Amsterdam - Go Dutch!

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As our plane swayed and bumped in the early morning sky somewhere over Germany, I couldn’t help but think, “Amsterdam better be good.” And as we smashed on to the runway in perhaps the worst landing I’ve ever experienced, I thanked whatever being kept our seemingly drunk pilot from doing us all in and thought, “Really good!” If I were going to die for a city, I better be getting something more than wooden shoes, windmills, tulips, and stoned tourists. Fortunately, the last city on my European adventure ended up being one of my favorites, the definition of Old World charm and cosmopolitan self-confidence.

Amsterdam is a city unlike any other I have ever been to and perhaps the most inviting I have ever encountered. The warm Dutch people, friendly liberal politics, and beautiful tulip-covered landscapes made me think on dozens of occasions, “I could easily move here tomorrow and be happy!” There is something immensely inviting about Amsterdam. Lacking the winding medieval streets and castles of Prague, Vienna, and Budapest, Amsterdam does not feel like a fairy tale village. Instead, the city is a fully livable modern environment that manages to retain much of its seventeenth-century flavor through the brick houses which line every canal.

We started off our trip the way we unfortunately started way too many of our weekend excursions: with a McDonald’s breakfast. Globalizing American pigs in action - and proud of it! After a hearty 8 a.m. Big Mac, we went to our first coffee shop - the dimly lit Dutch institutions serving the eponymous coffee and the much-less-eponymous marijuana. Sold under the table, the marijuana is supposedly illegal but tolerated. I should start my Netherlands blog by saying that I still have not smoked pot and I don’t plan to… not that dozens of joints did not pass under my nose throughout the weekend. Try not to judge me for my nerdy, holier-than-thou convictions, just not something I’m aching to do.

After our first quintessentially Dutch experience, we followed it up quickly with another - getting hit by a bike. With hundreds of thousands of bikes whizzing by and darting between pedestrians on every street, it was a wonder that we lasted even a few hours before one of us, my unlucky friend Jenn, was knocked to the ground. Next, we embarked on a much-needed munchy tour. One of the ubiquitous sites in Amsterdam is the frites stand, street vendors selling tasty and extra-potatoey French fries sold in paper cones with dozens of condiment choices - mayonnaise, ketchup, curry sauce, spicy Indonesian chili sauce. Delicious!

It was at this point in the trip that we split into two groups - those who wanted to indulge in the cultural highlights of Amsterdam and those who wanted to… indulge in the cultural highlights. Emerging from a smoky coffee shop, my friend and I headed to the Rijksmuseum, the greatest art museum in the Netherlands. The museum is currently under renovation, so only its “greatest hits” are being shown, including elaborate seventeenth-century doll houses, landscapes of Dutch colonies in India and Indonesia, and various works by Rembrandt and Vermeer. After the sometimes ostentatious Baroque art in the Uffizi and other European galleries, Dutch art is markedly more restrained, often featuring pale figures clad all in black sitting or standing in a stationary pose. It is hard to imagine that this could give way to the Red Light District and the liberal party spirit associated with modern Amsterdam.

Behind the museum complex is an area known as Vondelpark, a park filled with trees and ponds. The surrounding neighborhood of quieter streets and niche boutiques is reminiscent of Greenwich Village. Jordaan, the next neighborhood, used to be the working-class part of town, but you would never know. Like so many “former working-class neighborhoods” in New York and other American cities, the areas have been fully gentrified and perhaps tamed. We ate Indonesian food - chicken satay with peanut sauce and fried rice - for lunch. Like so many European cities, the ethnic food scene is dominated by the cuisine of former colonies - this amounts to a lot of Indonesian, Surinamese, and Indian food.

Our next stop was Amsterdam’s trippiest and perhaps most popular tourist destination: the Van Gogh Museum. No other museum I have ever been to has incorporated the experimental modernism of the artist’s work into the architecture and execution of the museum itself. This does not bode well for those tourists who attempt to navigate the galleries high or freaking out on hallucinogenic “magic” mushrooms. When you enter the central atrium, a huge space surrounded by three floors of Van Gogh’s paintings, you are immediately faced with a totally blue room with couches and chairs. Unwitting visitors sit amidst the blue, many unaware that they are part of a giant contemporary art exhibit being projected on to the wall behind them. The floors and couches are a blue screen system, and the guests are placed inside Van Gogh’s paintings. I would not want to be a person on a hallucinogen seeing myself on the wall surrounded by haystacks or sunflowers. Scary thought… but maybe they deserve it just a little.

