New York City doesn't exist. If you ask the Post Office about it, they will correct you. Actually, they will make you feel like an idiot, if you are looking for a zip code and you use "New York City" in the form. You can try it on your own (use 83 East 4th Street for the rest of the address - I've been there). New York is not one unified place, it is many, much smaller places jammed into one geographical area. It's impossible then to discuss my first impression of the city as if there were only one. There's too much to experience, too much going on, for that to be even remotely true. This is the case with every major city the world over and "first impression" syndrome where someone offers a sweeping generalization of the city because they spent a couple days exploring the ultra-famous parts of the city is one of the most grievous sins of tourism (and I am just as guilty of it - I'm sure Amsterdam and Brussels had much left for me to truly explore). Most cities defy easy generalization and categorization, but some are more eclectic than others. Berlin, for example, offers a more varied experience of German life than Munich. Berlin isn't even properly one city yet, it is literally a collection of areas (though I understand they are working on that). But New York is easily the most diverse city that I have ever been to.
Truthfully, I have only experienced one borough of New York, a tiny sliver of it's metropolitan area. Jersey City, where I live, has several facets of it's own. I live in the part that is surrounded by the crappy and the run down. It sounds worse than it is because the rules of economics are slowly dictating a move into the area. It's fine. It's a bit of a dump, but it's fine. Then there is Hoboken and apparently a tiny bit of Weehauken (things run together here), which are trendy and solidly middle class (and just as predictably the food and bars are mostly overpriced). Pavonia/Newport is for people who want to feel like they are living in New York proper, but with a view of the city, and the prices and taxes of New Jersey. It sounds like it's a cheap imitation, but Goldman Sachs has an entire office tower not too far away. It's only cheap when compared to Manhattan.
Ah, Manhattan. That's the only borough of the five that I've spent any time in. I'm sure that I will end up in Brooklyn at some point, but the PATH trains only run to the World Trade Center or 33rd St. So no Brooklyn and no Queens just yet. It took me a couple of days to work up the nerve to cross the river and check out the city. I'm not sure why, to tell you the truth. Maybe because going over the river (or under it rather since the ferries are stupid expensive) meant that I was really here. I couldn't chicken out and bolt the city if I set foot in Manhattan. But the truth is, as soon as I saw the New York skyline in person, I knew I was hooked. I am sure that I will take pictures of it at some point. It's stunning and if it captivates you at all, then you know, you are in New York to stay, come hell or high water. Or that's how you feel if you are a little bit of a romantic. The whole reality of unemployment may indeed have something to say about staying in New York or not, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it.
Looking at the skyline though already demonstrates a truth you will encounter on that ground: New York isn't really one place. You can see the difference between the skyscrapers downtown, the vast and obviously residential area, and the skyscrapers in mid-town. The Empire State building dominates its part of the island, practically unchallenged. Downtown, the skyscrapers are thickly forested, competing with each other like jungle trees for the light of the sun. There will be a big boy on the block in the near future when they finish the new World Trade Center tower, but for now, there are no winners, just competitors. It was unintentional, but my exploration of that gorgeous skyline followed the same path as my eyes from one end of the island to the middle (it's not the other end - I've made it to 50th St. and the island goes all the way to 216th St.).
If you get on a different PATH train, you will end up on Christopher St. instead of the WTC and it's a completely different world, the world of Greenwich Village. I was disturbed to find how easy it was to lose entire skyscrapers when you are actually among the brownstones and walkups (if those are the terms - Law and Order gave me the vocabulary, but I still use it like a tourist). In parts of the Village, you could easily go the entire day without ever knowing that downtown was even there. The parts that I walked through were gorgeous and I've seen quite a bit of it, though not enough to make unqualified judgments about the Village. It is always a surprise to discover major theatres just tucked into the buildings. Cherry Lane is literally tucked around a corner, the buildings so tight that even the sounds of traffic are significantly diminished. The Lortel is in an unassuming building on Christopher St. It's incongruous. In my world, these theatres are more important than the commercial giants on Broadway and around Times Square.
