Chapter 28: A week in Amsterdam

I’ve spent far too much of this blog describing some of my more dubious hostel experiences in all their miserable detail, but up until now I hadn’t had one that was so bad I simply packed up and walked out on an entire booking. I did abandon one in Barcelona, but that was only because it didn’t have a fridge. I was going to be in Amsterdam for eight nights, which is long enough that I wanted to secure a bottom bunk to look after my creaking knees, which feel like they’ve carried me across 25 countries in six months. And the woman at reception was happy enough to allocate one to me, and well away from the ear-splitting wall of sound radiating out from the hostel bar downstairs at that. This was an excellent start. 

Then I got up to the room, and… I didn’t linger long enough to be able to firmly identify whatever fluid it was that had been spilled – or possibly sprayed – on the bed. An excellent start had begun to descend rapidly, and so did I, back down to reception. The bed’s a little damp, I’m sorry. Nope, not sure what it is, I’ll have to leave that to you to figure out. Can we please try again? And don’t forget the bottom bunk, if possible.

A second bottom bunk was indeed possible, but I’d be on the ground floor, a lot closer to the bar. A lot, lot closer. I’ve mostly managed to avoid party hostels along the journey: a prominently promoted hostel bar in their listing is a red flag, but that was the case for virtually every Amsterdam hostel, and I’d simply had to roll the dice… and lost. Hans Brinker Hostel is a big operation, with 500 or so beds, and 499 of them appeared to belong to kids aged between 18 and 23, who were all laughing and screaming and shouting directly outside my window. The bar wouldn’t close until 1AM. I could maybe have dealt with it for a night or two, but eight? I’m far too curmudgeonly for that.

Back to the reception for a second, increasingly embarrassed and apologetic time. They could no longer find me a bottom bunk that was available for eight nights, but I insisted this was fine: I was happy to move from one room to another after a couple of nights, if that’s what it would take to find a dry bed without a riot taking place outside the window. Whilst they worked on a solution I went to use the bathroom in the common area, which had a sign on the front door that apologised in advance for the smell, explaining that they had some ‘dirty guests’. This was no longer an excellent start to my time in Amsterdam.

Eventually a third room was located and off I went, with some trepidation, to check it out. There were three bottom bunks and despite one being allocated to me, all were occupied. I’d almost stopped caring by that point and resigned myself to climbing up and down for a week… only to find there was no ladder to climb up with. Unlike the last time I was confronted with such a dilemma, there wasn’t even a Russian dancer present to demonstrate a good climbing technique. I desperately didn’t want to go back downstairs, but unless one of the guys in the room was inclined to volunteer to move (my hints in that direction went unheeded), I had no choice. A staff member came up and politely ‘requested’ that the other guest move, and so there I was, the least popular guy in the room.

My new room didn’t appear to have heating or cooling. It didn’t have functioning wifi. The ensuite bathroom didn’t carry a disclosure notice on the door, but it wasn’t far off warranting one. I was at least away from the bar, but now the bar had closed and the party had moved to the hallway instead. I couldn’t deal with all of this for a whole eight nights, so I went downstairs, informed them I’d be leaving in the morning and secured a refund, leaving the question of where on earth I would sleep for a week in one of the world’s most expensive cities unresolved. 

I didn’t want to risk another party hostel, so I ended up going door to door to find somewhere. When I asked at the second one I tried if it was a party hostel, the man working looked physically ill. “No!”, he said. “We want no alcoholics here!” A slight over-reaction, but I’d take it. My new home, Hostel Van Gogh, was much, much more expensive, but it didn’t quite cost an arm and a leg. An ear, perhaps.

*

I remember my very first breath of fresh overseas air. I was punched in the nose by the smell of incense the moment I stepped outside Denpasar airport. The miasma hangs over Bali at all times, but after just half an hour I could no longer smell it: my brain had obviously acknowledged to my olfactory system that yes, Bali smells funny, but there wasn’t much we could do about it so we might as well ignore it. I was in Bali for a week but the next time I caught that smell wasn’t until three years later, when I arrived in Singapore and emerged from the subway in Little India.

Amsterdam’s signature scent is only marginally less pervasive, with hot spots dotted around the city, not an all-enveloping cloud. That meant the inoculation I received in Bali didn’t work this time, and so I was assaulted perhaps half-hourly by a pungent Eau de Cannabis that I never quite got used to. The smell radiates out from all the pot cafes – which are much more widespread than I expected – but smoking is also legal, or at least tolerated, in public spaces as well. There’s weed in the parks, in the squares, in the street. I saw one bloke with an unlit joint waiting for a tram: a passing police office offered him a light. If there isn’t a cop with a lighter handy, you might instead duck into the nearest corner shop, which will sell you cannabis muffins, cannabis ice cream and cannabis lollipops.

