Amsterdam was my second stop on this prolific pan European tour. It is one of the most pedestrian friendly cities I’ve been to, being perfectly flat, loaded with human scale urban design, and plenty of easy ways to get around. Sometime in the past the potheads who were tired of getting lost in the forest and the bush found out about it, and they migrated here in droves. This made it not just the Netherland’s capital but also dope culture’s capital. Even though it’s the capital, it isn’t the seat of the government. They probably had to move all the important administrative organs to The Hague because everyone was getting high and sitting around playing bongo drums in Vondelpark.

Reduce

If you were blind and had to judge a place by nothing but what you could eat, you would most likely head back to the airport immediately after arriving in downtown Amsterdam thinking you had mistakenly landed in Istanbul. There appears to be more doner kebab shops than all other sources of food combined. While I’ll admit I enjoyed a doner pizza or two, it would have been nice to find more Dutch restaurants other than the ones that were obviously catering to tourists with jacked prices and junk taste. If I was the merciless dictator of Amsterdam, I would order some of these doner places to be turned into convenience stores, which are conspicuously lacking considering the need for 24 hour munchie depots.

The number of weirdo Dutchies should be restricted by an official cull. While my interaction with real live Dutch people was limited because somehow I kept winding up in doner shops, here are two lovely encounters I had:

Encounter 1) while going through airport security on the way out some old guy starts bitching at me in Dutch. I ignore him, and then he says rudely in English “don’t you speak the Dutch?” I of course replied in the negative. He then asks, “Well what are you doing in Holland?” to which my travel buddy quickly replied, “leaving!” as we neared the metal detector. He had no comeback.

Encounter 2) the hostel we were staying in had a series of doors to get past in order to get to your room. First was one you used your key card to unlock, which lead into a holding room where you had to buzz to get entrance from the front desk, then another separate secure door to get into your specific building and of course then your door room. All that security, plus checking IDs and filling out forms when checking in, and still the geniuses at the hostel allowed some Dutch guy with zero bags to check into our dorm who then of course ransacked the place, even smashed open one of the lockers. Fortunately for me the beer I had bought earlier was not pilfered.

Reuse

Amsterdam has the best bicycle transportation infrastructure in the world. Under normal Canadian circumstances I loathe bike lanes, because they lead drivers to think that bikes belong only in those narrow poorly designed paths of doom that are often blocked with parked cars and booby trapped with the infamous door prize. Not so in Amsterdam. The bike is definitely at the top of the transport totem pole, and is the best way to get around.

I’ll turn to this famous scene for one of my favorite things about Holland:

“Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy beer in a movie theatre. And I don’t mean in a paper cup either. They give you a glass of beer, like in a bar. In Paris, you can buy beer at MacDonald’s. Also, you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?”
“They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?”
“No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.”
”What’d they call it?”
“Royale with Cheese.”
“What’d they call a Big Mac?”
“Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac.”
“What do they call a Whopper?”
“I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King. But you know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?”
“What?”
“Mayonnaise.”
“Goddamn!”
“I seen ‘em do it. And I don’t mean a little bit on the side of the plate, they fuckin’ drown ‘em in it.”

Goddamn right! And it was hella good mayonnaise too.

Recycle

While the biking infrastructure is very good, the bikes are NOT. Most of the bikes in Amsterdam are heavy old style single speed cruisers with shit comfort and shittier braking. Riding around on them was like mowing the lawn with your teeth… if you were 85 years old!

Incinerate

The hippy population is out of control. Sadly they don’t make like lemmings and jump into the Keizersgracht. Vondelpark is overrun with them, as are other locations throughout the city that have 24 hour snack facilities and hallucinatory visual décor. I originally thought they could be reduced to a controlled number, but I’ve since realized that the best way to solve the problem is if they all went up in smoke.

Now instead of posting a bunch of photos of boring old buildings that every city in Europe has, here’s some crazy looking modern ones of which Holland has plenty.

Filed under: tourist shit