Holland is flat and crowded to those of us from a vast, empty space, and I kind of felt I had to justify my decision to live where I do, to prove why this was worth missing Canada.

My friend asked me once if homesickness for me was a nostalgic “I remember” or a driving “I’ve gotta get home” kind of feeling. I told him I associate certain kinds of landscapes with specific people, that when I’m in those landscapes I think of them, and that’s my way of missing them, and Canada.

Why? I don’t know. But the mystery of it is essential to the experience.

Without it, it would just be a thought.

So when my friend arrived, I decided to take him to those places that, if I ever leave Holland, I’ll miss. The places that’ll make me homesick for Amsterdam, its surroundings, and my connections here.

We ducked into a few churches, art galleries and hidden courtyards in the city, rode along the canals, and then headed out of town.

I took him to a favourite village of mine in the outskirts of Amsterdam,

where we left our bikes and headed through a broken gate into a protected bird area.

As we walked, we feel into the routine we had back in Canada – using catching up on each other’s lives as a way to get into deeper, philosophical issues, and ultimately, vice versa. In that way, the landscape didn’t matter.

And in another way, it did.

We didn’t get to see everything while my friend was here. We missed the dunes. We missed the polder I bike through on my way to work. We missed the old battery on the dike and the castle in a village on the other side of the bay of the protected bird area. Next time, maybe. There was no way to see it all in a couple of days. There are a lot of places, a lot of different landscapes to see, which disprove the reputation this country has for a singular, monotonous landscape. Landscape, after all, is about more than just the land, the physical space. It’s about the associations you make with it, and you need time – years, even – for that.

No, not that kind. This kind:

Holland, a country 1/3 of which is below sea level, has a great deal of them, from the massive, to the tiny, but this one’s my favourite:

It links the city and the IJ river to the IJsselmeer, a large inland sea that used to be open ocean, before a dike was built across it in the 1930s. Some say the IJsselmeer alone is responsible for that famous Dutch light of 17^th century paintings – so much water in the middle of a country bouncing off the bottoms of thick, ever-present clouds changes the quality of daylight for the better, reflecting it back down (though as the Dutch fill in the IJsselmeer to create more land for an increasing population, that light is becoming a thing of the past).

I used to have a studio in northern Amsterdam, and instead of taking the ferry across the river from behind Centraal Station, I’d take the longer (though quite pleasant) way to get there, over two big bridges,

then passing through a village of row houses along the river, whose residents seemed to be perpetually socializing outside their homes with cups of coffee or glasses of wine. No traffic could be heard – it was a peaceful place.

But the bridges, which are links to the ring road, were not. And then one day, I decided to carry my bike down the stairs of one of the bridges

and investigate the road that runs underneath.

I cycled through a kind of trailer park, alongside the shipping canal,

and finally came to the first lock, the one for the big boys.

Once you cross that, you get to a series of three smaller (almost comically small) ones – for leisurecraft and small sailboats.

There’s a delightful zigzag pattern to the whole thing, and you get spit out in that peaceful village.

So why would you ever take the bridges? Even if the locks are open and your trip is delayed by as much time as it’s already taken you to get there, it’s still a lovelier ride via the locks.

I take that route as often as I can now. It was foiled last week, due to repair, and I reluctantly returned to the bridge route.  But hey, it was at least a year before I discovered that the locks were not just a point of interest, but a through-route.

And until then, the bridges had served me well.

You can’t miss what you don’t know.

I’ve been seeing a lot of this kind of “trees as commodity” lately…

And it hasn’t been pretty.

Though that’s the ultimate end.

In the forest behind where I work, a whole section of naturally-growing forest has been clearcut – for nature. To be replaced by a meadow.

Destroying nature to create it.  OK, I’ll bite.

And a few weeks ago, we went in search of morel mushrooms. I thought I’d found a place where they might be – they like sandy soil and grow well where there’s been a burn. Last summer I biked past a place like that,

and made a mental note to go back in the spring. But when we got there, we came across this instead.

It’s not really clear to me why this is happening, or how soon the nature takes over. At the moment it just feels empty. Eerily like the landscape in The Lorax.

Sadly, there were no morels, even in the intact forest. But we lingered anyway, fascinated by the contrast:

Us:

Them:

And when I see a tree like this

I can’t help but wonder which outlasts the other.

They’re everywhere – some hidden down laneways,

at the backs of parks, or alongside railway tracks – and in a country more densely populated than India, it offers a cheap solution to the problem of not many people having even the possibility of a garden where they live. If you can find one.

Municipalities lease the land out to collectives, and even though there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of a quarter million of them in Holland, wait lists are long. But if you get in, for about 500 euros and a couple of days of your labour every year, you can pretty much do what you want with your turf. And most people do.

There are the overdone,

The Zen,

The colourful,

The overgrown,

The unabashedly simple,

Some with names, wistful ones (“Seaview” in a place where there is no hope of the sea for at least 20 miles), and the just-right.

Most volkstuins have running water but no electricity, so you live (and sleep) by daylight and woodfire.

Cars aren’t allowed on the grounds, and at the one we visited this weekend, there was even a bee hotel

and a butterfly garden next to the vegetable plots to make sure everything gets pollinated.