Yesterday, I got my first real taste of walking into that other, fabled, part of mid-town: Times Square. I had a few hours to kill before the concert I was to observe (the very same French Horn Rebellion I mentioned earlier), so I figured I would check out the Empire State Building. I was on 11th, it is on 33rd. That's not so bad. But then when I got to 33rd I thought, what's nine more blocks? So I ended up in Times Square, where I heard quite a few languages that were not English. New York reminds me of Europe in a lot of ways - you can walk large parts of it, it's packed with history, you hear all kinds of languages and accents all the time. But then I figured I would check out some of the theatres where I was trying to intern. I felt much worse about my application to Roundabout Theatre Company when I saw American Airlines Theatre. Roundabout is a LORT theatre company, much like the Alley, but on steroids. I am much more confident about New York Theatre Workshop where I was allowed to hand my application to an actual person. One who works for the theatre. Not one who works for the post office.
Finally, I thought I'm so close to Rockefeller Center that I will just pop over and then walk back. I was already at 47th and 9th, it's nothing to get to 50th and 6th (it's so easy to say those numbers like they mean something, but if you don't know New York, how much sense does it make?). After which I walked back to 11th and 4th. The walk back felt endless because I had somewhere to be at a particular time, so it was much more frustrating that you can only walk a block or two before you get stopped by a red light, even with jaywalking, even when you are traveling with traffic. I arrived at the concert venue and discovered that my feet hurt quite badly. I knew I had walked a fair bit, so I looked it up. If I had gone straight to Rockefeller Center from Webster Hall (which I most emphatically did not - Broadway is a kooky street that does weird things around Union Square and again around the Flatiron building), it would have been 2.2 miles. At first that number didn't impress me because I was so used to looking at kilometers. 2.2 km isn't that bad at all (it's barely a mile and a half). Then I doubled it because I had walked back and than I had to add another mile and a half to cover the walk to and from the subway stops (I say subway, but I have yet to be on the New York subway proper - just the PATH trains to and from Jersey). All told I walked about 8 miles yesterday. I can safely say after a stretch like that on the streets of New York that I still don't really know anything about the city at all.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
What To Make of Brussels
I thought that I disliked Amsterdam. After my first day in Brussels, I realized that I didn't dislike Amsterdam; it was merely disappointing. It was not as charming as I expected; it was a little too cynically attached to tourism; it was just too rushed. But overall it wasn't so bad. Brussels on the other hand, is a nightmare, from top to bottom. The transportation system goes everywhere, but it requires two or three different connections to get anywhere (You Can't Get There From Here syndrome). There are three train stations of staggeringly different significance and levels of sophistication. Noord is a dung heap, there is no other other description for it, complete with the seedy street where the prostitutes appear in their windows (at 11 in the AM) running along the tracks. Apparently, they do exist in the wild and not just in the tame confines of Amtersrdam's red light district. Central Station is central only in terms of geography, though not in terms of significance. For most practical purposes, Central is basically irrelevant and out of the way. Zuid is where the action is, but it was also the farthest away from where we ended up staying.
The real problem with the transportation system is not the bizarre set of connections between places but the staggering incompetence with which the system is run. If you are lucky, on the major trains (like the subway or some of the trains between cities), they might announce the stations. If you are really lucky, the trains will actually stop where the schedule says they will stop. I discovered to my cost that this is not always the case. I wanted the Schaerbeek Station. The schedule said it was one stop away, a paltry four minutes. I boarded the train thinking that my travel day was almost over, a day that had begun at 1:00 AM (because I refused to be 24 euro for a reservation on the Belgian night train because the train would only have been in Belgium for an hour and a half - it costs 10 euro for all of Germany). The train passed through said station, but didn't stop for another 20 minutes in a place called Mechelen. I later discovered that this stop is halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. I took the train back to Brussel Noord and made no further attempt to get to that train station. Local transportation is much better at sticking to the posted script, but you will never see or hear what the next stop will be once you are in the tram or bus. No announcement, no monitor flashing the upcoming station, nothing (a stark contrast to Germany where every tourist who spends any time on public transport will have learned at least two German words "Nächste Halt . . .").
