TRAIN TO HAARLEM, NETHERLANDS
Elke drove us to the Celle train station at 7:30 a.m. where we caught the train to Hannover and then changed trains for the ICE fast train to Amsterdam and Haarlem, arriving at about 2:30 p.m. in the afternoon.
For about half the ride we sat in the dining car with its huge windows and inexpensive food. The dining car was almost empty so we could sit there for two hours, having lunch and drinking coffee. There is something so luxurious and special about sitting in a hundred mile an hour smoothly gliding train with the German, and then the Dutch countryside, sliding by.
As soon as we crossed the border the shape of the houses changed. The German red tiled houses all have a peaked roof, but many of the Dutch houses have an odd shaped scalloped roof facade, flat on top. In the last few years as I’ve been to country after country I’ve been continually struck by how each culture has developed a different shape of house with almost every house in each country shaped the same but so different from other countries. I don’t see any practical reason for this difference. Just as cultures grow apart, each transitioning to another language, so the house shapes must slowly grow apart. But the result is that the materials, including the standardized materials such as 2×4’s, become different in each culture so that it must be hard to build a Greek House with its material requirements in the USA, or a Dutch house in Greece. We get locked into our separate ways of speaking and separate ways of building.
In Haarlem itself along the many canals many of the houses have the triangle serrated roofs that I see in Vermeer paintings. There is a sense of permanence and continuity here. When we return to the United States houses look flimsy, a combination of slim two by fours, that look as if the slightest breeze will blow them away, as often happens when a tornado hits, leaving a pile of sticks. German and Dutch houses look solid, as if they would last centuries, unperturbed by any weather.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 