Rick Follow Up

This was nice to see: a real Dutchman commenting on Rick Santorum's vacuous comments on Dutch health care.

Westerpark

Amsterdam is not an especially large city, but I have yet to go to explore several parts of it. I decided to go to the Westerpark area, which is about three miles northeast of me. It is on the other side of the Center, and on the opposite side of Amsterdam from my office.

View Larger Map

This is approximately the route.

The trip took me through the Center and, specifically the Jordaan, a very nice area of Amsterdam. It contains shops that sell pretty things like flowers.

There was a small park with a basketball court, a skateboarding/bmx area, and playground equipment for children. It was apparently warm enough for the teenagers playing basketball to wear short sleeves. Despite their clothes, they played a real game.

A warning for "DNA Spray."
The area adjacent to the "park" part of Westerpark contained several brick facade buildings with cafes and shops inside.


Westerpark is close to Central Station, and the park is bordered by rail lines to the north. The train on the top is headed toward Central Station; the train on the bottom just departed.


There were several sculptures in and around the park.






The park itself - meaning the area of grass and lakes and walking paths - was smaller than the other parks I've visited in Amsterdam. But it had many of the hallmarks of Amsterdam parks. There were middle aged men drinking beer out of large cans and smoking on benches. There were women walking with their children, or pushing their children in strollers. There were plenty of dogs, and lots of birds, including geese and cranes. There were young people being affectionate, and tourists riding around on their rental bikes.




And the ride home gave me the opportunity for an obligatory canal pic.

Youth in the Nederlands

Rick Santorum paints a rather bleak picture of healthcare in the Netherlands.

Admittedly, I do not have much experience with going to hospitals here or being an old person. But my Dutch colleagues find this to be laughably (like, literally) misinformed.

What I can take (from Wikipedia) is that the Netherlands is 16th in life expectancy (79.8) and the U.S. is 36th (78.3), the Netherlands has the 27th lowest infant mortality in the world (4.73 deaths per 1000 births) and the U.S. has 46th (6.26), and the Netherlands has an obesity rate of 12% whereas the U.S. has a rate of 34%. So perhaps U.S. politicians might look to the Netherlands for manners to improve health care in the U.S. rather than create bleak pictures of involuntary euthanasia.

Thaw

After the two week spell of unusually cold weather, winter seems to be taking its last breaths for this season. I rode my bike through a few rain/snow showers this afternoon, but the ice in the canals has melted entirely, and most of the ice in the shallower park lakes was gone. Though there were some thin sheets of ice - and, for lack of a better term, pond scum - where birds walked, presumably looking for food. Or maybe getting out of the cold water.

The air temperature was still low, but joggers, cyclists, and families were out enjoying the sunlight in the Vondelpark, along with musicians. The music was good, and some of it was quite moving:

Note that this canal (below) is where I was walking with hundreds of others on the ice one week ago:

I'm not sure what these were about. There have been demonstrations over the past few months - perhaps they funded a flashing sign on a rooftop near the Rijks Museum:

The temperature and the lack of leaves might not say spring. But the sunlight and a feeling in the air did.

Ice

A cold snap has walloped Europe from the North Sea to the Mediterranean over the past two weeks. Hundreds of people have died from the cold in Central Europe, enough that the homeless shelters in Poland decided to temporarily abandon their policy of not allowing alcohol in the shelters (apparently many homeless alcoholics were choosing to die from exposure to the elements rather than give up their vodka). Areas of the continent that rarely freeze or see snow have been unprepared for the weather, and it's been causing some problems.

Beyond delaying some trains, I'm not aware of the cold and the small amount of snow we've had doing much damage in the Netherlands. In fact, the cold produced a buzz of excitement across the country at the prospect of the Elfstedentocht, a 200km ice skating race on rivers around 11 small towns in the Dutch countryside. The freeze has not been deep enough for the Elfstedentocht since 1997, and large parts of the news have been redirected from covering the European debt crisis to examining the thickness of ice in the countryside.

Sadly, the ice never reached critical thickness, and, with temperatures approaching the normal range (highs in the low 40's) next week, it looks like another year will pass with no Elfstedentocht. But some of the Amsterdam canals, which are not as deep or thick as the rivers in the countryside, have frozen sufficiently for skating and walking. Today was sunny, but perhaps the coldest day in Amsterdam yet (high about 26 degrees), and families and tourists hit the canals.

The sight of so many people walking and skating on what is normally deep wide waters in the middle of the city was surreal.


Apparently bikes are sometimes thrown in the canals by drunk people at night. Not sure if people threw these out of habit, of if they were placed here strategically.


Not all of the canals were sufficiently frozen for walking. Some simply had large chunks of ice floating on the surface. This is the Kaisersgracht.



I climbed down into the canals and saw the apartments, cafes, and churches from four feet lower than normal.











Families had open fires for warmth and large containers of coffee and hot chocolate. They walked their dogs on the snow and ice, and they pulled their children on sleds and pushed them in strollers. Many walked around with cameras and camcorders, knowing that this was something that doesn't happen very often.