I Amsterdam

Having left my apartment in Perth at 12pm on a Tuesday and not arriving at my room in Paris until 10pm local time Thursday night, I calculate 64 hours of door-to-door travel. I flew from Perth to Sydney, where I spent the night; Sydney to Seoul, where I spent another night; and finally Seoul to Sydney. The worst part of it all? Not a single lousy mile of the 6 million mile trip counted towards my Delta Skymiles account. I flew Korean Airlines which is part of the same Sky Team Alliance as Delta, Air France, KLM, etc. So if you fly Korean Airlines, you rack up miles as if you were flying Delta. Simple as that. But because of “the class of ticket,” or “price of purchase” or “designated route” or “blah blah blah” this trip “isn’t eligible to transfer miles to my Delta account.” Whatever, alliance my @$$.

The second worst part of it all? Realizing that despite how great of an actor Liam Neeson is, he has been in some really really horrendous movies. Liam Neeson goes from class-A performances in movies like Schindler’s List and Batman Begins to put me out of my misery flicks like Taken or, as I regrettably watched from Seoul to Paris, Chloe which is basically a bastardized imitation of Unfaithful. Chloe is now up there with The Perfect Storm as movies where I just want to get two hours of my life back.

I arrived in Paris on a Thursday night and by Saturday afternoon I was driving through the Belgian countryside en route to the Netherlands. I never made it to Amsterdam during my study abroad semester in college or my 3 months working in Germany around this time last year. In restrospect, I am glad that I missed it on both occasions and can now “do it right” being based out of here for approximately the next three months. Despite its small size which I was unbeknownst to before (only 800,000 people) I consider Amsterdam one of THE premier Western European cities. The Netherlands itself is a very big small country which carries a large weight in the world.

It could be the Perth effect of just coming from the most isolated in the world, but this city is teeming with energy and packed with life. Amsterdam integrates various parts of different cities into one compact cluster, and I am still struggling to find the proper analysis for it after one week here. Its brownstone houses remind me of Boston; its alley-thin central city streets lined with H&M and Mango have a distinct Barcelona feel; the intersecting tram lines converging on the main plaza come off as very German; and of course, the anything goes tolerance of certain neighborhoods is something I have only previously come across in Asia. But the combination of everything is uniquely Amsterdam.

Very first impression: Amsterdam is a friggin wacky, mind-twisting alternate reality in which pedestrians, an army of bike riders, trams, and cars peacefully and harmoniously coexist. The Netherlands has more bike paths than the US and Canada COMBINED. That is a fact. Anyone who has been to Amsterdam would be a fool to dispute it. To get from one side of the street to the other you make your way past the pedestrians, look both ways through the super highway bike lane, watch out for cars in the street, and then dodge slow moving trams. That just gets you to the median and you then cross over the equivalent lanes on the other side of the street. Driving through Amsterdam’s thin roads you will find yourself tightly packed between a flurry of bikers on your right and tram cars on the left, and when crossing through one of the city’s many roundabouts your blood level rises trying to figure out just who exactly has the right of way. The harmony and volume in which all forms of transport intermingle on one street corner is just mind boggling. I cannot exaggerate the biking enough. Everyone, everyone, everyone in all shapes, sizes, colors, and age has a bike. There are multi-tiered parking garage structures for just bikes which has them stacked up by the thousands. I believe 1 million bikes can be found in a city of just 800,000 people. Every year 25,000 bikes get pulled from Amsterdam’s plethora of canals. No one wears a helmet and every bike looks the same.

I am very intrigued by the Dutch. For such a small country they pack a huge punch in the chapters of history. New York City – New Amsterdam – was of course first settled by the Dutch and in fact last year marked the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s arrival (Hudson was English, but sailed for the Netherlands). Common knowledge for sure, but do you know how New York got the nickname “the Big Apple?” According to a Dutch phrase, if you come out on top in a one-for-one trade, you have gained an egg from an apple. The Netherlands struck a deal with England during one of Europe’s 17^th century continental wars in which the Dutch traded their New Amsterdam colony for England’s territory of Suriname, just north of Brazil. Suriname, rich in sugar and a potential commodity cash cow, was the egg that the Netherlands got in exchange for the apple of a small, deserted island on the banks of the Hudson River. The English aptly changed the name of New Amsterdam to New York. Whoops….

As I often reflected about Portugal when living in Brazil, the Dutch once ruled the world. They were a naval power which dominated the trading route from Europe to Asia. During the Netherlands’ Golden Age of the 16^th century, Amsterdam was the most powerful cities in the world – built almost single handedly on the success of the Dutch East India Company, the world’s first public, multinational corporation.

There is a saying that God made the world but the Dutch built Amsterdam. The whole of the Netherlands is flat as a board and Amsterdam itself is built on ugly, harsh swampland with its highest point a whopping 1.5 meters above sea level. But through innovative engineering to reclaim land from the North Sea and an array of canals (more than Venice), the Dutch built a European powerhouse metropolis out of otherwise inhospitable land. The result is a very unique and mesmerizing urban landscape. Intuitively, Amsterdam is an easy place to figure out. The cobbled streets and murky canals are essentially concentric half loops revolving around the main train station in the north of the city. Being built on weak and wobbly foundations, side leaning houses and crooked buildings are common sites. By city ordinance, no building can be more than 5 stories high. Land is very valuable because of how scarce it is, so property taxes are calculated based on width. Naturally, this encourages tall, narrow, thin buildings with spirally staircases. Interestingly, windows on the upper floors tend to be very large in order to rope up furniture rather than the headache of transporting it up and down the stairs.

