Amsterdam by Photos

On Thursday evening, I went up to Amsterdam to see the band Beirut. I had to wait for a little while for my friends before the show, so I thought I'd wander about and grab a take-out beer. And although some neighborhoods in Amsterdam are quite lovely, this one teemed with tourists and tourist friendly establishments.

Some places that I did not eat dinner included a pancake-mussel house; any and all places offering a "tourist menu"; a restaurant specifically looking for 20 year old female waitresses; an empty chinese restaurant with stereotypical "architecture"; a self-proclaimed "Falafel King," who obviously has nothing on the Vendy Award runner-up King of Falafel and Shawarma of Astoria, Queens.

Beer was also harder to procure than you might guess. It would have been straight forward to buy magic mushrooms or marijuana; the latter is sold at "coffee shops." Both types of establishments apparently offer a side dish of the touristically required internet access.





But a beer? This place was so cheap that it was boarded up.



But in the end, it was a nice walk and a fantastic show.

Sinterklaas

Nicholas was born in 270 CE (AD) in Turkey; he apparently "had a reputation for secret gift giving." He died on December 6, 343 and this date on the calendar became known as St. Nicholas Day. [Wikipedia]

Fast forward thirteen centuries to Manhattan, in New Amsterdam:

As in the home country, the Dutch children would break out in song:

Saint Nicholas, good holy man,
Put on your best coat,
Then gallop to Amsterdam...

And on the sixth of the month, the saint's feast day, they would wake to find that he had left treats for them. ...among the English, the French, the German, the Swedish families of Manhattan, pressure was brought to bear on parents; the Dutch tradition was adopted [by them, also], and, later, pushed forward a couple of weeks to align with the more generally observed festival of Christmas. So 'Sinterklaas' began his American odyssey.

...it was [in Manhattan] that American children first longed for the arrival of 'St. a Claus' (as Rivington's New Yorker Gazetteer spelled it in the early 1770s, noting that the saint's feast day would be celebrated 'by the descendants of the ancient Dutch families, with their usual festivities'). ... It was a slim fellow in a bishop's hat whose arrival the children of Dutch Manhattan looked forward to on St. Nicholas' Eve; typically, he left treats in their shoes, but occasionally ... in stockings hung from the mantelpiece. As the non-Dutch families adopted him and he gained momentum, bits of other cultural traditions stuck to the ritual; the media (Thomas Nast's cartoons in Harper's Weekly plumped the saint and whitened his beard) and corporate advertising (the white-trimmed red suit came compliments of Coca-Cola's iconic ad campaign in the 1930s) refined the image....

[Copied from The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, which I highly recommend.]

And now fast forward some more to, obviously, the Hague. As is tradition, Sinterklaas arrives by boat from Spain; given the niceties of modern diplomacy, he is met by the Spanish ambassador. For some reason, which unfortunately I don't remember, Sinterklaas has to arrive well in advance of December 6; this year, it's this Saturday, as the posters proclaim around town (see photograph).

Despite his Turkish origins, Nicholas is thoroughly Europeanized; meanwhile, his assistants wear blackface. Rather than change this overly and overtly racialized tradition, their blackface is simply explained away as "soot" from the ship.

Some photos

Some days, when I swipe onto my floor at work, I get this inspirational message.











I finally found a vending machine that takes coins (right), but it's still pretty technologically advanced.










Moving onto food, it turns out that New York pizza is actually from a southern suburb of The Hague, seeing as this is apparently "the original."   I did not eat here. 





Finally, apparently the Dutch don't mind
 vaguely-Asian  menu items with
vaguely-demeaning names.   Woki Yaki Woki.  Right. 

Dutch Environmentalism and Blinky Lights

This post is quite difficult to entitle... so I'll describe. There's a Dutch word that has been translated variously as cheap, environmental, conservative and somewhere in between. For example, I've already commented on how they ride bicycles everywhere. Ask them why? Well, they're conserving money and the environment and it's just plain efficient. Then there's my roommate, who stuffs all of his smaller garbage into an old milk container and will one day (hopefully) throw it out with the rest of thrash. Why? Apparently, he's conserving too.

So Rotterdam is 25km away (15 miles) and a major highway connects it to The Hague. Apparently, the speed limit is only 80km/h (45mph) because -- as Americans know but do nothing about -- driving faster increases pollution. And you can't exceed the limit, either, because cameras note your plate on the on-ramps and exits and then calculate your speed. A guy I was having dinner with last night just received a €60 ($100) ticket for driving on it at 5km/h (3mph) over the limit at 1am on a recent Monday night. That and the two tickets the Belgian cameras mailed him from a recent weekend trip.

Speaking of tickets, national debate is currently raging here over bicycle lights. Many older bikes have the Dynamo system, which powers a white headlight and red taillight with a tiny generator attached to your front wheel. But many kids these days have those blinky lights that you might know from the US.
Well, there is a recent national decision that these blinky lights are out of compliance with the requirements of the national bicycle lighting law and that the police must start ticketing.

Thus, the headlines and the swirling debate. In response, the police chiefs of Utrecht and another city have decided not to comply and to permit riding with blinky lights. Other cities have promised to crack down. Parliament has scheduled at least one full day of debate for next week. And naturally, everyone's talking about it.

Then there's me: my Dynamo died last week. (I have a "bottle" dynamo to be precise.) I had thought it lucky that I brought my blinky light with me from the US. But foiled again!