Blogged with Flock

This city is at the same time very livable and very hard to live in. It is a beautiful city with great people but part of what makes it so interesting, also makes it, well, unnerving.

Their are bicycles everywhere. They are strapped to every tree, locked to each lamp post and crouding every intersection. The handsome (and beautiful) Dutch whizz around the city silently with excellent posture as they make thier rosy cheeked way to their final destination. The other side of this eco-pefect reality (enjoyed by young and old) is that if you are a pedestrian or a motorist, you are either constantly worrying about hitting a quickly moving cyclist or being slammed into by one of Amsterdam’s silent, two- wheeled assasins.

The Canals are perfect. I love them and the presence of water traffic and the possibilities for exploration and transportation are fully exploited. Further, the canals beautify the city and divide the different sections of town from each other so it is all a tidy series of connected worlds. The need for canals on the other hand, combined with the many cyclists and cars (mostly parked) means that the pedestrian is constantly squeezed out of what ever space was available and has to resort to leaping from 1m x 1m brick islands between bike paths and traffic lanes to avoid being hit by one of the aforementioned land hazards of Amsterdam. Add to this the Metro stations and the tram lines and the adage “spoilt for choice” becomes “too many cooks in the kitchen…”. With so many well thought out transportation modes to participate in, the limitations of space and the mutability of human life impinge on the full enjoyment of getting around in this city.

The Red Light District lends the otherwise meticulous Dutch an air of excitement in an otherwise visceral-free zone. Stimulation in the rest of the city will tickle your brain and your purse, even your creative juices but for true excitement, go directly to the amygdallic brain-stem people: the Red Light District. While possibly not visited by choice by Dutch over 25, the Red LightDistrict of Amsterdam is busy, vibrant and, well, full of smoke and, well, windows. The smoke is emmitted by visitors of a youngish demographic and the windows are the dwelling places of sex workers (or tourist landmarks) displaying a wide variety of genetic variability and generally trying to look sexy and bored at the same time. From a citizen’s point of view (and Amsterdam is a city of its citizens) the clientelle this district attracts (think frat boys and soccer hooligans in particular) effectively excludes a portion of the city from use. If I lived in Amsterdam, I would probably never go there.

There you have it. My 2 Euro cents on the subject. Hello to you all from the City that the Dutch took back from the Sea.