This is dense, compact farming, at its best. The rhubarb next to the herbs, the strawberries side-by-side with the spring onions, and just enough room for an apple tree in the back…

I know more than a few people who have a volkstuin here, and I don’t know anyone that’s ever given one up. They’re delightful, restful places.

You make them your own, and then let them speak for you.

But if you live here, you tend to avoid the places the tourists go. Amsterdam’s tourist season has no low point – at any given time of the year, there seem to be just as many tourists in the city as there are residents, and in August, when the Dutch flee for France, the city is almost exclusively composed of them.

But every once in a while, when we have visitors, it’s nice to alter one’s bike route to embrace what people come to see, instead of avoiding it.

My sister and brother-in-law were in town last week, in transit from skiing in Kashmir (!), and their stopover was the first part of the crystallization of culture shock, or at least their re-entry into the West.

So we, and they, took it easy, unapologetically doing what the tourists do, seeing what the tourists see. And it was lovely.

An old friend of mine is popping in for a couple of days soon, his first time ever in Amsterdam, and I’d be lying if I said this hasn’t been on my mind. All he wants is a feel for the city, but much is at stake. He and I have a special relationship when it comes to landscape, and I kind of feel like I have to prove to him why I left the one we knew (and he still knows) for this one.

I’m erring on the side of keeping it spontaneous, but when I ride through the city and pass something I haven’t seen or been to in a long time, it gets added to an already-long mental list of possible things to do that reveal what it’s like to live here, not what it’s like to visit.

Someone, I can’t remember who, said once that you get an accurate sense or understanding of a place in a single day of being there, or after forty years of living there. Anything in between is suspect. I’m not sure if I agree, but perhaps it’s best not to overthink these things, and just let the city be what it is…

This is no ordinary beer. It’s also not just an unusual beer. It’s rare, and incredibly difficult to come by.

Westvleteren trappist beer is made by the monks at Sint Sixtus Abbey, in Flanders, near the French border. There are only seven trappist beers in the world, which is a distinction requiring all ingredients used in the making of the beer to be grown on the property of the abbey. The other six trappist beers, while maybe not exactly easy to find if you live in, say, Saskatoon, are readily available in Europe, some even in supermarkets. Westvleteren, however, can only be bought by reservation, picked up at the abbey in person, and you can only get two cases at a time.

So when my brother-in-law, a huge fan of the stuff, called to say that after 4 days on the phone he finally got through and had to pick up his beer the following Saturday at precisely 2:45 pm, I thought I’d go along for the ride.

There are more restrictions: you can only make a reservation from the same telephone number once every two months, ditto for your car license plate. Suffice it to say that this is a beer with extremely limited production, and you have to work to get it. And once you have it, you agree that you’ll never sell it to a third party. Given that you agree to this while in an abbey, the promise holds a bit more weight than a casual handshake or verbal contract… there are some who violate the agreement, and at last check, a single bottle of Westvleteren was going for an average of $25 per bottle, with some vintages going for around $150 a bottle. (At the abbey, the case price averages out to about $2 a bottle.)

You get the idea.

The abbey is tucked in behind the hundreds of Canadian graveyards that litter Flanders, and if you drove by and weren’t an obsessive trappist beer fan, you’d probably miss it.

It’s one of the most understated abbeys I’ve ever seen.

The abbey itself is closed to visitors, except those picking up beer, and that’s done in a shed at the side of the building with an efficiency that belies the excellence of its beer, and its fanatical following. You pull up, give your license plate number, and while you’re chit-chatting with the drivers of other cars in the line, comparing how far you’ve come for two cases of beer, someone brings out your cases, you load them in, you pay, you leave. C’est tout.

But then you taste it. Now, Westvleteren 12 is consistently called the best beer in the world by amateurs and professionals alike. I’m a skeptic, and tend to take statements like that with a grain of salt. But I have to say, far and away, it is the best beer I’ve ever had. In a previous lifetime, I worked at a microbrewery and was educated in the finer differences – the things that made a good beer good, and a not-so-good one not worth drinking, and this one was beyond good. It had an earthy flavour, but it wasn’t overpowering. You could taste the hops, but it wasn’t bitter. It was smooth, smooth, smooth and tasted a bit like salt and dry ash at the end – something very pure, of this world, and yet not.

Was it worth a whole day? Absolutely, even though tasting it made me a bit melancholy because I knew I’d never taste a better one in my lifetime, or possibly even this one ever again. But if a bit of effort gets you a bottle of the best beer in the world, count me in.

The older I get, the more the little details of places stand out for me, as opposed to the grand, sweeping picture.

In fact, it could be said that the sum total of the little details forms a grand, sweeping picture.

What I mean to say is that I find out about a culture now not through its museums, a tour or historical context, but through the bland, everyday workings of a place that go mostly ignored, by tourists and locals alike.

Before when I travelled, I’d have a loose sort of plan in my head, of the things it would be interesting to see. But now, I go completely without plan, and when I get to wherever it is I’m going, I have a look around, and let the landscape tell me where to go.

Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, and it’s clear that knowing more of the history of a place would have been helpful.

