Ambling Amsterdam

The Eurostar from Brussels to Amsterdam takes less than two hours and it was this brief time period which convinced me to break our journey to Berlin with a short stay. I have been a frequent visitor on other European trips and thought that the city had little more to offer me. I felt a bit jaded with Amsterdam.

This feeling was not quite alleviated by the magnificent upgrade of Amsterdam Centrale rail station which leaves the old building facing the city centre shrouded in scaffolding and the main thoroughfare leading away from the station under reconstruction. There are inversions and reversions and diversions of traffic and trams all around the station with little overall direction as to how to traverse the area. Infrastructure renewal seems as ubiquitous in Europe as it is in the major cities of Australia as though there has been international collaboration on the best way to address pandemic induced economic woe. In Amsterdam however everything is of course, made more complex by unevenly paved streets, human beings’ jam packed into small narrow streets and the bicycles which own the city.

If you have never experienced Amsterdam, the supremacy of the bicycle can come as a shock. They are sturdy, working vehicles driven with unassailable verve by rider’s representative of the entire population. They move in all directions and have habit of being invisible until they whoosh past close enough to hear rubber on the cobbled road. Or to smell a heady perfume and hear children laughing as they sit in their carriages on the front of the bike. Whole families can and often do, colonise one bicycle. The relative absence of cars is however delightful and many of the visible models are electric or tiny. These tiny cars park on the pavement amid the lines of bicycles. They are impossibly cute.  

Our hotel, in centre of the city, sits in a strip of naturalized vegetation, once the tram line, now also undergoing renovation. In the middle of the vegetation, there is a small café (of the regular kind) serving sandwiches and drinks. Elderly gentlemen gather several days a week to exchange stamps and to chat in a philatelic sort of men`s shed.

Our precinct on the first canal, is well served with both coffee shops of the herbal kind and brown bars. These are interspersed with clothing ateliers, antique stores and bakeries serving the most extravagant pastry concoctions. I had forgotten the munchies, and the impossible amount of time people stand about in the supermarket trying to make decisions. Instagrammers forming long lines to be allowed access to favoured locations are also a recent addition.  French fries topped with a rather extraordinary, indescribably coloured, melted cheese sauce are also popular as are Aperol Spritzers served in balloon shaped glasses. Both are delicious.

Gradually the ease of this city, immeasurably entwined with the serene canals, gorgeous houses, occupied house boats and the use of all spaces for living, begins, again, to seduce me.   

Amsterdam is an excellent place to explore, although the art of enjoying its quirky, creative charm is to find the quiet routes, the less populated paths and places. The Jordaan, the museum quarter, and the redlight district are not these places but they offer outdoor markets, the gorgeous Van Gogh Museum, and the tawdry raffishness of the sex and drug venues which have always been synonymous with the city.

Quieter spaces are offered by the huge Vondel park close to the museum quarter. The Rijksmuseum, not itself a quiet space, does offer curated carefully Dutch art through the centuries, and also a busker playing classical music on a piano accordion. The music is grand, concert hall filling, and I feel privileged to be standing in a centuries old subway listening to it. Momentarily I forget the crowds and the surging bicycles as the musician and his music own this space.

The tiny Hortis Botanicas or botanical garden is also a balm to the soul. It is a favourite retreat filled with ancient medicinal specimens, unexpectedly unkempt flowerbeds, and birdsong. The birdsong is the more beautiful for having been rarely heard since I have been in Europe, even in the green places. 

Walking back through the Jewish Quarter, it is impossible not to think of the current conflict. There have been pro Palestine protests in all the cities I have visited to date and today the police are clearly stationed about the city as we encounter another rally. The world it seems is populated by memorials to the dead. Humans killed by Humans. The senselessness of it appalls me. Our next destination is Berlin which I suspect may be an object lesson in man`s inhumanity to man.

Amsterdam, on its walls, windows and pavements, is not short of commentary.

Ambling Amsterdam is to be encouraged in every meaning of the word.