I can generally put up with a lack of information about stops and the like and I am always willing to walk if I make a mistake. If public transport runs regularly and is vaguely on time, I can make do. This is also not the case in Brussels. The very first tram my mom and I were on stopped dead in a tunnel a couple hundred yards from the station. After ten minutes, the conductor opened the doors and had the passengers hop down onto the tracks and over to the service path where we completed our journey to the station on foot. We were on our way to the train station to catch a train to Brugges, which we naturally missed. We were already planning to go to Brugges so I could make the most of the last trip on my railway pass. What began as a normal day trip became a necessity after the first two hours I spent in Brussels were so stupidly obstructive and cack handed. If it hadn't have been Brugges, it would have been anywhere else: Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven (hmm, Stella), Liege, Waterloo . . . Anywhere other than Brussels.
Brugges turned out to be as picturesque and as medieval as promised, but it is also a tourist trap, not the thing most calculated to soothe anyone's mood, especially as quite a few of the cafes and bistros closed up shop between 5 and 6 PM, right about when Mom and I were looking for a nice place to grab a bite. Brugges must have a Rothenburg/Martha's Vineyard thing about preserving it's medieval character, including shunning tourists after a certain point in the evening. We eventually found a place to eat: Quick Burger, the equivalent of McDonald's and just as tasteless. It was at least inexpensive.
To the credit of Brussels, the rest of our stay was not as bad as that first day. Public transport proved more reliable, though no more informative. The major exception was rush hour, when using the system became positively oppressive. None of their trains were designed with accommodating very many people, a strange decision in a city of nearly 2 million people.
If it seems like I am fixating on public transportation at the expense of the rest of the city, consider it evidence of my ambivalence about the place. Despite the fact that Brussels has a long and distinguished history in the region and that many of the older (though not the oldest) buildings have been preserved, it does not present itself particularly well. Brussels is first and foremost a city about business and getting things done. It has provided ways for visitors to explore some of the past, but the past that is most open to visitors relates to the near past and usually to the Belgian monarchy which only dates back to 1830. The most massive and monumental buildings all originate after that time. Many of them date from the reign of Leopold II, the infamously megalomaniacal king who considered the Belgian Congo his personal colony, though the city has much older roots, on display in the stunning Grand Place (where you can find Victor Hugo's old place), and in some of them gorgeous cathedrals in the area. I just can't make any sense of the city. There are things to visit, there is some beautiful architecture, and even quality museums, like the Magritte Museum and the Museum of Musical Instruments (the museum dedicated to the french fry is in Brugges though - french fries originated in Belgium, there's your fun fact for the day).
The best way for me to explain the city might be to compare it with Berlin ten years ago. Not all of the benefits of re-unification had made it to the eastern parts of the city yet. Much of the city was dingy or covered with graffiti. It was in the throes of integrating an enormous new population. Germany's modern economic success had not completely taken hold (indeed many of Schroeder's most important reforms were yet to come). Brussels, despite it's importance as a commercial and legislative center, has not yet experienced the economic success that will help bring it the kind of vision that could transform the city or give it a cohesive sense of direction. This is a malaise that afflicts Belgium as a whole, actually. As of the writing of this post, Belgium does not have a national government. Negotiations for coalition forming have stalled since the election in June.
I can say without reservation that the hostel I stayed in was the best of the entire trip. Calling Sleephere a hostel doesn't do it justice. The owner, Karel Mondt,, a gregarious and generous host, prefers to call it a guest house. It reminded me of the boarding houses of the 19th century that I read about in Balzac and Dickens, though with significantly less drama. Or closer to home, the hostel my friends and I found ourselves in ten years ago in Budapest. Sleephere is the owner's 4 story house, with every room not dedicated to eating or cooking transformed into sleeping quarters. It is a quaint old house with creaky wooden stairs and the idiosyncratic decorations that can only come from someone's personal accumulation and not from any conscious attempts at interior decorating. It was authentic and unforced. My mom hated it, but she is used to factory sleeping, which is what so many hostels have become (that's Karel's phrase, not my own). StayOkay in Amsterdam, the Y in Basel, even Metropole in Berlin, they are all like the Southwest Airlines of hotels. They offer great service while cutting facilities and extras to the bone. They are hotels in spirit now, rather than hostels as I remember them - the kind of place that you look for when you arrive in a town without a thought for reservations. The internet has almost completely done away with the cute personal pension that you discover tucked into the Place St. Michel, steps away from Notre Dame de Paris. It was a positive pleasure that my mom had discovered this place, even if she didn't particularly like it. We spent the last night in Brussels in a hotel by the airport and while I enjoyed the privacy and amenities on offer, the soullessness of the place just reinforced what I had already knew - hosteling is about character not convenience. We certainly found it on 155 Landbouwstraat, Schaerbeek. The only part of Brussels that I enjoyed unequivocally.
