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*** Of Canals and Bicycles ***
Amsterdam is a city of crooked teeth. It's the ground of course: semi-submerged mud and below sea level polder, it was never really meant to support an entire city, and no matter how many pilings you drive down, you still can't count on your house staying level. At some point, everything will sink, just a little bit. And so Amsterdam exists as a series of odd angles, buildings precipitously leaning to and fro, tipping out over sidewalks, crashing into each other, arched gables mirroring arched bridges, brick houses echoing brick streets, bicycle outnumbering automobiles, canals clogged with a mixture of house boats and paddle boats, john boats and row boats, many of them rotting from a mixture of wet weather and Dutch neglect, some of them half sunken from spending the Winter outside.
It's all perfectly charming in its own strange way. The Dutch have this word, gezellig, which is essentially a national obsession. It means cozy, and everything in The Netherlands is guaged by its gezelligness, by how cute, charming and inviting it is. But there's a catch: gezellig is social in nature, it relates to people getting together, sharing very small coffees and very small cookies in very small rooms. As I was told by some friends when I first arrived, "you can't be gezellig alone."
And that's what Amsterdam is, it's gezellig. When I first walked here, on an unseasonably warm April night, underneath a full moon, listening to the waves of the Amstel lapping against the shoreline, watching the bicyclists ride past and chatting in a mixture of languages I half recognized, it all swirled around me, like I'd walked into a movie, the movie I had been searching for that entire trip, a movie of my own. I became drunk that night, drunk on Amsterdam, in love with Amsterdam, committed to Amsterdam in ways that I couldn't even begin to understand, so that when I came back and said, "I've been to Amsterdam," no one else could possibly know what that meant.
I came back every year after that. I forsook other locations to return, to walk around, to see it at all. "Amsterdam again?" a friend would ask. And I would just smile and say, "I have to," and leave it at that. And I would come, and for a day or two I would walk around the canal belt, melting again as if for the first time.
The canal belt is the center of Amsterdam, the result of one of Europe's largest development schemes, a feat of engineering that effectively doubled the thin city in the middle of the swamp. A series of canals were dug, concentric rings forming a horshoe around the heart of the old city, the Medieval quarter that has since turned into the Red Light District, a tourist playground of prostitutes and coffee shops (a coffee shop being the Dutch term for a cafe that sells soft drugs). Like the spokes of a wheel, the streets of the city center radiate outward, crossing each canal via an improbably steep arched bridge, moving diagonally in a manner which insures that you can never get to where you're going directly, but instead are always having to double back on yourself.
When I first came here, I got hopelessly lost - everyone does. Everything looks the same. Quite literally, if you've seen one block in the canal belt, you've seen about forty of them: two rows of stove top houses facing each other across a placid canal, one lane, one way streets squeezed between the entrance steps and the parked cars, sidewalks that until recently were at grade, blocked by couches in the Summer and by garbage the rest of the time, so that you were always weaving in and out of the roadway, narrowly avoiding cars that drove too fast and bicyclists who were frustrated that you weren't paying attention to their aggressive use of the bell.
Because everything looks the same, you have very few landmarks. As a tourist, it all becomes hopelessly confusing. Street signs are small and hard to find, and once you do there's no guarantee that you'll be able to discern the difference between Elandsgracht and Elianstraat, or between Eerste Bloemenstraat and Derde Bloemenstraat. Maps become useless appendages, and besides, everything is so meticulously gridded and haphazardly slanted that it's better to just go on a mixture of gut instinct, luck and a general enjoyment of walking around in circles. After all, it's beautiful the entire way.
Walk around long enough and your mind begins to come unhinged. It's like being in a video game where they shuffle through three or four stock backgrounds: no matter how far you go you're still in the same place. Turn down a street and you think you're going right but instead you've gone left; cross an arched bridge and think you're going up but really it's down. Near becomes far, towards away, straight slanted and curved simply twists until you lose the thread completely. When you ask someone where you are, when you show them a map, where they point their finger isn't remotely close to where you thought you were, and how you get back becomes even more impenetrable. And so you just keep walking, figuring that eventually you'll wind up in the right place.
