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.