You shouldn’t fly Iceland Air anywhere if you haven’t ever traveled
by air before. This is because all the
announcements are first in Modern Icelandic (Mod Ice, as it is known among the language
cognoscenti), and then in English that is so heavily accented it might as well
be Icelandic. They aren’t saying
anything different from anything you’ve heard on any other flight, but if you
don’t know what that is, you’ll spend all your time flying to and from
Reykjavik wondering what the hell they are talking about.
On our brief stop in Iceland we encounter snyrtegar, which means
toilets, and a chocolate cookie that had so many letters in its name – some of
them unknown to us – that we had to buy it. All together now: Súkkula∂ibitakaka!
At Schiphol (pronounced like ski pole) Airport in Amsterdam,[1] there are the
requisite notices on the baggage carousels that tell you which flights are
loading onto which carousel, when they are starting, when they are done,
etc. The notices flip between Dutch and
English. You hope that when it says “Alle
bagage is gelost” next to your flight number, that it does not mean what it
sounds like.
After a few minor delays and a short taxi ride, we land at our hopelessly
hip A-dam hangout on Rustenbergerstraat 256 in de Pijp (pronounced “pipe”). It totally lives up to its Airbnb billing of
three flights of stairs, and you feel like you are climbing up from the deepest
hold on a supertanker. The apartment is both
shipshape and trés moderne, with lots of smooth black and white surfaces and
hidden storage and big windows on both ends of the narrow flat. The two bedrooms upstairs are separated by a fabulous
bathroom with a complicated, multi-jetted shower and all frosted glass panels. We feel terribly stylish and our landlord Marvin
does not dispel this, being young and cool and he used to DJ so there are
hundreds of records lying about too.
Once I realize that there are no mugs because A-damers just serve tea
and coffee in glasses, we all feel at home.
It is funny how familiar but unfamiliar this city feels. There is that wonderful cold European city
smell which is partly traffic but also maybe food stores and cafes everywhere,
and people out walking and biking and sitting and talking. (More on the biking later). So that is kind of exotic but in a familiar
way. The unfamiliarity comes from the fact that everyone tells you, oh,
don’t worry about Dutch because everyone speaks English but somehow I expected
that to mean that I would understand all the signs and labels that are in Dutch
not English and I don’t. I find myself
repeatedly pronouncing things as they might be in German (Strasse instead of
Straat, Sh-traat instead of Straat). This
is not so surprising because sometimes Dutch looks very English and sometimes it
looks very German and sometimes it is like nothing you’ve ever seen
before. So this is a linguistic adventure. But the truth is that everyone does speak
enough English, and unlike certain other countries, they don’t mind speaking English with you, so you
really can get around just fine. But you
are on your own in the grocery store to figure out what kind of cheese you are
buying!
On our first night, we gather for dinner with our travel companions
Andy and Laurent and sister-in-law KT at the Viscafé de Gouden Hoek which turns
out to be way the hell across the city but totally worth the trip. The evening is a success: we figure out the tram AND I picked a really
good fish place where we sample jenever and a beer made especially for fish
which is brewed with mustard seeds and dill and is unbelievably tasty. There was much well-fried fish, one misfire
on something that I thought was herring and Andy thought was fish balls, but
turned out to be a perfectly-made fish sandwich, and a great deal of bonhomie. Izzy and I come home early – feeling terribly
sophisticated wending our way through dark A-dam – and then of course can’t
sleep because that is how it is when you travel far away.
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