Category: Family History

The most watery place I have been is The Netherlands. I visited one of my daughters there when she was studying at the University of Amsterdam for a semester. I took another daughter with me, and we stayed  for about a week. 

The city is built around a system of canals and is named for the dam that originally drained the land. The first canals were built for water management and defense in the middle ages, and the system was expanded in the 17th century to accommodate the exploding world trade that centered in Amsterdam. You can go almost everywhere in the city by boat.

So much water. Managed and moved and channeled so the land could be farmed, built on and lived on. The Dutch say, “God made the Dutch, and the Dutch made Holland.”

I knew this was probably a true statement about Dutchness, because my Dutch grandparents, my mother’s parents, impressed on me from an early age that, “If you aren’t Dutch, you aren’t much.” My grandfather’s parents were both born in Holland. I connect with that heritage in my love of tulips, windmill cookies and Delft pottery, but I didn’t think too much about finding connections on this trip to The Netherlands

We took a canal tour to learn the history and experience the waterways, but most of our time was spent on bikes. Amsterdam is as well known for it’s bikes as it is for it’s water, I think. Everyone cycles; there are cars on the road, but they navigate around the bikes. The roads for bikes are fast-moving two way streets, with cars on a separate part of the road.

We rented bikes for the time we were there, and my daughter insisted that we rent them from one of the less touristy places so that it wasn’t so obvious that we didn’t belong. She had her own bike,  a used one that she purchased at the outdoor market, and it fit her small frame perfectly. Her little Gazelle. She wanted to bring it home with her when her semester was over, but ended up selling it to another student.

We rode our bikes everywhere: to museums, parks, restaurants, a brewery in an old windmill, over bridges, along canals, night and day. Biking is my favorite memory of that trip. When we went to the grocery store, of course we biked, and the trip home with bags and baskets laden with food, drinks and stroopwafels was a test of our balancing skills.

We saw people on bikes carrying everything. Children–from babies to school age–sat in what resembled a little boat on the front of the bike, or lined up on a long bench seat in the back. Business people flew by in suits or skirts, their briefcases and computers loaded into baskets or colorful bags that fit over the rack on the back. I saw someone pump past my with a washing machine balanced in the front cargo section of his bike. No one wears helmets, not even the kids. I never saw any crashes, perhaps because Amsterdammers make good use of their bells to let you know to move out of the way.

One night we scoured internet reviews to choose a place that had a high “lekker” ranking (the Dutch equivalent of Yelp reviews) to go for dinner. We had to follow the map there, because we didn’t have cellular data on our phones, which meant lots of wrong turns and stopping to regroup. We wandered around a residential neighborhood for a while until we found the little local place we were looking for.

Although it seems that everyone in Amsterdam speaks English, this little place did business mostly in Dutch, so we had to rely on the bits of the language my daughter had picked up in her time there. I had a very friendly but hard to understand conversation with a local while we were waiting for a seat. He was talking to me about asparagus, which was one of the specials that day.

When we were seated, the server brought us a dish of asparagus, compliments of the friendly man. When I saw it, I was surprised to identify another thing that had come to me from my Dutch ancestors: creamed asparagus, a dish I grew up with and make for my family, but that I never thought about as cultural food.

Asparagus isn’t a topic that comes up much in conversation, but when I do happen to be discussing recipes for the spring vegetable, I’ve never met anyone who cuts it into pieces, cooks it in water, makes a green cream sauce and serves it over toast like we have always done. They do in Amsterdam. It felt like a revelation. A piece of my puzzle fell into place, one that I didn’t know needed a place.

Amsterdam is watery and California is dry; they speak Dutch and I speak English; they ride bikes and I drive everywhere; but we both make creamed asparagus. I am grateful to the Dutch gentleman who helped me make that connection.