Amersfoort

The skies parted. The radar promised three or four hours of rainless Sunday afternoon. Quick train ride to Amersfoort.

For all that Utrecht has going for it, Amersfoort has its own famous son, Piet Mondriaan. This cozy canal street is where he was born and apparently worked. Having started college life in architecture and almost worshipped Piet Mondriaan, this is practically hallowed ground for me.
 

The canals in Amersfoort are decorated with little bas-reliefs like this one, for no apparent reason except that they are pleasant to see. If there was a reason for this subject to be in this place, I couldn't divine it.
 

Every Dutch town has its central plaza, usually built around one of the oldest churches (not necessarily the largest), and Amersfoort is no exception--the Hof. It feels more spacious than most, reminding me of Brussels' Grand'Place (OK, Grote Markt in Dutch), except that Amersfoort's Hof is much plainer...but then you noticed some weirdnesses...I mean "distinguishing characteristics" of course...
 

It is not your eyes, or my camera. This building really is leaning. You see this in some of the very very old, narrow streets in the third and fourth arrondissements of Paris, where medieval taxes were based on coverage at the ground, and the tax-wise built homes that leaned over the streets. As though the streets weren't already claustrophobic or stagnant enough. But I hadn't noticed leaning walls in the Netherlands before this.
 

I wandered northward, for no other reason than it seemed interesting, and the light was wonderful. Near the edge of the city was this wall, which I suspected was the old city wall. I came closer, and...
 

...was rewarded by this bronze map. Compare a modern map of Amersfoort with this 1580 map, and you'll find precious little difference. In fact, I looked this map over from corner to corner and could easily trace where I had just walked, could see the canal bend near Piet Mondriaan's home, the Hof and its church (open place in the map's center), the city gate where I was standing at that moment, and the canal I had just walked along. That canal is over five hundred years old--not as old as in Utrecht (which was founded by Romans), but hey, I just moved from Orlando, where you hear things like: "My house is SO OLD, it was built in the seventies."
 

Along the canal just outside the city wall.
 

And I was on my return walk to Amersfoort's very large train station (it is a connection point for that part of the Netherlands), I had in fact made it almost to the Hof again, when I noticed one, then another, then very many street names. This is what I will probably remember of Amersfoort, or at least this first day in it...the wonder of some of its street names.

I have been here long enough now, and I have been surrounded by the Dutch language long enough (though I still don't much speak it), that even I could notice this:

't Zand
Langegracht
Lieve Vrouwekerkhof.

Whether this does anything for you I can't know. But these names strike me--yes, in Dutch--as wonderful, and after the same boring names that every Dutch town seems to suffer with--Ceintuurbaan, Kerkstraat, Brinklaan, Meentweg, Havenstraat (I'm falling asleep)--Amersfoort shows what a street name can be:

Zevenhuizen ("seven houses", and only 30 steps long)
Achter het Oude Stadhuis
Bollebruggang
Achter de Heilege Geest--"behind the Holy Ghost"--definitely wins the oddity prize

and my favorite of the whole lot...

Bloemendalse Binnenpoort--an impossibly lyrical name that probably defies translation, but the pieces lay out something like: "bloom-filled valley's inner door". I can't place literally what it could possibly mean...but that's part of its beauty, isn't it?

Of course, next to that is Elleboogkerk: "elbow church". And just when I was giving up on the Dutch language...

The weather has been odd. Some of our plants have taken to considering it spring already, budding here on the first of February. This seems to me a very poor strategy--there is a lot of winter and icy weather yet to go.
 

And many days yet of damaging gales, like the ones of last Thursday and Friday.