Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

We’d had a fast and furious two weeks, and were dead exhausted. Still, since we had a few days left before we had to head back home, and I’m always up for seeing a new town, we decided to hit Amsterdam. Where better to relax and wind down for a couple days?

Amsterdam conjures up certain images - there’s the quaint houseboats and canals, of course, and the strange, sometimes crooked rowhouses with their hooks used for hauling up furniture (the doorways and halls being too narrow). There’s its storied history, and two world-class art museums. Of course, those kinds of images are usually secondary to its most famous low-culture quartet: beer, pot, hookers, and porn.

Those four are all well and good (and cheap - the one time we hit the coffee house I spent more on playing pinball than on weed), but what Amsterdam really should be famous for on a low-culture level is its amazing variety of greasy street food. For every red-light house, coffee shop, or bar there’s 10 kebab carts, pizza joints or French Fry stands. It makes sense - you’re never going to go broke trying to feed people cheap greasy food in the world’s #1 destination for drinking and smoking pot.

I hit the museums and walked around town, but the only tourist attraction we really went out of our way to see was the old Heineken Brewery. After coming back from South America, I had visited a friend in Atlanta, where the main tourist attraction was the “World of Coke,” admission 10 dollars. I shouldn’t have scoffed snobbily at the tourists lined up to get in: the brewery ended up being pretty much the equivalent Dutch tourist trap: the “Heineken Experience.” Well, at least we got three glasses of beer and a take-home glass with our admission.

We did manage to find a great bar though - centrally located, non-touristy, with a great selection of beer on tap (each of which came in its own unique glass). I highly recommend to all of you a night at Cafe Gollem - or an afternoon, as that’s when they have their microbrew sampler.

After Cafe Gollem, we couldn’t resist climbing one more thing in Europe. We headed up to the top of this church. It turned out that I had, in fact, climbed my namesake church - the Mozeshuis (or Moses House in English).

Notice the huge billboard on the outside of the church. A 50-foot tall fashion model gracing a house of God is pretty par for the course there. Amsterdam’s a weird place. Not just for their acceptance and embrace of the more tawdry side of life, but for the way they don’t seem to see any inherent conflict between it and their more highbrow culture. Perhaps this picture explains it best. There was one more interesting “got to love the Dutch” scene we found before we left: this mural of Johnny Rotten. Not really just for the mural though - but for where they thought it most appropriate to put it.

It was a fantastic trip. Despite a bit of an adventure transferring flights at Charles de Gaulle (the most dystopic airport I’ve ever been too - we all but ended up on the tarmac), the journey home was uneventful. Still, we weren’t sad, but exited. We had a great time exploring Paris as extreme tourists, but ultimately we were just that: tourists. Above, around, and below New York City, we’re at home.

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

One of the most interesting things about this trip was getting to see the different layers of Paris. The catacombs themselves had some layers - often there were two different levels above each other, with manholes, stairs, and ladders further adding a three-dimensional element of height and depth. But visiting the catacombs also exposed us to the layers of Paris as a whole. Here’s a few examples.

Our Hotel: View from street level, view of our second-floor room (that’s the cata map on the table), view from the roof, view from underneath in the catacombs.

The Val de Grace: View from street level, view from underneath in the catacombs

The Cemetery Montparnasse: View from above, view from ground level, view from the catacombs underneath the western end, view from the ossuaries underneath the eastern end.

While we only visited the Cemetery Montparnasse in order to get a ground-level shot above the ossuaries, I actually discovered a few famous graves - the first being Alfred Dreyfus (of the famous Dreyfus Affair), and his family, (some of whom, as you can tell from the grave, were deported to Auschwitz). The second was a joint grave: Simone de Beauvoir and her “longtime companion,” Jean-Paul Sartre. I felt very French (and was endlessly amused) when I got to tell Steve to literally “meet me at the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre.” I also thought I had found the grave of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (one of the people he helped commit suicide, Merian Frederick, actually used to be our neighbor). I was a little thrown by the “Aram” before the “Jack Kevorkian,” but I figured this quote at the bottom of the grave was kind of indicative of the Jack Kevorkian we all know. But I was wrong - Dr. Jack’s currently still alive and in jail, while it’s lawyer and newsletter publisher Jack Kevorkian who died in 2003 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

The shot of the cemetery from above was taken from the Tour Montparnasse - the best and least appreciated of the observation decks of Paris. In addition to our unofficial views, I had been up the Eiffel Tower on an earlier trip (as related here), and also went up to the roof of the Notre Dame on this trip. My advice is to save your money (and time spent waiting in line) for the Eiffel Tower, go on the Notre Dame tour only for the up-close view of the gothic architecture, and make sure to hit the roof of the Tour Montparnasse. Don’t pay though - just say you’re going up to the restaurant. Nobody checks tickets for the roof. And while the daytime view is certainly nice, make sure you’re up there at night - and you’ll see that Paris has truly earned its nickname of the City of Light.