A Trip to Amsterdam, or an Incoherent Oddysey to the Underworld?

It has been a dearly long time since I have written anything.... I will explain away the intervening 3 or so months by saying that I wrote nothing because I did nothing whilst I whiled away my time at home.

So I jump all that intervening bit we call regular life and delve straight into my quest to reach Amsterdam.

It is without notifying a vast majority of the reading public that I have been toodling around Germany for the past week and a half or so. And while Germany certainly has its drawing cards and half-ways interesting stories to tell (perhaps more about them at a later date), it was the lure of tulips, canals, Rembrandt (umm... sort of... saying so makes me vastly more culturally sophisticated than I seem), green plant matter, but most importantly, the chance to say that I've drunk beer in another country that drew me to embark on my epic quest of reaching Amsterdam from Osanbrück in NW Germany ---- that, and the rather more Sysephian quest to secure cheap Dutch coffee.

The guide and I settled in for the long and grueling mountainous climb through the impenetrable peaks that jaggedly crisscross the Dutch landscape. The stress of not knowing whether the car, despite its Volkswagen quality, would surmount another tortuous 2 metre high rise was more than any mortal ought to take. With time, however, our People`s Car proved itself more formidable than the awesome inhospitableness and remote mountain peaks of the Dutch A1 autobahn. Despite a scenery to rival the Himalayas surrounding me, the rigours of the journey left me in need of a nap.

And thus it was that my contribution to the quest to reach Amsterdam mostly consisted of sleeping, waking up occasionally to see that another mountain pass was coming, sleeping some more, waking up to helpfully point out that we were following a Lithuanian truck, sleeping, waking up to inform the driver that we were now following a Latvian truck, and so on, until I had pointed out a rough quorum of the former Warsaw Pact.

As the resolution of our quest neared, it was entrusted to me to correctly negotiate our way through the last breathtakingly beautiful mountain valley and into the promised land of Amsterdam, where we would be sure to find some Grolsch and reasonably priced coffee. It was, alas, a Sysephian task.

The German road map we brought along, was, in the end, a German road map, meaning, to state the perfectly and painfully blindingly obvious, that Dutch roads were not included. (Of course, they did have a `Holland` section towards the back, but it happened to include a good cross section of Northern Europe, thus ensuring that it gave a pretty good idea of what autoroutes those Lithuanian truck drivers I had so helpfully pointed out had taken to reach Amsterdam, but singularly failed to provide various reasonably priced coffee dispensing emporia that may or may not have lain upon some sort of convenient entrance to Amsterdam.

In the end, we were never really that close to rolling our boulder to the top of one of those impregnable and forbidding Dutch mountains, a la Sysephus. Vague directions about `10 minutes that way` yielded about as many reasonably priced coffee dispensing emporia in 60 minutes of driving as a thorough enumeration of various reasonably priced pork dispensing emporia in Kandahar would.

Sixty minutes of coffeeless searching confirmed three things: Dutch people don`t eat (a lack of food emporia logically suggests that they are some sort of super race who have conquered the scourge of hunger and thirst for reasonably priced coffee), they like bicycles, and they really love plant stores. They abound. They multiply. They take up biblical amounts of land. And they have absolutely no reasonably priced coffee.

Taking with us a roll of string into one of these autonomous republics of gardening (lest we should meet some sort of minotaur between the hanging baskets and the rhododendrans in the labyrinthe that is a Dutch gardening store and need to walk the three or so hours out), we set off on the vain chance that there might be food or reasonably priced coffee inside. After more battles, adventures and encounters with sirens, cyclopses, and anything else Homer could write in a lifetime (no prizes for correctly deducing that there is a classical mythological theme running throughout our story today), we realized that there was no food, and no reasonably priced coffee. So we bought a plant instead.

Few mortals enter the lair of Hades (to mix the mythological metaphor just a bit more) and return alive. But we did. And we got a small plant, too --- an absolutely gorgeous specimen perfect for a bathroom windowsill.

And so, that was Holland, land of rocky mountains sometimes reaching an astonishing 3 metres, no food emporia, behemoth garden stores and any other stereotype about the country that I would be compltely unjustified in making, given that I spent no more than 8 hours of my life in the country.....

.......And we happened to find some reasonably priced coffee at a supermarket (though not quite the right kind, mind you) right on the German border at Enschede. But if we had just gone there, would we have ever gotten a plant from the deep bosom of a Dutch gardening store?




....Just on the top of the car there: Spoils from Hades