The Van Gogh paintings are truly beautiful and seeing them in person feels like a necessity, as the texture of the actual brushstrokes is almost as important as the image itself. Many of the most famous works were there, including “The Bedroom,” “The Potato Eaters,” and numerous still lifes featuring sunflowers and irises. One of the coolest parts of the collection was a series painted while Van Gogh was in an asylum, in which he copied the works of the great masters - Rembrandt, Delacroix, Millet - in his own style. Artistic remixes?

The back part of the museum, which houses visiting exhibits, contained the works of Max Beckmann, a German Expressionist whose thick brushstrokes bring to life images like eerie skulls and glowing candles. I have found throughout the European museums I have seen that German Expressionism may be my favorite period in art - emotional, evocative, colorful, provocative, violent, and exciting. The collection was accompanied by a performance artist who tried to transform the Beckmann works into tap dance. It is hard for a performance artist to ever rise above the level of absurdity, and this guy did not disappoint. While he started out with a relatively normal and respectable tap dance, his next piece involved standing with his head pressed into the corner of the room stamping his foot as a German jazz song played on a boom-box. I understand that he was trying to convey the emotions Beckmann may have felt during World War II, but I just didn’t care. If performance art is where our contemporary art scene is headed, I’m scared…
That night, we saw a very different type of performance, and it was a lot easier on the stomach: the Boom Chicago improve and sketch comedy troupe. Boom Chicago is the place where Seth Meyers from Saturday Night Live got his start in comedy, and the current cast shares his focus on snarky, political, irreverent humor. Our room in the hostel actually offered more laughs later in the night. We were forced to stay in a dorm-style room with a group of rowdy, drunken Scottish guys. In the middle of the night, one of the Scots started screaming and moaning that his shoulder had come out of its socket - for the twelfth time. Like a volunteer fire department, the other Scottish guys jumped out of bed, ready to come to the rescue. They all stood around the screamer and grabbed on to his arm as he spat out directions, “Up a little… now push it back in… AAAH! . . . now to the left… no wait… down… AAAH! . . . back and to the right!” Eventually, we heard a pop and the Scot went back to sleep like a kid’s broken toy put back together by a father.

The next morning, we went on a free tour given by the same company that offered the great tours in Berlin. There is no better way to learn about a city than through a guided expedition through its streets. We met the guide - a heavily tattooed and pierced punk who ended up knowing a lot - at Centraal Station, which is built on a man-made island in the middle of the harbor. It is really easy to forget that all the beauty of the islands that make up Amsterdam is based on the hard work of the Dutch over the centuries. Considering the dams and man-made islands, it becomes readily apparent why the Dutch are proud to boast, “God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands.” The Dutch, in general, seem to get overshadowed by other European powers throughout history. As the first republic in Europe, they experienced a Golden Age in the seventeenth century which left them, temporarily, as one of the world’s top superpowers. However, I think we tend to ignore their achievements (expect for maybe those of us from Dutch-discovered Staten Island).

From this proud period in history comes a pretty embarrassing legacy. Prior to the Napoleonic invasion, the Dutch lived without last names. When the French officials arrived and demanded last names for administrative purposes, the people of Amsterdam provided Dutch phrases like “born naked” and “pubic hair” as jokes, but the names unfortunately stuck! As we continued our tour and entered the Red Light District, a gross older woman leaned out of her second-floor window and started screaming at our guide and telling him she was going to call the cops. During the confrontation, my friend nudged me to remind me we had seen this woman earlier that day on the way to the tour, naked except for a bra, leaning out of the same window pulling a wicker arm chair up to the second floor on a rope.

While the chair thing seemed a little weird at first, we learned that the houses were actually designed for that - although the nudity was optional. The homes which line the canals of Amsterdam are so narrow that there was no way for supplies to be taken up the tiny steep stairs. As a solution, the architects built the homes on an angle so that they lean toward the street, and items can be lifted by pulley without smashing the windows on lower floors.
One of the hidden attractions of the Red Light District is Our Lord in the Attic, a “hidden Catholic church.” When Catholicism was outlawed in the Netherlands centuries ago, officials turned a blind eye on congregations as long as their priest said Mass in a location that did not look like a church. This church was constructed in a narrow house that could have passed as any normal home. Our guide pointed out that this policy of turning a blind eye is still practiced today in Amsterdam with regards to prostitution and marijuana, two practices which were traditionally illegal but tolerated.