When you live here it isn't much better. You still don't really know where you are by landmarks - everything looks the same - but by place, by sequence. Three canals over and two bridges down, take a left at the narrow passageway and look out for the bicyclists, cross the cobblestone square and walk along the pedestrian lane, keep the flower market on your right until you get to the streetcar tracks, follow those for awhile and look for the overflowing bicycle rack. If it wasn't for the fact that my bike was parked on the Elansgracht I wouldn't know its name, and if you give me a street address I can't begin to tell you where it is. It took me three months to learn the difference between the Keizersgracht and the Nieuwe Keizersgracht; as any student of the language can tell you, the Dutch have never been shy about recycling words. But then the Dutch are never shy about anything.
I ask a friend from Australia what he thinks about the Dutch, and he doesn't hesitate to tell me, "I don't like them at all." Another person, an American, says to me, "the Dutch will insult you long before you insult them." Typical thoughts on the Dutch are that they're cold, they're bossy, they're frank; they don't have boundaries, they always speak their minds, they breed a level of personal independence that can border on the passive aggressive when seen in a certain light. They'll tell you themselves that they think their country is too small, too crowded, and has too many rules; The Netherlands is one large nanny state, where the idea that someone can do whatever he or she wants to as long as it doesn't cause a problem for anybody else is taken to an extreme, and ceaselessly bureaucratic, end. The Dutch themselves flee in droves for America or Southern Europe, while new immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East rush in to take their place.
And are they what everyone says they are? At times. They can be strangely formal, but they can also be friendly as well, if you give them a moment. People who are used to more Americanized climates often miss the fact that, in America, people are friendly without necessarily being sincere. We're friendly on autopilot, helpful as instinctive reaction. In Holland, there is no expectation of hospitality, not until you get to know someone, not until you've earned the right to become gezellig. But if you give it a moment, if you flash your smile, if you let someone see who you are, you'll be surprised at what they offer in return. And besides, the Dutch are nothing if not stubborn - knowing that they're considered unfriendly, many go out of their way to be overly friendly, absurdly friendly, just so that they can prove you wrong, just so that you'll have a better opinion of them. They're strangely German in that way.
And as the time passes, that way of thinking fades away. You no longer think of Dutch and Non-Dutch (although, by most accounts, they still do). You simply become a part of the city, a part of the life here. When you first arrive, people speak to you in English before you even open your mouth; it's as if something in your stance, in your presence, possibly even in your pheromones announces your foreigness, your linguistic shortcomings. And then one day that stops. People in the stores speak to you in Dutch, people that you meet ask you what part of the city you live in, tourists show you their maps and ask you how they get to the Red Light District. You begin to belong.
And every day you love it more. You see it more. Discover some new alleyway, some perfect little bridge, a darling little statue you'd previously overlooked. There are so many details hidden beneath those gables, adorning those houses: stained glass windows and art decco cornices; family crests and pastoral scenes; plaster reliefs and inlaid granite plaques; hand painted numbers over the doorway letting you know when this house was built, 1654, 1596. Some of these houses have stood for four hundred years.
This city is so old. As an American, even an American from an old city, I can't begin to understand what that means. This city was built when my hometown was still a marsh. They had dammed the Amstel, filled in the swamp, dug the canals, driven the pilings, invested in tulips, colonized the world and amassed a fortune before my town was even a settlement. You can't think of that for very long or your brain will unhinge.
And besides, that's all in the past now. The proverbial Golden Age has receded into memory, is slowly fading on the walls of the Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam today is a medium sized city, a city whose main crowds are of the tourist variety, a city that can become amazingly quiet and still when you turn off the main street, when you walk along a canal, when you pause to observe the full moon, to listen to the people around you, chatting in so many languages, going about their lives. And for a moment it all swirls around you and you fall in love all over again.
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