Amsterdam, G-rated

Backpackers' Lucerne Hostel, Lucerne, Switzerland; September 24th, 2:18 pm

The fact that I’m sitting in our hostel in the middle of the day in Swtizerland writing the blogpost about Amsterdam perhaps says more about our experience in the real city of sin (sorry Las Vegas) than the following post ever could. I had neither the time nor the interest to blog about Amsterdam while we were there; now that we are safely nestled up in the wholesome Swiss Alps, I have neither the energy nor the inclination to do anything but blog about Amsterdam.

Ever since we got on the train last night, I’ve been debating how I should describe the very important piece of the backpacking experience that the Dutch capital provides, with the knowledge that parents, grandparents, and impressionable little sisters might read my description. Here’s my solution: I’ll provide two versions of the Amsterdam story, one G-rated version (this post) and one R-rated version (the next post). Before any mothers fast-forward to find out what sort of trouble their children got into in the R-rated version, you should know that the R-rating stands for sex, drugs, and maybe even a little rock-n-roll.

Amsterdam was a huge improvement on Paris for me. Not only were prices a little more reasonable, but the city was also COMPLETELY different from anything I’ve seen in America. I’ve never been to any place that felt so fundamentally foreign. The architecture, the urban layout, the signs, the people, their dress, their behavior—nothing in Amsterdam would fit into the American cultural landscape. Unlike Paris with Manhattan, the closest I can come to a comparison point for Amsterdam is a combination of Epcot and Pleasure Island at Disney World. My only complaint was that we didn’t stay long enough for me to figure out whether this fantasy-land feel was an affectation to rake in tourism dollars or the outgrowth of a genuine cultural gap. I think it was a combination of both, but the foreignness extended so far and yet seemed so outrageous that I’m still not sure. As a perfect example, in an apparent attempt to avoid the Parisian olfactory problems, the Dutch have installed big green spirals on almost every street corner in which men can urinate freely. They look like free-standing dressing rooms with a small hole in the middle of the ground. And people use them! Sober people! I used one in the middle of the day, and no one gave me any funny looks. How can any country be that unrestrained in their approach to solving problems? Imagine the contrast between a town hall meeting in Oklahoma City and the Dutch meeting that produced this idea.

Amsterdam town hall meeting:

Dutch citizen: “Our whole city smells like pee because the people who don’t have 30 cents to use the bathroom simply use the sidewalk as their bathroom.”

Stoned Dutch guy from Amsterdam: “OOO I have a great idea! Let’s put spirals with pee holes in the middle all over the city so that people don’t pee on the walls.”

Stoned Dutch Mayor: “Hey! That is a great idea! And while we’re at it, let’s legalize prostitution to prevent the spread of vinereal disease and decriminalize marijuana so we don’t fill up our prisons with our pot dealers. Then, we can tax all this stuff so that we can pay for universal healthcare! That was easy.”

Or maybe the chronology was more like:

Irritated Dutch Mayor: “Now that we’ve legalized pot and prostitution, we have a bunch of stoned backpackers peeing all over our streets. Let’s build some free-standing stalls they can stumble into so we can at least keep the smell manageable.”

American town hall meeting:

American citizen: “Poor people are peeing on the streets because we somehow started charging 30 cents to use the bathroom.”

American mayor: “Okay. Let’s stop doing that.”

American Democrat: “But then how will we fund our struggling school systems?”

American republican: “We won’t, but at least our streets won’t smell like urine.”

In bizarre contrast with the sex and pot shops, Amsterdam is also home to some magnificient art museums, including the Vincent Van Gough museum. I had inherited a fascination with the tortured artist from my dad, and this museum provided me with a great opportunity to explore my curiosity. The collection boasts over 200 of his paintings along with several thousand drawings and letters to complement them. Although we didn’t see any of his truly jaw-dropping pieces, witnessing his genius develop as we toured the rooms holding a chronological series of his pieces proved far more enjoyable than standing behind twenty other people waiting for a glimpse of Starry Night in New Haven last year. That work actually becomes all the more impressive in the context of his tragic life. Before he got to Paris in 1885, Van Gough was really struggling to find himself as an artist. He hated traditional styles even then, but he still used the very dark color schemes common in the Netherlands at that time. Furthermore, he hadn’t learned to embrace his technical shortcomings; his sense of spatial relationships were almost as bad as mine. In fact, every piece on display from this period looked like something I might have produced trying to mimic Van Gough if I only had brown, black, and grey paint. Then, just when I was starting to doubt whether this pillar of modern art had any talent at all (I have doubted that about most other modern artists), we moved into the gallery of paintings from his time in Paris, where he had met Henri Toulouse-Lautrec among other artists budding on the forefront of modernism. Especially as we had just spent a week in Paris, where classical French styles continue to dominate at the Louvre and Versailles, Van Gough’s vivid colors and rapid, thick brushstrokes seemed just as novel and fresh as they did when his sister-in-law began to introduce his oeuvre posthumously to the wider world.

We also went to Vandel Park, which was mostly beautiful, although parts were wrapped in hideous construction fencing. Unfortunately for you concerned mothers out there, that's about the only experience from Amsterdam that make it into the G-rated version. If you would prefer to skip the next post, our hostel in Switzerland has an 11:00 pm curfew and the higher-than-Parisian prices have prevented us from doing anything but walk around. The Lucerne post should be a little bit tamer.