The real problem with the transportation system is not the bizarre set of connections between places but the staggering incompetence with which the system is run. If you are lucky, on the major trains (like the subway or some of the trains between cities), they might announce the stations. If you are really lucky, the trains will actually stop where the schedule says they will stop. I discovered to my cost that this is not always the case. I wanted the Schaerbeek Station. The schedule said it was one stop away, a paltry four minutes. I boarded the train thinking that my travel day was almost over, a day that had begun at 1:00 AM (because I refused to be 24 euro for a reservation on the Belgian night train because the train would only have been in Belgium for an hour and a half - it costs 10 euro for all of Germany). The train passed through said station, but didn't stop for another 20 minutes in a place called Mechelen. I later discovered that this stop is halfway between Brussels and Antwerp. I took the train back to Brussel Noord and made no further attempt to get to that train station. Local transportation is much better at sticking to the posted script, but you will never see or hear what the next stop will be once you are in the tram or bus. No announcement, no monitor flashing the upcoming station, nothing (a stark contrast to Germany where every tourist who spends any time on public transport will have learned at least two German words "Nächste Halt . . .").
I can generally put up with a lack of information about stops and the like and I am always willing to walk if I make a mistake. If public transport runs regularly and is vaguely on time, I can make do. This is also not the case in Brussels. The very first tram my mom and I were on stopped dead in a tunnel a couple hundred yards from the station. After ten minutes, the conductor opened the doors and had the passengers hop down onto the tracks and over to the service path where we completed our journey to the station on foot. We were on our way to the train station to catch a train to Brugges, which we naturally missed. We were already planning to go to Brugges so I could make the most of the last trip on my railway pass. What began as a normal day trip became a necessity after the first two hours I spent in Brussels were so stupidly obstructive and cack handed. If it hadn't have been Brugges, it would have been anywhere else: Ghent, Antwerp, Leuven (hmm, Stella), Liege, Waterloo . . . Anywhere other than Brussels.
Brugges turned out to be as picturesque and as medieval as promised, but it is also a tourist trap, not the thing most calculated to soothe anyone's mood, especially as quite a few of the cafes and bistros closed up shop between 5 and 6 PM, right about when Mom and I were looking for a nice place to grab a bite. Brugges must have a Rothenburg/Martha's Vineyard thing about preserving it's medieval character, including shunning tourists after a certain point in the evening. We eventually found a place to eat: Quick Burger, the equivalent of McDonald's and just as tasteless. It was at least inexpensive.
To the credit of Brussels, the rest of our stay was not as bad as that first day. Public transport proved more reliable, though no more informative. The major exception was rush hour, when using the system became positively oppressive. None of their trains were designed with accommodating very many people, a strange decision in a city of nearly 2 million people.
If it seems like I am fixating on public transportation at the expense of the rest of the city, consider it evidence of my ambivalence about the place. Despite the fact that Brussels has a long and distinguished history in the region and that many of the older (though not the oldest) buildings have been preserved, it does not present itself particularly well. Brussels is first and foremost a city about business and getting things done. It has provided ways for visitors to explore some of the past, but the past that is most open to visitors relates to the near past and usually to the Belgian monarchy which only dates back to 1830. The most massive and monumental buildings all originate after that time. Many of them date from the reign of Leopold II, the infamously megalomaniacal king who considered the Belgian Congo his personal colony, though the city has much older roots, on display in the stunning Grand Place (where you can find Victor Hugo's old place), and in some of them gorgeous cathedrals in the area. I just can't make any sense of the city. There are things to visit, there is some beautiful architecture, and even quality museums, like the Magritte Museum and the Museum of Musical Instruments (the museum dedicated to the french fry is in Brugges though - french fries originated in Belgium, there's your fun fact for the day).
