‘ware the chipkaart

We had our first free day – with no lecture – in Amsterdam today, so folks were left to their own devices for entertainment and enlightenment.  Well, mostly. Sue organized a canal tour in the morning, so people just had to come up with a way to fill their afternoons.

The canal tour was lovely. I had taken a tour of Amsterdam’s many canals a week earlier, but the two experiences were completely different. Last week I went on a sunny Saturday, and the canals were jammed with people partying in their boats. We bumped a few people and canal walls, and the driver (captain?) had to take an unplanned route because the usual way was too congested. It actually turned out to be pretty interesting because he also turned off the recorded tour and told us what he knew about the areas we floated through. Today the weather was drizzly and cold, so the canals were considerably less crowded. The iSchool group filled one half of the boat, with Chinese tourists taking up the other half, so we listened to the tour in English and Chinese. The tour was interesting but uneventful (no bumper boats this time). Unfortunately, many of the most interesting things seemed to be on the Chinese side of the boat, so we didn’t get to see all of them as closely as we would have liked. Ah, well.

After the canal tour, I tagged along with Molly to the Hermitage Museum. The museum is a new addition to Amsterdam’s art scene, having opened in its current space in June 2009. Before that, the building was an actual hermitage, a home for many of Amsterdam’s poor, for more than 300 years. The current exhibition contains works of Matisse, Picasso and Kandinsky, along with the works of others from their respective art movements. I was absorbed in colors and lines for more than two hours before deciding to move on.

The next museum I visited was the Verzets Museum, which commemorates the lives of some of the people who were involved in the Dutch resistance during World War II. I came away from the museum both inspired and discouraged. Many of the individual stories of heroism were amazing, but Hitler still controlled the country for several years. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews were murdered during the German occupation of the Netherlands. At the end of the museum was a portion dedicated to the Dutch living in Indonesia during the war. It was interesting to me that the Dutch were deeply engaged in resisting German occupation at the same time their country was occupying Indonesia and committing injustices and brutalities against the people who lived there. A lot to think about there.

The last part of my day was the least enjoyable. Urg. The Netherlands uses a card with an embedded chip for people to pay for travel on public transit. People load money onto the card and tap it on a card reader to pay for trips on trams, trains, subways, etc. It’s all very practical and efficient – except when it’s not. During yesterday’s trip to Hilversum, the card reader didn’t register when I tapped my card at Centraal Station to leave Amsterdam. If you tap the card at one station without a corresponding destination, you’re charged the maximum fare for the type of trip you’re making. For trains, the maximum fare is €20. I didn’t realize my card hadn’t registered in Centraal, so I tapped my card at the reader in Hilversum. When I left Hilversum several hours later, I tapped the card at Hilversum and then again at Centraal when I got there. I thought everything had worked out correctly until I took a tram last night. When I got off, my balance read €2. I had been charged €40 for a roundtrip that should have been about €10. So after my museum-filled afternoon, I went to Centraal and talked to a super nice (and attractive – I think they’re all supermodels here) guy at the service desk. He explained to me that unfortunately, he could not refund any money directly to my chip card; refunds can only be deposited into Dutch bank accounts. I, alas, don’t have a Dutch bank account, so I begrudgingly added €30 to my card balance so I can keep using it for travel. There are several morals to this story, but the one I’ll keep closest to my heart for now is: Make sure you hear a beep when you tap your card.