The Dutch are the tallest nationality on average in the world. Men are 5’11’’ on average, women 5’6’’. Yay for me! The Dutch are known for being among the most attractive people in the world (according to Lonely Planet) and for their forthright, brutally honest, and blunt sense of delivery. Don’t ask a Dutch person “do I look fat in this” and expect a modest answer, in other words.

Perhaps the most impressive and intriguing aspect that I have been most smitten by is that the Netherlands is a fluent, but not native English speaking culture. I know from experience that most Germans speak English and you can easily get around Paris playing the odds that enough people speak English. But this is a whole other ballgame. A Dutch person will greet you in Dutch but upon the slightest sign that you don’t speak the language, without pause, with no annoyance, and with astonishing ease he/she will switch to perfect English as cool as the other side of the pillow. The grammatical precision and fluency is astounding for a country and culture that has never been colonized by an English speaking nation. And whereas most countries consider it a burden to switch from their language to your English (rightfully so) the Dutch embrace it with a smile and a “how can I help you?”

That brings us to the theme of tolerance, also very typical Dutch. From what my walking tour guide told me, the Netherlands has had two traumatic historical experiences that have emboldened its psyche of liberalism and tolerance. First was the founding of the present day Netherlands itself. In the 1500s the Netherlands was ruled by Charles II of Spain, a staunch Catholic, who went on a relentless purge of non-Catholics in the Netherlands. Once they broke from Spain the Netherlands vowed to establish a tolerant country open to all religious practices. Fast-forward to WWII when Amsterdam, once a thriving metropolis home to more than 150,000 Jews, saw its Jewish population depleted to just 5,000 by the end of the war. Both prompted a lot of internalizing about the type of open and accepting culture the Netherlands wants to be.

Do those events directly explain why hundreds of legal marijuana-selling coffeeshops populate the city and half naked women dance in Red Light District windows soliciting themselves for 15 minutes or best offer? Probably not. Do they contribute in a way to the liberal and tolerant attitude of the city? I think so. The main theme that my tour guide promoted on our excursion was that there are three things to guarantee your success and assimilation into Amsterdam: be discreet, be good for business, and don’t hurt anyone. Add a bike into the mix and you're golden.

Since you've been gone

Well, well, well…where to begin? The travel winds have swirled yet again and this time I’ve ridden the gales back to the “old world,” back in time so to speak where it’s only a +6 hour time difference between me and majority of my modest readership. Greetings from Amsterdam! Almost six months to the day from when I first touched ground in Australia, I hopped on a jet plane and made a long trek from Perth to Paris with one night layovers each in Sydney and Seoul. I’ll get to Amsterdam in a bit because, as you can imagine, it’s a roller coaster of a place in its own right.

Departure day from Australia closed a very big chapter in the travel book that has been written over the past, say, 2-3 years. A nearly 6 month stint in Oz, made it my longest consecutive stay in any foreign country where I have ever lived. Through my one-on-one conversations with anyone reading this, it’s no secret that I wasn’t in love with Australia – Perth in particular. For me, both Australia’s virtue and vice was its similarity to the US. Same language of course which admittedly served as a guilty pleasure never having to preface a conversation with some version of “sorry, I don’t speak xxx;” same ease and accessibility of things because of efficient infrastructure (as opposed to Asia let’s say); and the same high quality of life which in itself provided less of a “wow factor” during my time there. All of the similarities perhaps explain why my entries were so few and far between in Australia – not so many culturally new things to write about I guess. The comfort and ease in which I was able to operate in Australia was certainly the virtue. But a big perk of my job is the chance to live in the obscure, different places. So Australia failed to live up to that respect.

However, professionally, I am very pleased with how the Oz experience turned out. I found the report that we were working on – the country’s upstream petroleum industry – super interesting. And as difficult as it was at times to understand, I really enjoyed riding the learning curve of the energy sector which included up close and personal conversations with industry folks such as the CEOs of Shell and INPEX in Australia, and the governor of Western Australia – Australia’s predominant energy state. Energy is definitely an industry that I am keen on getting more into in the future.

This has never been a blog about work, so I will end the work talk here. But it’s all to say that despite the personal boredom I often felt living in the world’s most isolated city, Perth and Australia as a whole had their fair share of great experiences. With the luxury of six months behind my back, I can now safely say that getting lost in the woods outside of Sydney (subject of a previous blog post) was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. I mean, shouting “help” into the barren wilderness so as to avoid sleeping on the dirt amongst God knows what types of snakes and spiders is quite the rush. I hit the open road for a fruitful trek up the Western Australian coast treating myself to stunning landscapes and scenery. I met some great people along the way, both local Aussies and expats whose travel paths I crossed. And I even conquered the tyrannies of distance for one week by taking a vacation to the Philippines and spending quality time with dear friends and family.

Australia is a tough place to “do” in six months, while working. There’s just so much to see and do. You can spend an entire year in the country enjoying all that it has to offer. At an initial glance it might look ludicrous that I never made it to the Great Barrier Reef or didn’t trek through the deserts in the central heartlands. Let’s just say that they’re high on my list of things to do when I do make it back to Oz and have more free time on my agenda for just the travel aspect. My job is interesting in that I am in an ambiguous state between “traveling” and “living” abroad. Too long in one set place to be just traveling, too short to be able to say I am living, this tension created a love-hate relationship between me and Australia. I loved having so many outdoor and adventurous trips to think of, but hated ultimately being dragged back to the infeasibility of squeezing cross country trips into just one weekend while budgeting $5 half gallons of milk and $2 per pound of apples into my weekly expenses. Australia has no shortage of fun and exciting things to do hence why I fully plan on dedicating one long strictly travel related trip to it sometime in the future. Until then, I leave Oz where it is, full of positive memories, and look forward to the new opportunities that await in the Netherlands.