The best way for me to explain the city might be to compare it with Berlin ten years ago. Not all of the benefits of re-unification had made it to the eastern parts of the city yet. Much of the city was dingy or covered with graffiti. It was in the throes of integrating an enormous new population. Germany's modern economic success had not completely taken hold (indeed many of Schroeder's most important reforms were yet to come). Brussels, despite it's importance as a commercial and legislative center, has not yet experienced the economic success that will help bring it the kind of vision that could transform the city or give it a cohesive sense of direction. This is a malaise that afflicts Belgium as a whole, actually. As of the writing of this post, Belgium does not have a national government. Negotiations for coalition forming have stalled since the election in June.
I can say without reservation that the hostel I stayed in was the best of the entire trip. Calling Sleephere a hostel doesn't do it justice. The owner, Karel Mondt,, a gregarious and generous host, prefers to call it a guest house. It reminded me of the boarding houses of the 19th century that I read about in Balzac and Dickens, though with significantly less drama. Or closer to home, the hostel my friends and I found ourselves in ten years ago in Budapest. Sleephere is the owner's 4 story house, with every room not dedicated to eating or cooking transformed into sleeping quarters. It is a quaint old house with creaky wooden stairs and the idiosyncratic decorations that can only come from someone's personal accumulation and not from any conscious attempts at interior decorating. It was authentic and unforced. My mom hated it, but she is used to factory sleeping, which is what so many hostels have become (that's Karel's phrase, not my own). StayOkay in Amsterdam, the Y in Basel, even Metropole in Berlin, they are all like the Southwest Airlines of hotels. They offer great service while cutting facilities and extras to the bone. They are hotels in spirit now, rather than hostels as I remember them - the kind of place that you look for when you arrive in a town without a thought for reservations. The internet has almost completely done away with the cute personal pension that you discover tucked into the Place St. Michel, steps away from Notre Dame de Paris. It was a positive pleasure that my mom had discovered this place, even if she didn't particularly like it. We spent the last night in Brussels in a hotel by the airport and while I enjoyed the privacy and amenities on offer, the soullessness of the place just reinforced what I had already knew - hosteling is about character not convenience. We certainly found it on 155 Landbouwstraat, Schaerbeek. The only part of Brussels that I enjoyed unequivocally.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Amsterdon't
I am Not Amsterdam
I knew Amsterdam was going to be problem as soon as I started taking a look at their tourist board website. My mom had suggested a series of museums, most of which I couldn't afford and then she mentioned the I AMsterdam card. It promised access to almost all of the major museums and a full ride on public transport. For 38 euro. For one day. If I spend 7 euro, I get the benefit of the public transportation (and that goes down on a per day basis the more days I buy - 4 days is only 20 euro). After my exhaustive efforts in the various museums that I have visited that to do museums justice you have to be willing to spend 2 to 4 hours in one, significantly more in the case of a good history museum. I spent 10 hours in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and managed slightly less than half the museum (which only cost 5 euro). Anyone who encourages you to spend that much money on a lot of different museums for one day is not encouraging you to spend considerable amounts of time in any of the museums. They want you to go there, follow the arrows around the exhibits, spend some time in the shop, and then leave. This is completely antithetical to nearly every habit I have been attempting to create. This did not bode well.
My arrival in Amsterdam did not make things better. The night train from Basel was inexplicably delayed for an hour in Mannheim (the worst of German service coming out in Deutsche Bahn there; they didn't even acknowledge that we were late), so we were practically shoved off the train into Centraal. My first task was to get to the airport to pick up my mother, who would be landing in an hour. It was going to take at least a half an hour to get to the aiport, assuming nothing went wrong with getting a train. Fortunately (and not at all thanks to DB), that went off without a hitch. There was a minor hiccup when I realized that I had promised my mother that I would meet her at baggage claim when of course that is off limits to the unwashed masses since international arrivals have to go through customs, but the architects of Schipol airport were at least aware of what usually happens at baggage carousels and helpfully set up a waiting area with a great view of passport control. The most time sensitive parts of our time in Amsterdam revolved around the airport whose thoughtful design made those tasks much easier.
