Oh, what a successful day.

To begin with, Cora drops by for a pancake breakfast upstairs and brings me a CD of Nienke Laverman singing fado, the Portuguese version of flamenco. The twist here is that we have a Dutch woman singing this stuff in Frisian. Yes, a niche market.

And speaking of niches, the pancakes are made with Arrowhead Mills Buttermilk Pancake and Waffle Mix that I had brought over for Rina at her request. Well, see, some American tourists had brought a bag of the stuff with them and left the unconsumed portion behind. Rina had tried it out of curiosity and just loved it. It does make good pancakes, but the question I have is why in the world would somebody bring his own pancake mix to the Netherlands? Sure, I bring lots of food in, but the stuff I bring is all stuff that I want to feed the natives, and more importantly, stuff I don't think they can buy here. For example, the five different chile powders that I brought this time to make Texas chili with.

I mix some of these chile powders with powdered oregano and cumin and give them to Cora so she can make a batch of my chili for Johnny, and I also mention that if she continues to be nice to Rina, she may get one of the jars of Brussels sprouts that will be ready in a few days.

In the afternoon, I take a bus over to Noord Amsterdam to check out the Pelikaanbrug's big brother. Great fun although there are a couple of, well, encounters with bus drivers. In the first place, I know that several buses run over that bridge, so I can take any of them, assuming that it stops near the bridge. The first one of these that comes is a 36, and I simply ask the driver if he stops by the bridge over the Noord Hollands Kanaal on Lijndoornlaan because I want to go there and take photos of it and return.

Apparently I am the first person to make such a bizarre request, because he seems rather taken aback. Still, he more or less cheerfully stamps three strips on my strippenkaart, and sure enough, stops just this side of the bridge.

I swarm all around the bridge, taking pics both at grade level and down at canal level on both sides. And then ask a woman pushing a baby carriage along the canal the location of the closest bus stop going back to the Centraal Station. Afterwards, I realize that she might have directed me to the one that was just out of sight a few meters away at this end of the bridge if, instead of going on and on about the beauty of the bridge exclusively, I had thrown in just a word or two praising her baby.

As it is, she directs me back over the bridge a few hundred meters down the road, and as I approach the stop, I see that a bus is coming. I break into a run and manage to get into the stop as the bus rolls up. He doesn't slow, and I frantically wave at him. He grudgingly stops, and then chews me out when I board, which I don't understand and which flusters me enough that my Dutch gets even worse, but I think I effectively communicate that I am unfamiliar with Dutch bus protocols. Alas, my friends are not sure what I did wrong.

In the early evening, Rina takes me on a ride around the city on the Ring, pointing out some stunning architecture along the way. That and the amazing bridge they call "The Bra" because that's what it is shaped like. And then there we are down at the southwest corner of the city and it seems almost wrong not to drive just a few more kilometers down to find the Calatrava bridges, about which I'd been raving so much that I'd got Rina curious.

So we head toward Hoofddorp with the idea of cutting over to the bridges when we can see them. At some point below Hoofddorp I spot what I think is the "mast" for one bridge, but the first place that seems reasonable to cut over is marked as the exit for Nieuwe Vennep. So we take it and turn right at the canal that I just know in my heart is the one the bridges are over.

Rina is not so sure this is the right canal, so she pulls up where a couple of guys have stopped to access an ATM, and we bail out. Before we get up to the guys, Rina, with the exquisite chauvinism exhibited by city dwellers everywhere, articulates her fear (and mine) that these local yokels won't know anything about bridges by some weird Spaniard. So she leads the inquiry by telling the guys that I'd come from all the way from California specifically to see these bridges. Then I chime in that they are by the Spanish engineer Santiago Calatrava, and one of the guys just lights up with delight over our interest.

We city folks must remind ourselves that after they've finished milking the cows and digging up the potatoes, village people often learn to read and write, not to mention access the Internet and even, gasp, appreciate beauty and take pride in having it locally.

Turns out all three of the bridges are just straight ahead. The first is the big one. So big, in fact, that Rem Koolhaas made the somewhat snarky observation that it seemed a bit excessive to build a hundred meter bridge over a ten meter canal. Well, maybe he's right, considering that there's no flood plain, but it sure is a beautiful hundred meters.

Rina stops the car and we explore it, me snapping pics like mad even though Ivar has much better things posted. We also drive past the other two bridges, and I'm thinking that when I pick up my rental car on the first, I'll swing by these bridges "on the way" to Friesland.

Note: Better photographs of Calatrava's work can be found on the excellent website of José Miguel Hernández Hernández.

Did I mention that I'm feeling this compulsion to go to Friesland to see for myself whether God is as dead in Jorwerd as Geert Mak says He is? (In Hoe god verdween uit Jorwerd, translated into English as Jorwerd: the death of the village in late twentieth-century Europe). I'm renting a car because, if I remember correctly, there is no longer any bus service to Jorwerd. Well, yes, Greyhound discontinued service to Garrison, Texas over twenty years ago. That was my mother's village, and over my lifetime I watched it disintegrate in a process similar to Jorwerd's.

I cannot too strongly recommend this book. Here's a review.