I don’t imbibe – having an illness that can quickly put me in a coma if I screw up discourages me from seeking out altered states of consciousness – and so Amsterdam kept giving me a headache. Second-hand smoke has been irritating me across Europe, but feeling second-hand stoned? That was new. 

I’d set out to explore the city after settling into the blissfully quiet and apparently teetotal Van Gogh Hostel, with no real objective in mind other than that I would head north, into the central canal district. The first thing you notice the moment you step outside in Amsterdam is the bikes. Everybody who is physically capable of pedalling rides a bike. There’s not a single fence railing, tree trunk or lamp post that doesn’t have a bike attached to it. I doubt it’s even possible to be outdoors in Amsterdam and not have a bicycle in your direct line of sight. There are so many bikes they have to get creative about finding places to park them all:

Cyclists rule the roads here just as firmly as cars do in Melbourne, and just as imperiously: more than once I had to literally jump out of the way of a bike that was coming through, no matter what. Throw in the canals, which required full awareness of where safe footholds end and water begins, and it’s the most precarious city to wander aimlessly through since Sofia, with its death-trap pavements. But the canals, and the bridges and buildings surrounding them are worth being cautious around:

And they provide a stage for my favourite busker yet:

Bilbo

There’s an organ in the boat that he operates with his feet while playing the trumpet with one hand and steering with the other. His repertoire stretches from classical jazz to modern pop, and he even performed a Led Zeppelin duet with the bell ringer in one of the nearby churches, which I desperately regret not capturing on video. I was just wondering how he planned to monetise the operation when he pulled out a wooden fishing pole, with a clog hanging from the line for holding coins. I gave him a euro. When Bilbo Baggins is rowing an organ, playing Stairway to Heaven in harmony with a church and fishing for tips with a shoe, you pretty much have to give him a euro.

The first I knew that I was in the red light district was when I looked up and saw a semi-naked woman smiling at me from behind a window. For anybody who isn’t aware, Amsterdam is (in)famous for its red light district, where prostitutes literally stand in windows in lingerie, trying to attract customers. It’s one of Amsterdam’s biggest tourist attractions, but I found the place deeply uncomfortable. 

I’ve been stuck on writing this paragraph now for 15 minutes. I have no objections – none – to sex work, as long as people are freely choosing to do it, are free to leave and are able to work safely. In short, it’s a job like any other. And it’s not that I think women standing in their underwear in windows is inherently demeaning, either: a service like any other should, logically, be as freely advertised as any other, so it would be hypocritical of me to suggest otherwise.

No. It’s not prostitutes that make the red light district depressing. It’s the tourists. Curious in spite of myself, I went back for a walk around after dark. I saw my three dorm mates, a trio of young, evidently not very observant Muslim men from Dubai who had come to Amsterdam to break taboos: they smoked pot, drank alcohol, ate pork and roamed the red light district, egging each other on to knock on the windows. 

They were annoying, but not nearly as much as an Australian-accented woman I overheard. “You are beautiful!”, she shouted, but not at me. She was pointing at a woman in a window, arms outstretched, both in admiration and in sorrow.

“You are so beautiful!”, she repeated. It’s true. The woman was beautiful. She also thought she might have a client.

“It’s such a shame. Isn’t it a shame?” Her friend nodded. “Such a shame. Such. A. Shame.”

I was on the point of interjecting, curious to know how ugly a prostitute should be before it’s acceptable for them to stand in a window and be slut-shamed by hypocritical Australian women, but off they toddled to despair over the fate of some other woman who was pretty enough to know better.

I wasn’t enjoying the red light district, let’s put it that way. I’m not a wowser: I essentially agree with what Amsterdam seeks to accomplish, both with the pot cafes and the red light district. Normalising, destigmatising, bringing things out of the shadows is the right thing to do, but because Amsterdam is the only place that’s doing it it’s had the perverse effect of turning parts of the city into a Mecca for taboo-tourism, and it feels seedy and depressing, rather than liberated. I’m sure it’s different away from the city centre, but I’m not sure I’m in a hurry to find out.