Maybe Centraal will eventually be as well designed a transport hub as Schipol once the paroxysm of construction has passed over and through Amsterdam. Thanks to that very same construction, Centraal is a mess (and a centruy of design decisions since it was originally built). Beyond the construction, Centraal is a frustrating place because there are few and not particularly accurate and useful signs. While there were plenty of arrows indicating the direction of buses and trams, few of them bothered to point out that the office where you have to buy tickets for those buses and trams is across the street from the main train station, as though the local transit authority's remit stopped at the gates of the train station. Beyond this line, you shall not pass. The outlook did not improve when we went inside that ticket office and it was packed, an ominous sign of things to come.
Eventually, all our transportation needs were taken care and we had safely settled in at the hostel. I figured that we should avoid the tourist traps and museums and just take in the city on foot during our first day. That's when I discovered the horrible truth, or several horrible truths about Amsterdam in its current "under construction" state, the first being that Amsterdam is not a particularly pedestrian friendly city. Between the canals, the trams, the roads, and the bike paths, there is very little real estate for the lowly Fussgänger, often not enough for two people to walk side by side. Stray too far outside of your zone you risk getting run down by the scooters and mopeds traveling in the bike lane, never mind the wolfpacks of cyclists. When we finally arrived near the center of the old town at Waterlooplein, we discovered that even in those areas were tourists are expected to congregate, there is no such thing as a pedestrian zone. This was true even for the Dam square, the Red Light district, and the Centraal. If you can get there on foot, so can the crazy guys on scooters. You are never safe from them.
One of the purposes of walking on foot is to experience a city in a more relaxed way. It gives you time to process your surroundings. There is no better way to learn a city than with your feet, assuming the city is safe for such an approach (though that is also something you can learn by walking). I never felt that this was possible in Amsterdam. Even in late September, the middle of the city was crowded and pulsing with speed and movement. Everyone and everything was in a hurry or on edge or behind and trying to make up time. This edginess is exactly what you deserve if you are driving a car in downtown Amsterdam, but isn't something I generally want inflicted on me as a pedestrian (or as a flaneur really, since I had no particular purpose other than being there, which is not true of every pedestrian).
I think Amsterdam hates cars as well as pedestrians. It's not just the narrow streets and the ever present canals and roaming packs of cyclists. You can tell a lot about a city from its cars, not just things like median income level, but personality. Porsches are common on the streets of Munich (so are BMWs but you have to discount that since they are made in the city) because the city is full of trendy rich people who want to be seen and who enjoy the kind of ride the car provides, especially the stares and the envy, but also the speed and the cornering. Berlin is full of government types and Mercedes, sedans that are sober and luxurious, with just a splash of Ferrari red and British racing green to go along with the money and influence. Houston, with its oceans of oil money, features Bentleys, as well as plenty of Lexi or Lexuses or Lexus (like moose) to go along with that money. Amsterdam is full of Opels and ugly Renaults and older VWs. Most of the cars were dirty and unwashed. There are very few Alfas or Fiats or any of the other small cars that have the sense of swagger and cool that let people who can't afford swanky sports cars enjoy their ability to accomplish their weekly shop. Based on the cars I saw in Amsterdam, there is a decided lack of joy or interest in driving, certainly most of the cars aren't shown a lot of care. For some people, this will be a selling point of course, but for me, it was just more proof that the city and I would not get along.
This fact was confirmed over the next few days as my mom and I took in Amsterdam's museums, which I suspect are all designed for maximum tourist processing. They are always crowded even as late in September as we were there. They have precious few places to rest. And they never ever have any place where you can just contemplate the work of art or the piece of history on display. The Jewish museum is a bit of a breather, but it's also not particularly good at explaining or illuminating history. There will be plenty more on museum culture later, when I deal with museums from all of my travels. The verdict on Amsterdam is almostly completely negative. If I were handing out grades, it would get a D only because, to be fair, they do have some amazing works of art. You may or may not know this, but Van Gogh and Rembrandt were pretty good painters. The exception to this was the Hermitage branch campus. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg opened an exhibition hall in for rotation exhibitions in Amsterdam not too long ago (like the Louvre, but instead of dropping it in the middle of the Arabian peninsula, the Hermitage put it somewhere useful). The Alexander the Great exhibit was everything that the other museums were not. It was especially well lit, compared to the other museums. Bad lighting is a surprising problem for a museum to have when Philips, one of the largest lighting companies in the world, is a major sponsor.
