Amsterdam

When I told my friends that I was going to Amsterdam on Saturday, there were two things that they said to me:

1)    “The entire city smells like weed. It stinks!”

2)    “Don’t go to the Red Light District! Whatever you do, don’t go there. You’ll be taken away if there is any form of darkness or shadow.”

Granted, both of those pieces were just hilarious when they were said to me, but both of them ended up holding some value of truth in the end. Before you start reading, I’ll say it now: No, I was not kidnapped in the Red Light District.

            We drove to Amsterdam early on Saturday morning. Even though my host parents had talked about it with me on Friday night, I was still shocked to find out that Amsterdam was a two and a half hour drive away. College Station is about three and a half hours from Prosper, and we make that drive a lot more often, but Germany is quite a bit smaller than Texas, so the mental definitions of distance is different too. Martin, Christel, Nik, Jana, and I all woke up around 6:30 on Saturday morning to leave for a day in Amsterdam, they couldn’t remember the last time they were all in Amsterdam together, and I knew I was never in Amsterdam at all. The back seat was quiet most of the way there as we slept all in weird positions with heads on each other’s shoulders and necks bent in uncomfortable angles, but we woke up 20 minutes outside of Amsterdam and sat up excitedly.

 My first view of Amsterdam was the Olympic Stadium from 1928. My host dad, Martin, is a huge sports fan, so he ran around talking excitedly about where the Olympic games were the years before and after and the Netherlands’ prize field hockey team. We all laughed a little as we knew his trip was made before we even had left the parking lot there and got on a street tram into downtown Amsterdam. I read the signs excitedly on my way into downtown, where I live in Germany is right on the borders to the Netherlands and Belgium, so I am used to seeing Dutch and trying to read it, but everything was more exciting when I knew I was in Amsterdam. As we pulled into the central station, I kept looking at the water that made up half of the streets of the city, and I was blown away. Every house was built narrow, tall, and it slanted out towards the street a little to get a couple extra inches floor room for the same piece of land. There were hooks hanging at the top of every house, which my host family told me was for lifting goods to the top floor, something practical that I would never had expected. As we walked down a main street covered in Amsterdam tourist shops, such as sex museums, souvenirs shops, and cafés, my host mom pointed out the windows to me and said, “Just how they paid taxes for how much land their house covered, they also had to pay a “curtain tax.” If they had curtains that meant they had something they wanted to hide… As you know, the Dutch are very open people.” Little tidbits of knowledge like that came throughout the day, such as the word “te huur,” or Dutch for “to borrow” (“teh who-r”) later evolved to the German “Hure” (“who-r-uh”) which somewhere along the line became “whore” in English. That was all invented on the streets of Amsterdam, where a man could “borrow” a woman for a night and give her back the next morning. Well, aren’t those nice little tid bits of knowledge? The crazy things the city of Amsterdam has to tell…

As our walking tour of the city continued, I kept my eyes out for one building that I had seen and studied in photos. It was narrow, tall, had 9 glass one-paned windows, and sat on the canal. It was the house of Anne Frank. Sadly, pretty much half of the houses of Amsterdam can fit that description. I had my eyes out as we passed over every bridge. Then, as we were walking in the area that we knew it was in, we came across a line that went down the block and around the corner. We had found it. “Excuse me, how long have you guys been waiting here?” I asked someone at the front of the line, while crossing my fingers, “Oh, not long! Just fifteen minutes or so, it goes quickly!” We took our spots in line and watched people line up behind us as we slowly inched our way forward. In front of us, a group of college aged students from America were talking about a friend that goes to Kansas University. Behind us, a similar group was debating where they should go next. The group behind them was also speaking in English; all the groups were plainly from America. Is there some holiday I missed out on? How can so many people just skip out to go to Amsterdam? (Besides for us Germans!) The house of Anne Frank was something to see. It really was small, and your time in there was gone before you know it. But having read the book, I appreciated seeing the rooms; seeing the pencil marks on the wall where they tracked the heights of Margot, Peter, and Anne;  seeing Anne’s collection of movie star photos still glued on the wall; seeing the bookshelf-hidden entrance where she always described hitting her head; seeing that Peter’s room wasn’t as set off from everyone else as I had though; seeing the real Diary of Anne Frank at the very end of the tour.

We went from there to lunch at a café next to one of the canals to walking through the city, looking for old bridges, shopping, and hitting up the main attraction points in Amsterdam. It was a gorgeous city that stole my breath. Terry Prachett once said, “My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them,” which holds more than its fair share of truth when you are walking through the city and a biker comes flying at you, using one of those bells for its real purpose: “Get out of my way!” As for where I began this story, the smell of certain recreation drugs definitely hits you at the most random parts while walking through the city. The other part came true in a different way, of all the places we walked to in Amsterdam, I never saw the Red Light District. I hope you weren’t expecting much of a different answer!