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.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Outside. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.