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.