Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

We’d had a fast and furious two weeks, and were dead exhausted. Still, since we had a few days left before we had to head back home, and I’m always up for seeing a new town, we decided to hit Amsterdam. Where better to relax and wind down for a couple days?

Amsterdam conjures up certain images - there’s the quaint houseboats and canals, of course, and the strange, sometimes crooked rowhouses with their hooks used for hauling up furniture (the doorways and halls being too narrow). There’s its storied history, and two world-class art museums. Of course, those kinds of images are usually secondary to its most famous low-culture quartet: beer, pot, hookers, and porn.

Those four are all well and good (and cheap - the one time we hit the coffee house I spent more on playing pinball than on weed), but what Amsterdam really should be famous for on a low-culture level is its amazing variety of greasy street food. For every red-light house, coffee shop, or bar there’s 10 kebab carts, pizza joints or French Fry stands. It makes sense - you’re never going to go broke trying to feed people cheap greasy food in the world’s #1 destination for drinking and smoking pot.

I hit the museums and walked around town, but the only tourist attraction we really went out of our way to see was the old Heineken Brewery. After coming back from South America, I had visited a friend in Atlanta, where the main tourist attraction was the “World of Coke,” admission 10 dollars. I shouldn’t have scoffed snobbily at the tourists lined up to get in: the brewery ended up being pretty much the equivalent Dutch tourist trap: the “Heineken Experience.” Well, at least we got three glasses of beer and a take-home glass with our admission.

We did manage to find a great bar though - centrally located, non-touristy, with a great selection of beer on tap (each of which came in its own unique glass). I highly recommend to all of you a night at Cafe Gollem - or an afternoon, as that’s when they have their microbrew sampler.

After Cafe Gollem, we couldn’t resist climbing one more thing in Europe. We headed up to the top of this church. It turned out that I had, in fact, climbed my namesake church - the Mozeshuis (or Moses House in English).

Notice the huge billboard on the outside of the church. A 50-foot tall fashion model gracing a house of God is pretty par for the course there. Amsterdam’s a weird place. Not just for their acceptance and embrace of the more tawdry side of life, but for the way they don’t seem to see any inherent conflict between it and their more highbrow culture. Perhaps this picture explains it best. There was one more interesting “got to love the Dutch” scene we found before we left: this mural of Johnny Rotten. Not really just for the mural though - but for where they thought it most appropriate to put it.

It was a fantastic trip. Despite a bit of an adventure transferring flights at Charles de Gaulle (the most dystopic airport I’ve ever been too - we all but ended up on the tarmac), the journey home was uneventful. Still, we weren’t sad, but exited. We had a great time exploring Paris as extreme tourists, but ultimately we were just that: tourists. Above, around, and below New York City, we’re at home.

We were a little Catacombed-out after our 30-hour marathon trip. Still, that didn’t mean we weren’t still up for seeing more of the hidden side of town. Steve wanted to visit the sewers before we left (there’s actually an official sewer tour that’s offered, but he’d already taken that and wanted to see the rest), and I wanted to run around the subway tunnels. Unfortunately, we didn’t get around to either one. Both sewers and subways are a lot riskier than the catas. A little more time, a few more contacts, we probably would have figured it out. But as it stood, we couldn’t even figure out what the third rail was on the subway tracks. Ah well, it’s always good to save something for the next trip.

Instead, we decided to see if we could visit an underground canal we saw on a map. I had been wanting to do a lot more walking around town, so I decided to scope it out on my walk earlier that day, and meet up with Steve later if it looked promising. I found both the north and south ends of the tunnel (the canal continues above-ground on either side). Both looked pretty secure - the walkways had locked fences, and they were arranged so that the only way around involved swimming.

Still, when I met Steve he wanted to see for himself. And it turned out we were in luck - one of the padlocks on the gate turned out to be so old that it broke off in our hand. In we went.

The canal itself wasn’t that interesting. What was interesting was the fact that we were right underneath where the Bastille used to be. Despite there being a “Bastille” stop on the subway map, the actual prison hasn’t existed since July 14th, 1789. What’s there now is the Colonne de Juillet, which bears a startling resemblance to the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. While we were in the Canal, we noticed a door covered with a metal grate. That evening, David told us that when he was a kid you could break open the door, which led to the spiral staircase that went right up to the top of the Colonne. The Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial, which has been closed for decades, is something I’ve always wanted to climb, so when I heard David had gotten up its Parisian sibling, my jealousy was pretty palpable (Note: climbing of the Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial now accomplished. Re-opening to the public expected 2007).

Fortunately there were other climbing options that night. After visiting David, we headed north to the Church of St. Sulpice (which some readers might know from its role in the DaVinci Code). Steve left all his photography equipment back at the hotel. Sometimes you just have to go climb something interesting for the pure fun of it. This one was for us.

The church had scaffolding on the North tower. That was the good news. The bad news was twofold - there was a police station right across the plaza, and it had the same metal fencing as the Tour St. Jacques. This time, however, there’d be no digging under. The fencing wasn’t on grass, but on concrete. We had to find a way over instead.

Our best shot seemed to be this way. We both made it over, and up we went, hoping we hadn’t made enough of a racket that we were heard by the cops across the plaza. When I went back a few days later to take pictures, I noticed somebody had managed to open up another way in.

We got to the top, and after admiring the view and congratulating ourselves, we took the interior staircase down into the bell tower. Some of the Parisians have been all around St. Sulpice. For us though, the top and the bell tower were enough. It was amazing being in there - as opposed to the modern concrete bell tower of the Church in Reykjavik, which we had visited officially on our trip to Iceland, the bells of St. Sulpice were entirely supported by wooden scaffolding over 200 years old. We climbed around a bit, then headed back down. We noticed another interesting tidbit on our way. On the face of the tower was a plaque engraved in Hebrew with the name of God.