Europe @ 2.4 km/h (17 page)

It’s long been a pet theory of mine that every country has some innovation we could learn from. The Dutch post office issues householders JA and NEE stickers which they put on their front doors to indicate whether they do, or do not, wish to receive advertising mail. Another good idea, seen in The Hague, is the provision of brief biographies on eponymous street signs. These state when the person the street is named after was alive, and his or her claim to fame.

466-469 km

As Natalie, our tour guide, plied us with facts about the history of the Hague Peace Palace, it occurred to me I’d made a grievous error, confusing this colossus with the far more newsworthy International Criminal Court. A frenzy of note-taking hid my embarrassment, but I couldn’t help reproaching myself,
Just as well you weren’t sent
here by a newspaper to report on the trial of Charles Taylor, and ended
up ‘filing’ instead on the intricacies of the maritime dispute between
Romania and Ukraine.
Items seen on the tour included: a tapestry donated by the last Shah of Iran; elephant tusks from the King of Siam (as was); twelve million mosaic squares; a replica of the Paris Opéra staircase; four Ming vases — in the Japanese Room, no less; busts of Edward VII, Schweitzer, Gandhi and Mandela; and a statue of Christ donated by Argentina after a decision on its border dispute with Chile by the International Court of Arbitration, which also sits here. Just as well Argentina didn’t gift it
before
the ruling — or there might have been a suspicion of corruption.

Later I went in search of the International Criminal Court, only to discover that The Hague has an abundance of them. Outside one, a security guard said I was too late today but a hearing was coming up on Wednesday (too late for me, alas). The Charles Taylor one? ‘No, it’s only for the former Yugoslav cases,’ he said with an air of disappointment. ‘Don’t worry,’ he brightened up, ‘we get confused too.’ As we spoke, an employee was leaving the barbed-wire-ringed compound. A couple of minutes later, seeing him at the bus stop, I said, ‘You work at the criminal tribunal, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said the man, a cook from Ghana.

‘So tell me,’ I said, with an air of forced levity. ‘Did you poison Milosevic?’

A hearty laugh: ‘No, it wasn’t me.’ But then he turned serious.

My question had reminded him of something. And now he handed me a journalistic scoop.

‘My friend, who is a cook at the Liberian [International Criminal] court, he told me that Charles Taylor asked for his own Liberian home food to be served, or else he would go on hunger strike. How can he demand that? First he kills his own people’ — strictly, this begged the question, but I was not disposed to argue the point — ‘and then he says, “You must serve me the food I like best.”’

‘And did they agree to his request?’ I asked.

‘No.’

So there you have it. LIBERIAN EX-PRESIDENT, ‘WAR CRIMINAL’, IN FOOD PROTEST, with details supplied by ‘sources close to the court’.

471-472 km

Confidently billed as ‘the smallest town in the Netherlands’, Madurodam — spread over just 18,000 square metres — appears at first blush to be an amusement park but is actually the world’s most unusual war memorial, containing some 80,000 bulbs — 30,000 tulip bulbs and 50,000 light bulbs.

Intensive pruning keeps trees that would normally grow 15 metres tall down to a maximum height of 60 cm. The attraction — named after Resistance hero George Maduro, who died in Dachau concentration camp — is a veritable Little Holland.

In all, it contains 185 structures miniaturised to one twenty-fifth of their actual size — from Schiphol Airport to a speedboat called the
Abel Tasman
. As you would expect, it’s a magical experience for all visitors, a particular favourite among children and effortlessly educational. For all that, one does tire after two hours of wandering its scaled-down streets. But I will remember Madurodam, above all, as the scene of one of my worst faux pas.

First, my excuses. A day of arduous pushing had dulled my usual alertness — but I also blame the undeniable fact that a thick Dutch accent can lend itself to misunderstanding. For whatever combination of reasons, then, I was amazed when I heard the woman selling me my ticket — and so kindly, too, at half price — urge me to stay on until later in the evening.

‘Why?’ I asked innocently.

‘Well,’ I heard her say, ‘if you stay some more time we have fellatio at eleven o’clock.’