But then, if you’re going for context, you’re not going to see how people actually live.

For someone like me who’s never had a head for history, that kind of museum/tour/historical experience tends to make a place fade fast from my memory, and I have difficulty keeping track of where I was, of what was remarkable. Which seems contradictory.

The unambitious trip to a place further-off-the-beaten track is more appealing, and somehow satisfying, though I can’t explain why.

You look up, down and all around, and those tiny little details you see stay etched in your mind forever. Context or not.

Ever since then, we’ve been thinking about seeing the city from a different vantage point. She’s been living in Amsterdam for twenty years, and I’ve been here for six and a half, so it’s about time for both of us.

We decided to take a rowing course, not in one of those fancy, serious clubs with initiation fees in the five figures, but one run by the city, around the corner from us, on the Amstel River.

Every Sunday morning for the last eight weeks (barring a couple of weeks when the Amstel froze over), we’ve set out in a four-man boat to haul ourselves and down the river.

When I was in high school, I trained (dryland) for rowing one fall, winter and spring. It was hardcore. We ran from home to school. Then we did stairs for half an hour. Then we ran to the boat club (a few km away), where we spent half an hour or an hour on ergonomic rowing machines. Then we ran back to school. All this from 5:00-7:30 every weekday morning, and in a fierce, Canadian winter. It was never too cold or snowy to cancel training, and the approach was that if you weren’t nauseous or vomiting by the end of it, you hadn’t tried hard enough that day, and you’d be reprimanded. So when it finally came time to put the boats in the water mid-April, I could hardly wait. After eight months of preparation, I just wanted on the water. I wanted some payback.

It was glorious. The pull of the oars, the surge forward in a sleek boat, the sound of water dripping from the oars with each stroke, then the plunge back into the lake, eight oars at once making a single sound. And the silence of the city at dawn, the water a mirror before the sun rose high enough to create a wind.

There were 19 of us, and only 16 could be chosen. Sadly, I turned out to be too small (you need long legs for maximum pull), and was rejected from the team after a mere month on the water. In truth, I wasn’t much of a team player and found the experience a bit too authoritarian (though appreciated the challenge and the push to be better, stronger) – all work and no play, our early mornings filled with the military-like barks of our humourless, overachieving trainers. This was high school, after all, not Olympic training.

Hopefully, this time it’ll be different.

For the moment, we’re not really good enough to enjoy seeing the city from a lower, water-based perspective, and our equally humourless instructor won’t pause long enough for me to take a picture of the view while sitting in the boat. We only have time to concentrate on our strokes and rhythm – anyone who’s rowed knows how precarious the boat can be if one person is a second off on their timing.

But once we get better, maybe my neighbour and I will be able to laugh mid-stroke, or let our eyes wander up for a glimpse inside the houseboats that line the canals, gain a new understanding of the layout of the city, and appreciate the landscape of water in Amsterdam. For now, it’s still work, but I’m hoping we’ll be able to turn it in to play soon.

Work is about 25 km away from where I live, a nice ride through the fields, polders and countryside,

finishing in a dense forest.

There are six or seven different ways to get there, but for the past year, every single one of them has been beset with long-term construction or maintenance detours

that add an unpleasant element to the commute, namely riding beside highways. So I’ve been in search for the perfect alternative: a route that doesn’t take too long, but which is free of car traffic. Last fall, I thought I’d found one, but a section of it shut for six months at the beginning of November because it goes through an area where migrating birds breed. And when one of the routes through the polder reopened after four months of being shut for repaving, I thought I was home-free, until it shut again indefinitely (and in Holland, indefinitely means a long time) a few weeks ago for canal reconstruction.

Now, those who know me know that I’ve indulged in the detour a great deal. I’ve spent a lot of time on my bicycle checking out different roads, in search of the perfect ride. And while it may seem an impossible task to find a direct, pleasant and quiet route to work these days, finding that out has been kind of fun. Taking a left off the main road to see where it goes,

or the second right past the farmhouse because it looks like a shortcut to the woods…

the detour is all-important to the mind and the spirit, I think. It helps reset the brain, slows one down and makes one appreciate the landscape, and its diversity.

For the next couple of weeks I won’t be posting, because I’ll be off on another detour, in southern France. And as easy as WordPress makes it to post from a mobile phone, that’s just not my speed (in fact, my mobile phone will probably be off, or stay at home). That seems counter to the detour, because the detour requires disconnection, or at least, a willingness to temporarily go off course, to be ok with no one knowing where you are.

I grew up using figure skates, but they’re poo-pooed here. The Dutch are all about long blades – for speed, for endurance, for those long strokes you take with your hands clasped behind your back.

I’d never tried them before, but there weren’t any figure skates around, and there was no way I was going to pass up skating on the canals.

It was a gorgeous day, and people were out in droves.

There was a concert on the ice at the Pulitzer,

and some were even using the ice because it was easier to walk on than the streets, or just because they could.

The ice is gone now, but those handful of days where walking (or skating) on ice was possible, instilled a wonder in everyone I know. It was the only question people were asking each other at work, on the streets: Heb je geschaatst? Did you skate?

Yes, I did.