lapsedmodernist | (no subject)

So, in my whirlwind trip through the Netherlands last week--best described by a Russian aphorsim "galopom po Evropam"--galloping through Europe--this is what I did have time to see:

The lovely Maastricht--a small medieval city on the Southern border of Holland, with cobble-stone streets, the aforementioned church-turned-bookstore, and phantasmagorical creatures lining the town square

I spent a day and two nights in Leiden, and I fell in love with it. The canals, reflected clouds lazily floating and shape-shifting upon encountering rusty boats, the houses with large windows that seem to veil the indoor stages with translucent curtains, an abandoned factory full of art, new friends in escheresque apartments lit by tea candles and anti-squats, a Dutch poet with a Russian name, who is a self-proclaimed magician (possibly true), trees preparing to march with roots mostly unearthed, labyrinthine weaving trips through narrow alleys and backyard gardens populated with black cats, amber-colored beer rivulets, a tempting junkshop left sadly un-investigated literally next door to where I was staying.

I slept on a stage of sorts in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with a streetlight casting a sooty glow on my face (and, apparently, as I discovered the following morning--five people watched me sleep from the street at one point).

I got several hasty gulpfuls of Amsterdam, darker and moodier than the light, fairy-tale Leiden, and in the end departed with a kinetic map of the country made up from the unfolding sequences observed from the second floor of the trains I took, first to the South, then back to the North. Traversing the country in this manner I saw the alternating human and naturescapes, small towns with rivers and canals weaving through them giving way to industrial inlets, flanked by towns that reminded me of Brno--a town a couple of hours from Prague, that

theophile and I drove through on our cross-Czech road trip the summer before last. Mixed in were these strange planned communities, like hydro-suburbs, dozens of houses with tiny yards with water all around them--as my nre friend Niels described them--commuter abodes, shortly beyond the outskirts of amsterdam--and fields and windmills and patches of flooded land here and there.

On the train ride into Amsterdam the city sailed into view, futuristic cubes aggregated in constellations over water, the outer rings of Saturn, and box-apartment buildings, like the one I grew up in in Moscow, with laundry hanging on balconies, circling the deep rich pulsating heart of the city, saturated like ripe-ripe cherries, so ripe they could be mistaken for ticks. I walked through and around in a haze until twilight, and left the city at the same time the sun did.