Thursday November 25, 2004

Munich and the Netherlands

I was on a visit to Munich a few months ago for the ISCA conference, followed by a personal visit to the Netherlands. Munich is a very nice city, with excellent public transportation. I took a walking tour (which turned into a drinking tour, because we got rained upon, so we sat in a biergarten and the guide showed us pictures of the places we were supposed to see instead). An authentic biergarten is apparently one with chestnut trees.  The bright part of the rain was that Munich showed off its range of lovely colourful umbrellas, so I bought three of them. I've been to Germany a few times before and every time I think of making a list of the German words which appear frequently, to avoid confusion (for example, is taffelwasser tap-water or table-water ?) However, I did not manage to create that list this time either. I found early on that my little Oxford German<->English dictionary was virtually useless for deciphering posted instructions or menu cards. I visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial (remembering the word gedenkstatte, for memorial), which was quite similar to the Sakhsenhausen camp near Berlin. Not just the camp, but also the surroundings: a half-hour train ride away from a major city; a train station with just a few tracks; a 10 minute bus ride through desolate streets so quiet that they make it difficult to imagine the goings-on of the time. Dachau has a few standing barracks, the gravelly roll-call square, a cemetery, and so on. It also has a rather chilling gas chamber, which was not used. A documentary film shows Goebbels on video. The Munich metro system is, as usual, superb; Marienplatz is the center of action, and one emerges from the metro station right into the platz. For the first few days, I was either narrowly making or narrowing missing the sliding doors, so I couldn't help remembering the Gwynneth Paltrow movie each time. The Munich central station looks impressive, especially with a parked fleet of Deutsche Bahn's classy red-and-white and white-and-red trains. By the way, there is a gap, but no mind the gap. I had time to kill on the last day of the conference, so I went to a German show of an opera (La Traviata) - the singing was quite good, but I did not have enough time to stay till the end, and I had a cough which was probably disturbing others, so I chose to leave early. It was a lovely auditorium in Gartner Platz, but at 16 euros, I had a cheap seat, the kind where one has to peer between people's heads to get a glimpse of three quarters of the stage. The overnight train from Munich to Utrecht was slow, but comfortable; and, these days, one can always while away time mindlessly pushing buttons to check if one's mobile phone has coverage in strange lands. The Netherlands: First, a few words of Dutch needed by the traveller: Dutch is almost phonetic, except that 'v' is pronounced as 'f', 'j' as 'y', 'g' as a throaty 'gh', ij as "aa-e", and tt as a soft t. Weg=way a la rue or strasse, von=of (William von Orange), voor=for, geen=prohibited, uur=hour, nieuwe=new, plein=platz, dienst=office, hypothek=realtor, te huur=rent, etc. English however is well understood, making this one of the easiest European countries for English-speakers to travel in. It's hard to think of another country of 15 million people which has had as much impact as the Netherlands. A third of the Netherlands is below sea level (hence the name), and large parts of the countryside are given to what is obviously a highly mechanized culture of farming - I rarely saw anyone working in the fields. The public transportation is again excellent, with an elaborate system of trams supplementing NS, the Dutch railways. A strip of 10 (strippenkarte) is the thing to buy, but you've to be careful about punching the right number of slots for your destination - ticket checking is very frequent. Rail coaches made by Alsthom appear to be popular. There are lots of cyclists on the streets. Amsterdam is a fun city, known best for its canals and museums. I'm not an art buff, but I was impressed by the 17th century paintings in the (genuinely) world-famous Rijks museum, so I decided to visit the impressionists museum next. This turned out to be a disaster - van Gogh's potatoes left me stone cold. We drove across most of the country one afternoon to visit the open-air Zuiderzee folk-museum, not unlike the Dakshina Chitra we have here in South India. It was amusing to see a real semaphore here - this is what Djikstra must have had in mind. I also noticed large signs saying P and V (and also S) posted over railway tracks, though I'm not sure what exactly they mean. The Netherlands has lots of Chiniz-Indisch (Chinese-Indonesian) restaurants, since Indonesia was a Dutch colony until 1945. Indian restaurants appear to be rather expensive (15 euros for a meal ?!) A highlight is the falafel place just outside Amsterdam Central - it's immediately on the right after crossing the canal. There was a nice bookstore in Amsterdam where I managed to pick up the 2003 Let's Go Europe for just 6 euros, and an excellent "Holland Handbook" for the expatriate posted to the Netherlands. I wish someone would produce a book like this for India.

Furnaces at Dachau concentration camp Marienplatz With Maurice Wilkes Amsterdam - a miniature mock-up A semaphore at the Zuiderzee museum

(2004-11-25 03:58:51.0) Permalink