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Europe on Two Martinis a Day - Part 4 (Thuringia and Holland)
Thursday, August 28th, 2008 05:37 pmI don't know why, but I've never found Germany very interesting. It has produced some great writers and composers, but never filled me with a desire to visit, so I was all for skipping Germany and going straight from Austria to Holland. Nalan, on the other hand, was keen to visit, having heard all about Germany from her father, who lived there for about a decade well before the whole Gastarbeiter thing started, and thus had a fairly positive view of the place. In particular, she wanted to see Köln and Berlin. We compromised by agreeing to spend the night in Erfurt (which was recommended by some fellow travellers) and having a quick look round Munich while we changed trains.
What little we saw of Munich was pleasant enough, but Erfurt proved to be a disappointment. Specifically, we were disappointed by the fact that the gasthaus we had booked was closed by the time we arrived—11.30 p.m., which I suppose is frightfully late for Germans. Worse, their telephone was not working. So much for German efficiency. After ringing doorbells and throwing stones at windows to no avail, we went back to the station where we sat in a cafe waiting for the trains to start, listening to the guttural Thuringian dialect and wondering if the fellow drunkenly babbling about his "vadderland" was likely to pick a fight with us for being English or Turkish. Fortunately the only problem we encountered was hypercaffeination, and after an uneventful five hours we hopped on the train to Göttingen, a name Nalan found hilarious because "göt" is Turkish for "arse" (to be fair, she was sleepless and hypercaffeinated). From there it was just another short hop to Hannover, where we intercepted the train to Amsterdam.
It did not take much to convince Nalan that Amsterdam was where she'd really wanted to go all the time. In fact, all it took was the public library. It was large, it was comfortable, it had Turkish magazines, it had a cafe selling excellent cheap sandwiches and cakes, and most importantly for travellers arriving with no hotel booked, it had a load of computers with free Internet access. Oh yes, it had a polar bear, too.
After finding a hotel, I went off foraging and, like a good hunter, returned to present my woman with food and an itinerary for the following day. Here we again turned out to have different plans: I proposed visiting the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum; Nalan wanted coffee shops and the Red Light District. It turned out that we were each basing our plans on what we thought the other's priorities were. We compromised on the Van Gogh Museum and the Red Light District, which, as you can see, really is red.
That's the great thing about Amsterdam: there is something for everyone—art, architecture, erotica, beer, drugs, cheeses, canals … in fact the only thing not to like is the language. I once read a theory that there are no direct emotional associations of the sounds of words; according to this linguist, we think French sounds romantic and German harsh because we think of the people who speak these languages as having those qualities, not because of anything inherent in the phonemes. Dutch is a striking disproof of this theory. When I think of Dutch people, words like "civilised", "good-humoured", "polite" and "modest" come to mind. If I were to imagine a language that would suit this charming race, it would be something restrained and melodious, with a lot of vowels, not Dutch, which sounds like a German trying to speak English while swallowing a painfully hot potato. When the National Geographic channel does one of its short features on languages facing extinction (usually it seems, because they are collapsing under the weight of their consonants), we always say "Let it be Dutch!" There again, maybe the reason the Dutch are so nice is because they were saddled with a language no one wants to learn that sounds offensive even to their ears, thus encouraging them to appreciate other languages and cultures. Contrast this with the French, whose love of their (admittedly beautiful) mother tongue has contributed greatly to the smugness that makes them so hard to tolerate. But more of France later …
What little we saw of Munich was pleasant enough, but Erfurt proved to be a disappointment. Specifically, we were disappointed by the fact that the gasthaus we had booked was closed by the time we arrived—11.30 p.m., which I suppose is frightfully late for Germans. Worse, their telephone was not working. So much for German efficiency. After ringing doorbells and throwing stones at windows to no avail, we went back to the station where we sat in a cafe waiting for the trains to start, listening to the guttural Thuringian dialect and wondering if the fellow drunkenly babbling about his "vadderland" was likely to pick a fight with us for being English or Turkish. Fortunately the only problem we encountered was hypercaffeination, and after an uneventful five hours we hopped on the train to Göttingen, a name Nalan found hilarious because "göt" is Turkish for "arse" (to be fair, she was sleepless and hypercaffeinated). From there it was just another short hop to Hannover, where we intercepted the train to Amsterdam.
It did not take much to convince Nalan that Amsterdam was where she'd really wanted to go all the time. In fact, all it took was the public library. It was large, it was comfortable, it had Turkish magazines, it had a cafe selling excellent cheap sandwiches and cakes, and most importantly for travellers arriving with no hotel booked, it had a load of computers with free Internet access. Oh yes, it had a polar bear, too.
After finding a hotel, I went off foraging and, like a good hunter, returned to present my woman with food and an itinerary for the following day. Here we again turned out to have different plans: I proposed visiting the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijksmuseum; Nalan wanted coffee shops and the Red Light District. It turned out that we were each basing our plans on what we thought the other's priorities were. We compromised on the Van Gogh Museum and the Red Light District, which, as you can see, really is red.
That's the great thing about Amsterdam: there is something for everyone—art, architecture, erotica, beer, drugs, cheeses, canals … in fact the only thing not to like is the language. I once read a theory that there are no direct emotional associations of the sounds of words; according to this linguist, we think French sounds romantic and German harsh because we think of the people who speak these languages as having those qualities, not because of anything inherent in the phonemes. Dutch is a striking disproof of this theory. When I think of Dutch people, words like "civilised", "good-humoured", "polite" and "modest" come to mind. If I were to imagine a language that would suit this charming race, it would be something restrained and melodious, with a lot of vowels, not Dutch, which sounds like a German trying to speak English while swallowing a painfully hot potato. When the National Geographic channel does one of its short features on languages facing extinction (usually it seems, because they are collapsing under the weight of their consonants), we always say "Let it be Dutch!" There again, maybe the reason the Dutch are so nice is because they were saddled with a language no one wants to learn that sounds offensive even to their ears, thus encouraging them to appreciate other languages and cultures. Contrast this with the French, whose love of their (admittedly beautiful) mother tongue has contributed greatly to the smugness that makes them so hard to tolerate. But more of France later …
