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| Travel brochure photo of Amsterdam |
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| Another typical Amsterdam scene |
While my shipmates were posting stereotypical Amsterdam images on their Instagrams, we ... never saw the sights. But it was for the best possible reason. Almost every minute that we weren't working, we were spending catching up with old friends who now lived in the area: our divemaster from Aruba brought her husband and two sons to see the ship and walk a bit of the festival with us; a picnic table, Heinekens, and a chance to catch up on each other's lives since we had last dived together in the Caribbean (pre-Covid!); a Navy sailing colleague of Dan's; an internet friend of Jaye's, along with her friend and her "bonus grandchild." There were ship tours and coffee at outdoor cafes.
It's almost impossible to describe what it's like to be in one of these large tall ship festivals. Hundreds of ships of all sizes and types, docked along a seafront or canal. Thousands, in Amsterdam's case millions, of people looking at them or lined up for deck tours, making walking around impossible. Food tents, live music. Even if we had had time and desire to walk around and get the feel of the city, it wouldn't be possible -- just the fact that we were there, and the crowds we drew, really changed the way the city was available to experience, a kind of maritime Heisenberg principle. Lots of infrastructure changes -- streets closed, extra pedestrian bridges across canals, some views completely blocked by crowds or boats. What would normally be quiet parks or peaceful cafes were anything but, because of the festival traffic.
We had two small chunks of time off that weren't structured with friends. For one, we walked around the festival, visiting a few new-to-us ships, and the ships of our Fundacion colleagues. For another, we tried to walk into the city but it was jammed! We couldn't get much of anywhere or walk at anything like our normal speed, not that that is so fast anyway.
We had one fascinating educational surprise, though. Walking around Amsterdam on Thursday I found this building named after Piet Hein. I was soooo excited! Piet Hein, Danish mathematician, also was a member of the Danish resistance and wrote cute and cryptic little morale-building poems during the Nazi occupation in WWII and ever since I learned about him in high school he was one of my heroes. I memorized his poems, studied the math behind the "superellipse" design he created, and played with plastic versions of his puzzles. (Here is a link to his wikipedia.) And here was an entire street and building named after him! I told my Dutch friends about my find the next day and they laughed, though.
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| Not that Piet Hein! |
Well, as it turns out, there were TWO Piet Heins in history. The one being celebrated in Amsterdam was actually a Dutch admiral and privateer during the era just before our ship, ironically best known for capturing a fleet of Spanish galleons full of silver. Not my math hero at all. (You can google both of them, interesting reading.) I’m reminded again that one country’s heroes, are another country’s pirates.