You say what
? For a moment I squinted at her face to see if it looked familiar. Had I seen it recently inside an open caravan on the Reeperbahn, perhaps? No — impossible. The ticket vendor could obviously tell from the disbelief inscribed on my dial that I had misunderstood her. ‘Why are you so shocked?’ she quizzed me — and this time I was all ears. ‘I told you, “We have a laser show at eleven o’clock.”’

475-476 km

Along and near Koningskade, one of The Hague’s main avenues, you cannot miss an outdoor exhibition of Australian art installations housed in glass cubes. One, a sculpture called
I O U
, consists of three giant letters (you guessed it): I, O and U. A head melting into sand I quite liked, and the next one — a mother and baby motorbike — was ingenious in its way. But nothing (and no one, for that matter) came near
Cow up a Tree
, a boxy Friesian in the cleft of a metallic elm.
¹³
With a degree of trepidation I approached a sleepy-looking Dutch officer perched in a police van 100 metres from this bovine cultural statement. Testing his intelligence, I inquired, ‘Do you know what that is?’ He looked up and shook his head. ‘No.’ ‘That’s a cow up a tree,’ I explained, as though it were nothing remarkable, and certain at any rate that such a sight would pique the interest of any dairy-conscious Dutchman. ‘Well, you know,’ he shrugged, ‘it is art.’ Not really looking for an argument, I was happy to leave him to his opinion.

478 km

A rare balmy night brings with it another epiphany. The serenity experienced by the glassy lagoon known as Hofvijver, beneath the soft lights of Binnenhof Palace, continued — despite an outward change of scene — through a perfect dinner at Hardans, a traditional Dutch restaurant in Nobelstraat. Duck breast in apple sauce. Part of the evening’s perfection sprang from my ignorance. It was late, nearly 10 pm, and the restaurant I’d had in mind (Puck) was closed, as it is every Monday.

Finding an affordable place to stay in Rotterdam wasn’t easy. The Maritime Hotel was worth the search, though. Its more expensive rooms face the River Maas but a selection of unadvertised, small yet clean rooms at the back — normally reserved for sailors on shore leave — suited my budget perfectly at €27 (A$45) a night.

The hotel is literally shipshape, and the wavy corridors must induce seasickness in a mariner who’s made it back three sheets to the wind.

Over breakfast I got talking with the English expat couple opposite. They operate a
pension
in Picardy, not far from my route through northern France in early October. Spontaneously, they invited me to stay a night free of charge. Naturally, I accepted.

499-500 km

Of Europe’s less glittering art showcases, I cannot say I’ve had a more enjoyable time at any than I did today at Rotterdam’s own Boijmans van Beuningen Museum. This must have something to do with repeating my Hermitage luck. Entrance is free on Wednesdays (I didn’t know that) and today, 1 August, as luck would have it, is a Wednesday.

I head straight for the room with the three Dalis. Despite being a museum of rank (in terms of acquisitions), it obviously can’t afford the best-trained staff. An attendant, asked for directions to one of the Dali rooms, tells me I’m in it, even though there isn’t a Dalí in sight. How surreal can you get?

In my layman’s view, Salvador Dalí at his best manifests three qualities — ambiguity, humour and the power to shock.
Le Grand
Paranoiäque
(1936) is hard to describe better than the catalogue does: ‘a head … formed by various figures’. Alternatively, the head could be taken for a rock formation — a typical Dalíesque double image. There is also great humour here:
White Aphrodisiac Telephone
(also from 1936) is a phone whose receiver is a plastic rendering of a crab. Humour, too, in
Tete Otorhinologique de Venus
(1969-1970), a sculpture of the classical goddess with an ear for a nose, and a nose for an ear, both on the left side of her head.

Peter Paul Rubens was just as shocking in his time, of course. On display here is
The Martyrdom of St Livinus
(1633-1635). St Livinus, a seventh-century Irish missionary, preached in Flanders before he was attacked by godless robbers who tore out his tongue and threw it to the dogs — for which God punished them by way of thunderbolt. This work has several centres of action. In one part of the canvas we see horses rearing and angels aiming bolts; in another, St Livinus, in mortal agony, appeals to God; in a third, the transfixing spectacle of an assailant holding a large pair of tongs that clasp a brilliantly delineated human tongue while three hounds vie for the meaty pink morsel.

