Bikes, Canals, and a Reindeer in Amsterdam, Then South to Basel

The Beurs van Berlage had a Christmas tree taller than the buildings crowding around it that morning, gold lights and red heart ornaments and a lit crown on top like the tree had been given a small coronation of its own. I stood under a stone archway across the square and looked at it for longer than a Christmas tree usually earns from me, mostly because the light at that hour was doing something no photograph of it ever quite manages to explain.

Dam Square held its usual crowd, trams cutting past the Peek and Cloppenburg building's old stone facade, Dutch and Swiss flags snapping over a corner that had clearly seen a lot of tourists ask a lot of questions. I let the canals do the rest of the morning's work, one of the quieter rings, houseboats moored two and three deep, bare trees doubled in water still enough to hold their whole reflection without breaking it once.

Bikes outnumbered pedestrians in a way no city so far on this trip had matched.

I spent a good part of the day simply staying out of their way while I looked at everything else, one cyclist crossing a herringbone brick bridge with a cheese shop bag swinging off the handlebars like that was the most ordinary errand in the world, which in this city it probably was. Nobody on a bike here seemed to be sightseeing. They had somewhere to be, and the fact that their route happened to cross four centuries of gabled architecture on the way there did not appear to register as remarkable to anyone but me.

By early evening I had circled back toward the water near Amsterdam Noord, the This Is Holland sign lit up against a dark building front, glass floors below it glowing blue and busy with people getting out of the cold. My last stop before the station was a shopping concourse with a life sized lit up reindeer standing over a golden sleigh, tinsel antlers and all, which felt like a strange final image to carry onto an overnight train, and also somehow the correct one.

The train south left at half past eight and did not arrive in Basel until twenty past six the next morning, another night spent choosing between sleep and the window, usually managing neither particularly well. Somewhere in the dark we crossed out of the Netherlands and into Germany and then, hours later, into Switzerland, three countries stitched together by nothing more than the sound of the tracks changing pitch under the wheels every so often. Basel would arrive with the sun barely up, cold, unfamiliar, another city waiting to be walked rather than toured.