Ogling and judging women isn’t the only tourist attraction in the red light district, though: it has a bunch of oddball museums too. The Hash, Marijuana and Hemp Museum is run by the biggest weed retailer in Amsterdam, so it can’t quite claim to be dispassionate about its subject. It’s interesting anyway, covering everything from hemp as a sustainable building material – apparently Ford are now using it to make car doors, of all things – through pot use in religious ceremonies, medical marijuana and the absurd consequences of the war on drugs. There’s a display of an indoor growing set-up that apparently required special permission for them to have, because even in Amsterdam marijuana laws are hopelessly incoherent. It’s legal to grow plants outside, on your balcony, but not inside under lights. And while it’s legal for the cafes to sell you a joint, because that counts as individual consumption, it’s illegal for them to buy in stock, because that’s wholesale distribution. Utterly ridiculous.

I knew very well that the Sex Museum would be a tourist trap, pitching itself at hen and bucks parties, but for €5 I thought it would be good for a laugh. Unfortunately it was too grim even for that. As you climb the stairs you feel a blast of hot air: turn towards it and you find a pair of plastic buttocks with eyelashes, mounted to the wall, winking at you. I mean. Who came up with that? Much of the museum is made up of surprisingly modest plastic dioramas, including not one but two animatronic Marilyn Monroes. One recreates her skirt flying up over a stormwater drain, and the other a Playboy photo shoot: as if the winking buttocks weren’t enough, the sleazy robot photographer turns from Marilyn to you and he gives you a wink, too:

I’d seen enough after 15 minutes. 

Lest you think there’s nothing ‘wholesome’ in Amsterdam, I completed the trifecta of sex, drugs and… flowers… with a visit to the Tulip Museum. Unfortunately it’s another corporate branding exercise run by some big flower wholesaler, but it had an entertaining set of exhibits on Tulipmania, when flower power got a little out of hand in the 1600s and a single rare bulb was briefly worth twenty times the average national wage until everybody came to their senses, the market crashed and people’s blooming fortunes were nipped in the bud. 

The Tulip Museum was really only a brief diversion while I waited for the queues to thin outside Anne Frank House. I hadn’t actually planned to go here: as I’ve written before I’ve consciously limited the extent to which I trace the Holocaust on this trip and besides, I’d never actually gotten around to reading her diary. But having made a belated decision to visit, I downloaded it and started reading… and was amazed, and amused, and heart-broken by the sheer quality of her writing, the depth of her thinking, the strength of her ambition, the fierceness of her independence, and the humour she somehow summoned in circumstances where I would have completely collapsed both physically and mentally. I was about half-way through when I visited the building, and the sense of immediacy that provided, being in the rooms that Anne had described to me that morning, was like no other historic site I’ve visited anywhere along the trip. She’d be 88 today: maybe still alive and writing but for the worst cruelty that humanity is capable of. It makes me so angry.

My hostel’s namesake, the Van Gogh Museum, didn’t make me angry, but it was a little sad. I’d chosen to skip the Rijksmuseum: it’s best known for its enormous collection of Rembrandts and other Dutch masters, which are technical masterpieces but otherwise mostly boring portrait photos from the pre-camera era, and I’m a Philistine who has had about as much art as I can handle for one year in any case. Vincent Van Gogh, though, is this Philistine’s favourite artist, so an entire museum of Van Goghs was too good an offer to pass up. The collection is built largely on the family’s own collection, including most of his letters as well as many key paintings, and it uses them to tell his life story remarkably well. Most of his output was in the last couple of years of his life, as he was spiralling into mental illness and ultimately suicide, and it’s both remarkable how much he achieved and mournful to imagine how much more he might have accomplished with better treatment.

This was all getting a little heavy, so I made a day trip to Apenheul, a primate park appropriately located in the town of Apeldoorn, where most of the smaller monkeys and lemurs are in what amounts to free range slabs of forest that visitors walk through. You can get rather close:

That last one of half a curious lemur’s face was a fraction of a second before said curious lemur head-butted my camera. 

I finished in Amsterdam more or less as I started it, wandering about aimlessly. I’d been seeing this flag everywhere:

I’d assumed it was a sporting team, but then I spotted it on an official-looking building and looked it up. It’s the official Amsterdam city flag. When even the flag is rated XXX, perhaps they get the tourists they’re asking for?

That night I decamped to Rotterdam, from where I would get the overnight ferry out of the Schengen zone for the last time. I was only 108km away from Antwerp, where I’d been some 142 days earlier, but thanks to that Schengen area I’d had to make an approximately 15,907km detour. Whose stupid idea was this?