While prostitution may have been tolerated, one activity which most definitely was not tolerated and which has seemingly attracted much attention from policymakers is drunken public urination on buildings, streets, and alleys. As a result, in 1975 public urinals were placed around Amsterdam. Built as large green spiral structures about the size of a phone booth, men could go inside and pee in one central location instead of on private residences. Feminists reacted by peeing on bridges and threatening to pee on every bridge in the city until public restrooms were built on the streets for women. They were eventually built and later taken down because they were attracting homeless junkies. The newest additions to the urination scene are the ultra-public urinals which now show up on Amsterdam street corners every weekend. Amounting to essentially four holes on a grey plastic “piss tre,e” as the Dutch call it, the devices are taken out into the countryside and cleaned out during the week and delivered to Amsterdam each Friday evening. Other gadgets seen throughout the city include “pee deflectors,” metal pans placed in the corners of alleys that splash urine back on the offender, as well as metal bars which used to be electrified. It is kind of hard to imagine that this much attention is paid to something so seemingly innocuous, but it is true that Amsterdam really does lack that pesky urine smell that pervades New York subway stations.

The Red Light District is one of those places that makes people around the world turn up their noses and scoff, “Ugh!”… like New Jersey. And while it definitely does not deserve respect or admiration, it is not as seedy as many assume it must be. Supposedly, the district is one of the safest in the entire city. Drugs are no more visible here than in the quiet, white-collar neighborhoods further from the city center. The area does not feel dangerous in any way since it is so filled with gawking tourists. The gawking is directed at the prostitutes who mechanically pose and strut behind their dirty neon-lit windows. While the industry is said to be regulated (perhaps to remove the pimp factor?), there is something depressing about the overweight, ugly women flaunting themselves even in daylight, trying to support themselves.

The next day, we escaped the city with the hopes of renting a bike in the nearby city of Haarlem and riding along the tulip-lined bike paths which stretch throughout the country. When we got off in the train, we went directly to the bike shop suggested by the guidebook. The giant garage-like store was lined with bicycles from wall to wall, but the owner said in a thick Dutch accent, “No bikes!” When we asked where else we could find bikes in the city, he said, “No more bikes in Haarlem. Get on train. New city.” Since we really didn’t want to go city-hopping to find a bicycle, we changed plans and boarded a bus to Keukenhof, the largest flower garden in the world, renowned for its springtime tulip fields. While we spent almost an entire day there, it is hard to say much more than one word (“tulips”) to describe the experience since the whole park was so singularly focused. There is nothing wrong with that… if you’re in the mood to see rows upon rows upon rows of tulips and other bulb flowers, it is a perfect day.

We tried to cram our final day in Amsterdam with as many activities as possible. Anne Frank’s House is known for attracting immense crowds (which equates to Vatican-Museum-sized lines snaking around the surrounding streets). We decided to get up early and beat the rush of tourists. The hiding quarters of the Frank family are a really moving place. While a destination like Auschwitz is overwhelming in its magnitude, it is hard to put a human face on the experience, no matter how many pictures and personal effects they place on display. However, something simple like hearing the same church bells Anne Frank used to listen to or peering through the same window onto a big chestnut tree in the backyard is much more emotional.

Our next destination elicited emotions as well, but these were mostly of the confusion/anger/frustration variety, and they came at the hands of contemporary art once again. The Stedelijk Museum is imposing and uninviting from the minute you walk in the door. It is temporarily being housed in an old functionalist post office building, monstrous and white on an industrial-looking island in the harbor. The first exhibit we saw was harmful enough and actually pretty interesting. It showed colorful graphic art from the 1960s and beyond, including posters and advertisements complete with tongue-in-cheek humor and accessible imagery… art for people who don’t like contemporary art. Unfortunately, the rest of the museum was filled with the worst kind of art - that which is meant to be pretentious and aggravating. Films of writhing squids, “Hand on Wrist” (a riveting movie of a hand stepping on a wrist… ugh), two parallel rows of televisions playing bright colors and eerie voices, a close-up movie of a man’s skin sweating and shivering. The museum was definitely the perfect setting for a horror film…

Another unappetizing part of Amsterdam, more literally, is the national candy of the Netherlands, drop. Some countries in Europe pride themselves on making the finest chocolates. Others are known for their marzipans or meringues. The Netherlands is known for a truly disgusting licorice candy that comes in honey, salty, and extra-salty flavors… no joke.

Luckily, the candy was the only part of Amsterdam that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. An inviting city of peaceful canals and less peaceful tourists looking for a good time, Amsterdam should definitely be given a second chance by those who know it only for its prostitution and lax drug laws. Plus, it is much more fun to overindulge in the other side of Amsterdam - great art, living history, and greasy fries.

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