Perhaps you think I am over-emphasising the fine arts. But, historically, the Dutch have been trendsetters in visual representation. As if to prove the point, a panel on one of the gallery walls states that, in the century after the bourgeoisie took over from the Church as principal patron of the visual arts, ‘between five and ten million works of art were produced in the republic’.

Speaking of imagery, they took their Protestantism seriously here. Opposite the museum is the facade of the Remonstrantse Kerk, with all the saints on its entablature defaced.

503 km

A visit to the suburb of Blaak goes a long way to justifying Rotterdam’s reputation as the hometown of Europe’s most original buildings. It has been named Europe’s 2007 City of Architecture but this reputation rests on far more than a single impressive year. It is in Blaak we find studio flats shaped like huge dice in mid-roll — or giant Rubik’s Cubes, if you prefer. These 38 Show Cubes, as they are known, are now a quarter of a century old.

I soon see there is no access. They’re reachable only by staircase, and even I think it will be a bit confrontational to crawl upstairs and knock on residents’ doors. Just then I meet Juliana as she is arriving home from work. She takes my camera up to her apartment, and whizzes off half a dozen photos to show me what an interior (or at least hers) looks like. Illogically, I had assumed everything inside would be at a crazy angle but now I see — as gravity dictates — that the décor is arranged on the good old horizontal and vertical planes. Juliana amazes me with the news that she has lived in her cube for twenty years. Three years, I’d imagined, would be the maximum before you climbed the slanting walls. She says cube houses are ideal for singletons and small families. And how much would one set me back today? ‘About €200,000 (A$333,000).’

504 km

The Netherlands is a latecomer to the ranks of Western countries that have banned smoking in restaurants. Its tardiness I attribute to the Dutch championing of tolerance (extended, as previously mentioned, to smokers of a different weed). This morning the Maritime Hotel posts a notice about the ban, which came into force yesterday. ‘Dear Guest: As from 1 August 2007 smoking will no longer be allowed in our restaurant. However, you can still smoke in the Maritime Cafe
, with the exception of the no-smoking area
.’

512-528 km

Late at night I discover that the sound of double basses being wheeled in their cases along a path is almost indistinguishable from rolling thunder. A rumbling wakes me in my room at the Apeldoorn hostel, on the edge of my sister-in-law’s hometown. Before I roll over and drift back to sleep, I see the cream-coloured cases gleaming under an electric light. This will bear investigating tomorrow, I tell myself.

And so it does. Over breakfast I get talking with Jurjen Toepoel, in his late 20s, who is tour manager for the Dutch National Youth Orchestra (Nationaal Jeugd Orkest), which at 50 years is much older than anyone in it. The 70-strong orchestra — divided for concert purposes into two ensembles of 35 members apiece — is domiciled at the hostel here for three weeks while on its summer tour. Tonight it will be performing less than an hour away, in Arnhem. Would I like to join the tour bus and hear the concert? Sure thing.

Despite the ‘national’ in its name, the musicians in it now hail from Poland, Spain and further afield. They are more European than Dutch, more global than European. So is their repertoire. Tonight they present the world premiere of a work commissioned from the Japanese-American composer Ken Ueno especially for them.

I meet Ueno at Arnhem’s Muzis Sacrum Concertzaal and, after he makes a startling admission for a classical composer — declaring ‘I’m a musician because of Jimi Hendrix’ — we just riff.

‘I had a different life plan to that of many musicians,’ he tells me. ‘US West Point military academy.’

‘What were you aiming for there?’

‘You know — the usual. Maybe general or senator.’

‘No higher than that?’

‘Well … then I discovered electric guitar. I think there’s a crossover, although I wouldn’t exaggerate it. You won’t find me inserting death-metal passages into the middle of symphonic movements. What really grabbed me about classical music was when I heard Bartók’s string quartets and Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
and they hit me viscerally, direct. Duke Ellington used to say, “There are only two types of music: good and bad.”’ And so to
Necropolis
, the piece he wrote for the youth orchestra. Ueno created the work while living in Rome, on a fellowship at the American Academy there. He found inspiration in Etruscan burial sites visited near the Italian capital. ‘The city of the living is in ruins, but the Italians are living over the dead,’ he explains. So the work plays itself out on parallel plateaux, as it were. It is in three movements, but two are ‘submerged’ in silence (a touch of John Cage there), so only the second one is audible. Almost unheard of.