An important caveat here is that Amsterdam is a city beset, plagued even, by a rash of renovations and construction projects. If you visit the city in the next two years you will run into a whole mess of renovations including (and certainly not limited to) the Royal Palace, the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk, the Central Station, the Maritime museum, the Rokin, and the road in front of the Jewish museum. If any of those places interest you, then you should put off your visit to the city until 2011 at the very earliest. I'd say you should leave it to 2012, if the world hasn't ended. I don't think I will like it anymore, but I leave that possibility open to others.
Where did that leave us? That left us very happy people when Mom and I parted ways. She was headed to a bus tour through Ireland (undeniably cool, especially since I have never been) and I was headed to Munich, the city that was really at the heart of my trip to Europe in the first place. I'm glad I went to Amsterdam. But I was much happier leaving it.
I knew Amsterdam was going to be problem as soon as I started taking a look at their tourist board website. My mom had suggested a series of museums, most of which I couldn't afford and then she mentioned the I AMsterdam card. It promised access to almost all of the major museums and a full ride on public transport. For 38 euro. For one day. If I spend 7 euro, I get the benefit of the public transportation (and that goes down on a per day basis the more days I buy - 4 days is only 20 euro). After my exhaustive efforts in the various museums that I have visited that to do museums justice you have to be willing to spend 2 to 4 hours in one, significantly more in the case of a good history museum. I spent 10 hours in the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and managed slightly less than half the museum (which only cost 5 euro). Anyone who encourages you to spend that much money on a lot of different museums for one day is not encouraging you to spend considerable amounts of time in any of the museums. They want you to go there, follow the arrows around the exhibits, spend some time in the shop, and then leave. This is completely antithetical to nearly every habit I have been attempting to create. This did not bode well.
My arrival in Amsterdam did not make things better. The night train from Basel was inexplicably delayed for an hour in Mannheim (the worst of German service coming out in Deutsche Bahn there; they didn't even acknowledge that we were late), so we were practically shoved off the train into Centraal. My first task was to get to the airport to pick up my mother, who would be landing in an hour. It was going to take at least a half an hour to get to the aiport, assuming nothing went wrong with getting a train. Fortunately (and not at all thanks to DB), that went off without a hitch. There was a minor hiccup when I realized that I had promised my mother that I would meet her at baggage claim when of course that is off limits to the unwashed masses since international arrivals have to go through customs, but the architects of Schipol airport were at least aware of what usually happens at baggage carousels and helpfully set up a waiting area with a great view of passport control. The most time sensitive parts of our time in Amsterdam revolved around the airport whose thoughtful design made those tasks much easier.
Maybe Centraal will eventually be as well designed a transport hub as Schipol once the paroxysm of construction has passed over and through Amsterdam. Thanks to that very same construction, Centraal is a mess (and a centruy of design decisions since it was originally built). Beyond the construction, Centraal is a frustrating place because there are few and not particularly accurate and useful signs. While there were plenty of arrows indicating the direction of buses and trams, few of them bothered to point out that the office where you have to buy tickets for those buses and trams is across the street from the main train station, as though the local transit authority's remit stopped at the gates of the train station. Beyond this line, you shall not pass. The outlook did not improve when we went inside that ticket office and it was packed, an ominous sign of things to come.
Eventually, all our transportation needs were taken care and we had safely settled in at the hostel. I figured that we should avoid the tourist traps and museums and just take in the city on foot during our first day. That's when I discovered the horrible truth, or several horrible truths about Amsterdam in its current "under construction" state, the first being that Amsterdam is not a particularly pedestrian friendly city. Between the canals, the trams, the roads, and the bike paths, there is very little real estate for the lowly Fussgänger, often not enough for two people to walk side by side. Stray too far outside of your zone you risk getting run down by the scooters and mopeds traveling in the bike lane, never mind the wolfpacks of cyclists. When we finally arrived near the center of the old town at Waterlooplein, we discovered that even in those areas were tourists are expected to congregate, there is no such thing as a pedestrian zone. This was true even for the Dam square, the Red Light district, and the Centraal. If you can get there on foot, so can the crazy guys on scooters. You are never safe from them.
