Making sense of Amsterdam

I’ve borrowed from the master storyteller before. Once again, he steps in to kickstart this piece: 

“Prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out the window, teasing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up…”

—Charles Dickens

 Ideas for a travel blog swirl chaotically for days, waiting for some sense of order to appear. This might be prompted by a chance encounter on the street. Or something I’ve read. Or an opening line may even spontaneously step forward, after which those swirling ideas obediently form an orderly queue and the blog writes itself, more or less.

But not this time. No lightbulb moment. Not yet.

Not the overnight ferry. Rather, the view from our barge home

We're aboard an overnight ferry to England  as I write this (which is probably why the orderly queue metaphor popped up, some sort of stiff-upper-lip antidote to the orderly chaos of Amsterdam street life). Inspiration has failed me so I'm unleashing my inner English teacher upon you, dear reader. An inspired lesson plan for a hot afternoon was to take the class to an interesting setting and ask them to engage with their senses. What can you hear? See? Smell? You get the idea. So here it is, a sensory tour of our recent week  in Amsterdam, where the cyclist is king.

For starters, this city is a visual symphony.  Colours bleed from bridges, from painted doorways, from the flower markets, from the marvellous works in the Van Gogh Museum, and from stylishly dressed locals. Amsterdam is so colourful, in fact, that tourists constantly put their lives in danger. Ooh, look at that view over the canal! I'll just step off the footpath and take a pic… Remember, bikes rule. Trams are next in the pecking order while car drivers know their place. Tourists are easily recognisable as the camera-toting chumps standing in the cycle lane. (Tourist tip #1: Do NOT step off the footpath without first looking left.)

 There's also the visual trickery involved in existing on land that is below sea level. We explored the countryside as well as the city, cycling many kilometres along canal paths and through nature reserves. It was disconcerting, at first, to observe that the fast-flowing body of water on your left was some metres higher than the polders (drained fields) to your right. Dykes, canals, drainage channels, locks and lifting bridges – all are testament to the ingenuity of the ancient engineers who conjured land from water. Schipol airport lies in a hollow four metres below sea level. Just amazing.

No flat whites here!

The nose should be on high alert in Amsterdam. A sort of watery dankness permeated our barge apartment, not surprising when you consider the intricacies of plumbing above and below the waterline.  Good coffee is also a thing in this city. Olfactory heaven right there. But wait. It is really important to know the difference between a café and a . . . coffeeshop. The latter tends to boast a garishly painted frontage but with a gloomy interior. Tourist tip #2: Do NOT ask for a flat white in a coffee shop. If your nose has been paying attention, you will understand why. 

Actually, there is something rather pleasing about wandering the streets of a city where it is okay to smoke weed in public. I confess I found myself sniffing the air appreciatively more than once. It certainly beats the acrid reek of tobacco smoke. In fact, unlike Bill Clinton, I may have inhaled more this week than in my twenties. (Which was only once. Honestly.) If I had wanted to take things further, I could have jumped on a Smoke Boat for a hazy canal tour. Or bought a packet of marijuana cookies, even. 

Found one or two of these

How's that for a neat segue into the next sense, taste? Could Mr Dickens do better? I have to admit that we are not really foodie tourists. Staying in self-contained accommodation means cooking for ourselves, so many of the culinary delights of Amsterdam were wasted on this kiwi couple. But that's not to say we didn't sample the key ingredients, Heineken, cheeses and salamis, and Dutch almond cakes. . .

There's a limit to how far I can take this sensory expedition so let's finish with the sounds of Amsterdam.

The Dutch National Youth Orchestra delighted us with their polished performance in the ornate 19th century Concertgebouw. Earlier in the week, we were entertained by four hugely talented and sartorially sharp clarinettists (the New Amsterdam Clarinet Quartet) in a free open-air concert in the Vondelpark. Mr Heineken was there too. Perfect!

The shoes!

Like many a European metropolis, the sounds  of Amsterdam include sonorous and stately church bells, urgent sirens and insistent tram bells. Add in bicycle bells (to get unthinking tourists out of cycle lanes) and the whoop-whoop heralding the raising of a bridge and there you have it, the soundtrack to the busyness and vibrancy that is Amsterdam.

Bike assembly on the barge

FOOTNOTE: The Dutch sense of self-deprecating humour is alive and kicking. Here's a brilliant YouTube video from the early days of the Trump presidency, America first, the Netherlands second

https://youtu.be/ELD2AwFN9Nc

But wait, there's more!

My number one follower, aka Tour Leader, spends many hours thinking 'big picture' thoughts. When he suggested I might like to include some of his ideas in my blog, I suggested he might like to write his own. Here it is.

Anarchy on Bikes

In Amsterdam there are more cycles than people. A good number of those cycles are on the bike pathways. Bike traffic is different to car traffic. In cities, cars have to follow each other because they take up too much space and there are too many of them on the road. It is a very regimented procession. Cycles are different. There is more freedom to express your individuality. They are travelling at different speeds. There is risk taking that never seems have any consequences. There are family groups, often with the youngsters on the same cycle as a parent. These groups behave very responsibly. Traffic rules exist but they can be broken if it's more sensible to do so. Only cyclists can break the rules. There is anarchy but every one seems to get to their destination safely.

That anarchy can exist only because the dedicated bike paths exist. There must have been bureaucrats in their offices carefully planning separation of bikes from pedestrians and motorised transport. They also decided to lay all the bike paths in red bitumen and even continue those bike paths around roundabouts. Parked cars cannot interfere with bikes. All of this planning and construction of the necessary infrastructure was done by a public body.

Amsterdam has a fascinating history. It was a centre for trade for hundreds of years. The stock exchange was invented there. Market driven economics has been an important part of their history and culture. So has public enterprise. Building dykes and canals and pumping water needed enterprise on a scale that large public entities could achieve. A culture of private enterprise and public endeavour complementing each other is evident. It has also been a very liberal culture. All religions, ethnicities, and gender orientations are accepted. It's illegal to do otherwise. There are more important things to worry about than smoking cannabis or riding your bike through a red light.

Capitalism is based on individualism. The motor car gained its ascendancy because you can go from your own home to wherever. Maybe raw capitalism is showing its flaws in the same way that reliance on the motor car is proving to be problematic. Traffic jams never seem to happen with cycles. Amsterdam moves a lot of people on bikes and trams. A lot of the cyclists are having fun as well. Maybe it's the individualism of cycling without the frustration of traffic.

There are people rediscovering what socialism means. Maybe it isn't a dirty word that can't be taken seriously. Sometimes the best solutions don't come about because the market moved blindly to create them. Sometimes it might involve what people want, bureaucracies and planning. Amsterdam is a great example. They clearly have a love affair with the humble bicycle, they have created a great infrastructure for it, and it works.

- Bruce