Amsterdam
Earlier, I mentioned that Amsterdam was my least favorite part of our trip. I already kind of regret saying that. But, here is a bit of a rundown.
What I didn’t like about Amsterdam:
Streets: I found it really hard to navigate. The “plan” for the city felt kind of haphazard to me. Among other things, it took quite a while for me to decipher the difference between a sidewalk/walking area, a bike lane, and a street. I remember walking out of the main train station and thinking, “Whoa! What is going on out here?”
This is both a sidewalk and a trolley car route.
Bikes: I love bicycles and cycling more than most, but the city is completely overwhelmed with people trying to get around on bikes, many of them (like me) without much knowledge of how the city “works,” so it feels really chaotic. There are bikes everywhere. I love this in the abstract; I would love to see more bikes used as a method of transportation here in the US, but throw a few thousand extra tourists into the mix, all of whom also want to ride a bike around your famously-bike-friendly city and it gets a little less wonderful. I can’t actually put my finger on exactly why I disliked the bikes in Amsterdam, save the feeling that I was kind of lost a lot of the time, and people zooming by on bikes all the time didn’t really help.1 In the end, I guess this is really the same complaint at the first: everything just felt really chaotic.
My beautiful wife, riding a bike in Vondelpark.
Marijuana: Cannabis has been legal in California, for both medicinal and recreational purposes, for some time now. I am not bothered by this at all. I would actually like to see some other “illicit” products made legal under at least some circumstances. What bugged me about the pot in Amsterdam is how ubiquitous it seemed to be. Put bluntly, the entire city just reeks of pot. I know that easy access to all sorts of usually-illegal stuff is part of Amsterdam’s “brand,” but I found the pot levels to be kind of over the top. Mostly, I think what bugged me is knowing that it’s not actual native Netherlanders in those shops doing all of the toking; mostly, it’s stupid American 20-somethings “exploring their horizons.” It seemed kind too “on the nose” for me, I guess.
The “Red Light District”: This is the same complaint as the one about pot. It’s not even really “a thing,” save that it’s there to put on a façade for tourists. I suppose San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury is kind of like this. Also, West Hollywood and the New Orleans’s French Quarter.
In hindsight, I would like to give The Netherlands another shot. I didn’t get to visit any other part of the country. My entire experience with the country was in its most (in)famous city and the tiny bit of the rest of the country I could see on the train ride from Brussels to Amsterdam. One Dutch woman I know saws that Amsterdam is her least favorite place to visit, and I think I can see why. Honestly, though, by the next morning, I was already feeling better about Amsterdam, so I wonder if I would have totally loved it after a week. At the very least, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht all deserve at least some attention.
The fact is, the longer we were in Amsterdam, the less it bothered me. Once we got ourselves some bikes and went for a ride through town and through the park, it was more fun. Once I wrapped my head around the street/bike path/trolley track/sidewalk situation, I felt better about all of it.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more I am re-thinking my feelings about the Netherlands. It’s a nice country with this weird, quirky, almost comically clichéd town as its largest city. Imagine if Memphis was the only thing you saw from the US and you judged everything about the country based on that city … you’d definitely have a skewed view of what “America” is like.
My beautiful wife in front of Rijksmuseum.
In hopes of going back to Europe on a longer-term basis someday, I’ve been trying to learn to speak Dutch over the past nine months. I am really liking it. As I mentioned before, I am semi-seriously looking at moving to Belgium someday; half the country speaks Dutch.2 Obviously, learning to speak Dutch, no matter the reason, means I should go back to the Netherlands and give it all another try. I am already starting to make some plans … assuming the world goes back to something resembling normal someday.
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Once I rented a bike myself, things got better, actually. Thus, I suppose my dissatisfaction with the bikes in Amsterdam was not the bikes themselves, but with trying to get around not on a bike (i.e. walking) with so many other people on bikes (many of them halfway lost.) ↩︎
Technically, they speak a dialect called Flemish. It’s still “Dutch,” but has its own quirks … probably like the difference between the English they speak in Scotland vs. the Southern US. The other half speaks French. ↩︎