avoid preservative-laden foods; air quality issues not to be forgotten, introduce external ventilation into your living spaces; route yourself preferentially through bacterially rich environments; and get educated.

Sadly, you probably cannot get educated by reading Remco's book: it's only available in Dutch, and he has no plans to translate it. There are other sources of information on the topic, of course, but I don't know of a better one and you will miss in any case Remco's inimitable voice. Here an extract:

A rotor allows the tail to turn on its axis and the bacteria can in this fashion with a spinning tail bore through the water like a corkscrew. It the tail turns counterclockwise the bacteria swims in a straight line. Clockwise, the bacteria tumbles. The tail's direction of turn is determined by signals from the bacteria's environment, and on that basis the bacteria swims straight or tumbles. The trajectory of a bacteria we can view as a wise life lesson: if you less often change your direction in response to an improved environment you will eventually reach your ideal. (p. 37)

As someone who tumbles a good deal, there's much in just this one paragraph for me. And while I'm not in a position to affirm Remco's scientific credentials, my (reading) Dutch is good enough to let me judge how well someone writes; as well, I've read a lot of the great "popular science" works by the (mostly dead) immortals, including Gould, Sacks, and Dawkins (before he got rabid about the whole atheism thing). Remco ranks. And not only does he rank, he is of a kin with the writer and the book that got me started in my lifelong love of this important genre, shown here in both English and Dutch editions (the latter photo supplied by Remco himself):

Microbe Hunters, recommended to me by my father (but not yet taken up by either of my boys), was the first book about science I ever read, and it set in train interests that led me to and through a doctoral program in Science and Technology Studies (aka "reading and writing about science and technology"). To discover that one of my besties has now emerged, a la de Kruiff, as a Dutch author writing a popular explanation of microbiology is simply delicious.

De Microbe Mens is about microbes and man, but it's also about a microbe-man, Remco himself. Two of the six chapters total are taken directly from Remco's own life. One is about his work on Yoba, the other about how he became and what he has done as a microbiologist. Remco tells me that many Dutch critics were disapproving of what they took as self-aggrandizement. These critics cannot have read much other popular science (and certainly not a word of Sacks') nor honestly asked themselves if these chapters helped or hurt the book. To my taste they serve not only as Remco's bona fides but also as inspiring and even exciting stories in themselves, offering a rare readable glimpse into the scientific process and its application.

I love the book, I love Remco, and thanks to the two I now love our little friend and sometimes master, the microbe.

AMSTELO-DAMUM AMPLIFICATUM

Map of Amsterdam with design for the expanded city by Daniel Stalpaert. A. Besnard after Daniel Stalpaert, 1657, collection Rijksmuseum.

The question I am asked most often these days: How has Amsterdam changed? The questioner most often hardly pauses before offering their own answer: it is much more crowded [with foreigners] than before. There’s no doubt about that: the number of tourists and of foreign residents has grown enormously and the impact on the city is unmistakable. Not only is the center of the city virtually impossible to access at times, but the tourists, lured by the online recommendations and offers of strangers, are turning up in the most surprising places. And those rich foreigners are driving up the housing prices, making it increasingly difficult for the Dutch to live in their own capital. My blushes. What annoys me about this is that it’s gotten to the point where one can’t even be certain that the cashier speaks Dutch, so increasingly everyone in the shops simply speaks English.

But “more people” is an observation I could have made while visiting or even from afar, and it’s a fact of life for virtually any city you care to think of. Much more interesting is how this city is coping with these problems. The city mothers (the current Mayor is a woman, a first for Amsterdam after all these centuries), with their typical good sense and very much in keeping with previous practice, are fighting addition with multiplication: they are building an entire set of new mini-cities around Amsterdam, in the process, vaulting it back into the global premier league for arguably the first time since the 16^th century.

Amsterdam began as a village and grew, quietly and unplanned, for long ages before shipping riches demanded, and paid for, its first ring of expansion. The "grachtengordel" that those masses of tourists are coming to see represents only a fraction of the footprint of the city, but when we last lived here almost all of the entertainment, food, and other pleasures of life were to be found either within or very near the outer bound of that ring. Now, that monopoly has been broken: neighborhoods formerly destitute of such are now bursting with hip restaurants, hotels, clubs, galleries, and so forth. One arises on a weekend morning and chooses a direction, confident that wherever you land the borough will be worth visiting. In this Amsterdam is becoming like New York or London, but it is doing so not via organic growth but by building and populating its own Brooklyn and Mayfair and Staten Island and Camden Town all at once. And, in some instances it's not just building those places, it's actually creating the earth upon which they rest.

The Dutch process, or Amsterdam’s at any rate, has evolved considerably. No longer is housing the first thing built, with all that makes life worth living left to sprout on its own. Rather than being forced there by a desperate need for a place to lay their head, people are lured to these up-and-coming neighborhoods by new beaches built next to reservoirs, by restaurants and bars inside converted warehouses and factories, by quirky ateliers systematically subsidized by public funds. As the artists run out of subsidy they may be relied upon to turn entrepreneur, creating the hip enterprises that draw the next wave of pioneers—mostly young families and mostly Dutch, or Dutch-speaking at any rate. The really early adopters have to keep their doors closed to stop the sand from construction sites blowing into their living rooms, but it's not long before things are sealed back up with a pristine layer of shops, offices, playgrounds, and bike lanes.

The foreigners, they still think Amsterdam is the ring, and the tourists, once confined to the Red Light District within the ring, are at least (mostly) held at bay by the Prinsengracht or, worst case scenario, the Amstelkanaal. Still, that leaves a lot of the city, including the part I live in, overrun, and plenty of Dutch people within it, long-time Amsterdam residents and active voters, unhappy with the changes around them. Political pressure is intense, with demands that more be done to “control” tourism in particular. (The Dutch are less interested in stemming foreign investment in, say, real estate, as it’s making a lot of them rich.) Amsterdam is actually trying to redirect some of the tourist population away from the city—they’ve arranged to name Muiderslot the “The Amsterdam Castle,” for example, even though it’s @17km from the city center, in the hopes that some tourists will head out on what inevitably turns out to be an all-day bike ride to a museum that closes at 4:30 PM—but the thing about tourists in the online age is that the more of them there are the more reviews get written drawing still more after. The question, to my mind, is not how to get rid of the tourists but how to keep them from running into the locals. That’s a much harder question to answer, the sort of thing you’d need a lot of data for, a lot of data and Smart Infrastructure. Ah, but that’s a topic for another time and another forum.

Monumentendag

What a lovely weekend, the two-day Open Monuments celebration, where the greatest places in and out of town are open to the public. We saw the old tram station and yard, a mansion complex, a medium sized church and enormous Jewish graveyard, and lots of fortresses, waterworks, and shipwrecks. Also, we encountered Napoleon and, inevitably, sheep. Here, just a few pictures, including one of a place where no monument yet exists, but which seemed well worth recording along the way.

Mission Accomplished

Longest summer ever--early start in California, late finish in the Netherlands--but yesterday was the official end of that lovely time and the start of a new adventure: Dutch school! Here are the boys on the doorstep, fresh faced, amused by Gideon's having sneezed for the first shot, ready to depart:

A ten minute bike ride later we have arrived:

The teachers were waiting at the door with a "spring into school" setup:

Having surmounted that barrier the boys went to their respective classrooms, Gideon with a group of kids his own age...

 Felix with all the other ages (there are only two classrooms total for "nieuwkomers"):

There they are in the bottom two rooms (this is about a third of the total facility):

And here we are, happy parents, having successfully negotiated yet another facet of the great Dutch bureaucracy:

Mission accomplished!

Autocorrect