One of the purposes of walking on foot is to experience a city in a more relaxed way. It gives you time to process your surroundings. There is no better way to learn a city than with your feet, assuming the city is safe for such an approach (though that is also something you can learn by walking). I never felt that this was possible in Amsterdam. Even in late September, the middle of the city was crowded and pulsing with speed and movement. Everyone and everything was in a hurry or on edge or behind and trying to make up time. This edginess is exactly what you deserve if you are driving a car in downtown Amsterdam, but isn't something I generally want inflicted on me as a pedestrian (or as a flaneur really, since I had no particular purpose other than being there, which is not true of every pedestrian).
I think Amsterdam hates cars as well as pedestrians. It's not just the narrow streets and the ever present canals and roaming packs of cyclists. You can tell a lot about a city from its cars, not just things like median income level, but personality. Porsches are common on the streets of Munich (so are BMWs but you have to discount that since they are made in the city) because the city is full of trendy rich people who want to be seen and who enjoy the kind of ride the car provides, especially the stares and the envy, but also the speed and the cornering. Berlin is full of government types and Mercedes, sedans that are sober and luxurious, with just a splash of Ferrari red and British racing green to go along with the money and influence. Houston, with its oceans of oil money, features Bentleys, as well as plenty of Lexi or Lexuses or Lexus (like moose) to go along with that money. Amsterdam is full of Opels and ugly Renaults and older VWs. Most of the cars were dirty and unwashed. There are very few Alfas or Fiats or any of the other small cars that have the sense of swagger and cool that let people who can't afford swanky sports cars enjoy their ability to accomplish their weekly shop. Based on the cars I saw in Amsterdam, there is a decided lack of joy or interest in driving, certainly most of the cars aren't shown a lot of care. For some people, this will be a selling point of course, but for me, it was just more proof that the city and I would not get along.
This fact was confirmed over the next few days as my mom and I took in Amsterdam's museums, which I suspect are all designed for maximum tourist processing. They are always crowded even as late in September as we were there. They have precious few places to rest. And they never ever have any place where you can just contemplate the work of art or the piece of history on display. The Jewish museum is a bit of a breather, but it's also not particularly good at explaining or illuminating history. There will be plenty more on museum culture later, when I deal with museums from all of my travels. The verdict on Amsterdam is almostly completely negative. If I were handing out grades, it would get a D only because, to be fair, they do have some amazing works of art. You may or may not know this, but Van Gogh and Rembrandt were pretty good painters. The exception to this was the Hermitage branch campus. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg opened an exhibition hall in for rotation exhibitions in Amsterdam not too long ago (like the Louvre, but instead of dropping it in the middle of the Arabian peninsula, the Hermitage put it somewhere useful). The Alexander the Great exhibit was everything that the other museums were not. It was especially well lit, compared to the other museums. Bad lighting is a surprising problem for a museum to have when Philips, one of the largest lighting companies in the world, is a major sponsor.
An important caveat here is that Amsterdam is a city beset, plagued even, by a rash of renovations and construction projects. If you visit the city in the next two years you will run into a whole mess of renovations including (and certainly not limited to) the Royal Palace, the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk, the Central Station, the Maritime museum, the Rokin, and the road in front of the Jewish museum. If any of those places interest you, then you should put off your visit to the city until 2011 at the very earliest. I'd say you should leave it to 2012, if the world hasn't ended. I don't think I will like it anymore, but I leave that possibility open to others.
Where did that leave us? That left us very happy people when Mom and I parted ways. She was headed to a bus tour through Ireland (undeniably cool, especially since I have never been) and I was headed to Munich, the city that was really at the heart of my trip to Europe in the first place. I'm glad I went to Amsterdam. But I was much happier leaving it.
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