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A Wanky Travel Guide to Amsterdam

30 July, 2015 — by Ben Davis0

AMSTERDAM at dusk

A tiny clown car is beeping at me as, like a statesman, I steer my heavy bicycle along the waterfront of a newly developed man-made island in Amsterdam.

We’re on Ijburg, in the Ij. This was once a bay but is technically now a lake, I think. We have cycled East of Amsterdam city centre for only 20 minutes, crossing big roads and big bridges (both a novelty in Central Amsterdam) and now we ride beneath billboards of smiling young people holding the keys to their new apartments. These islands are floating yuppie barracks.

They’re quite nice though. Amsterdam has obvious architectural heritage (and you’ll see firms housed along the finer canals in the centre) so even when mass housing springs up out here on the Ij it looks okay, and we see some floating independent builds, too, talking points that characterise the Dam.

The island is windswept but it’s a hot day. I can’t believe the number of grebes with young I can see in the Ij. Like the middle-aged man I am, I shout behind me, against the tail-wind, to my oblivious wife – ‘LOOK AT THE GREEEEBES!!’.

The small vehicle has overtaken us. You can drive what can be described as ‘rudimentary cars’, one seat wide, up and down the wider cycle lanes. They look like Smart cars would if they were manufactured in a communist country. They’re undeniably fun.

Cycle lanes are of course a well-know pleasure of Amsterdam. And if you’re not used to cycling, like I’m not, you’ll find the pedal-hardened locals overtaking you, even the wrinkly ones. We were effortlessly overtaken by bird-like old people.

I’ve started talking about Ijburg because I wanted to set the scene of a yuppie utopia. That’s how Amsterdam feels to me. It’s similar to Copenhagen, it has nothing scuzzy or wanky about it, like London often does. That’s not an advantage per se, nothing feels underground or edgy here amongst the flowers, more like Amsterdam has mixed together 21st Century culture and 18th Century merchant sensibility. I don’t know what that means really, just that it suits a 30 year old who enjoys information and nibbles.

Coffee, history, art, science and tall, open-minded Dutch people with yellow hair – one golden age is stealing the essence of the last (without the long wars). I guess it helps that all those old buildings are still around. All feels reasonable, beautiful and open to scrutiny.

Ijburg has quickly sprung up and it’s more a commuter belt than a centre for hipster loafing and overheard casuistry. We cycled out there just to stretch our legs and to see how this city is expanding. Heading back to the centre, one can find burgeoning Sunday fun in Jordaan, a few minutes walk to the West of the the central railway station. This is proper loafing territory. Dutch town houses and the more familiar canals making this area seem like a European mash-up of posh Hackney and Maida Vale. It’s a spot I can highly recommend for one full weekend day in Amsterdam, especially if you’re already familiar with the new ‘villages’ of London.

Ijburg

Making these comparisons between young neighbourhoods gets more eerie the more travel I undertake. It’s partly because as I grow older there are more connections made, but it’s also because a trend for regeneration undoubtedly sprang from the moment that builders downed tools in 2008. Recession generated awful things, like the word ‘upcycling’, but it made everyone want to make the best of what they had and have – community, their health, public spaces and buildings that needed TLC, not the bulldozers. If building stopped for a while, driving up rentals and house prices, might it have served to consolidate, to allow energy to build up in the outskirts of city centres, spawning mini cultural movements in the eddies of the pre-crash development surge?

I’m not sure why I let myself write like that. Amsterdam is too small anyway to have much of this urban hipster sprawl visible in the centre, but Jordaan certainly carries the flame for friendly yuppie pursuits. Yoga, socialising in the street, walking small dogs, eventually strolling with babies. Fewer chains are noticable.

Amsterdam centre does have the standard issue shopping district though, snuck in between water, flower markets and cheese shops you’ll find at least two high streets that are chock full of trainer shops. Not sure if there’s a clog connection there. It’s all lightweight running shoes.

Like hard hewn clogs, what makes Amsterdam beautiful is definitively man-made, whether 20th Century or 17th. Humped bridges, houses leaning against each other like stag parties, waterways, windmills, floating houses, trams, buxom gables with hooks and pulleys.

What isn’t man-made but is home-grown has been for so long the attraction of Amsterdam for many. However, that great weekend pursuit, smoking pot, is less pervasive in Amsterdam that I thought it would be. The rules now don’t permit tourists to buy, there is a reduced number of cafés and efforts have begun to reduce the strength of skunk on sale.

Despite this, of course there are some tourists that indulge, though this seems to be mainly in the centre, where highs are sought out in dark coffee bars amongst strangely-tame tourist-trap shops that look like the old hemp shops there used to be one or two of in every British city, the ones selling bongs, lighters and legal highs. These places have depressing facades that know nothing of merchandising aside from the idea of obscuring any view into the shop with a wall of ‘drug paraphernalia’.

Coffee-Shops-in-Amsterdam

The coffee shops further from the centre are civilised affairs. More open and friendly. Still, I found myself wondering just which upstanding members of society can be unaffected by a full spliff of high grade cannabis every weekend or of a school night. That’s not because I’m a pussy or a nimby, though I am, just that whenever I got a whiff it smelled like the kind of stuff you can smoke for a few months, but give it a few years and you’ll develop a nervous twitch or begin to dream while you’re awake.

Before we leave, let’s go from one type of paranoia to another – the paranoid art-loving pseud who, without his hit of white gallery space, feels he might just lose his touch, unable to identify a Rubens in the early rounds of armchair University Challenge.

There’s little to say about Amsterdam’s stripes when it comes to the visual arts. The newly swish Riijksmuseum has wonderful stuff (the tourists flock to Rembrandt’s Night Watch and Vermeer’s Milk Maid) but it has to be said, it’s one of those enormous places, housing everything from delftware to model boats, modern art to weapons. It is exhausting – but luckily a ticket grants reentry for a whole day, so cool your boots.

The Van Gogh museum and the Anne Frank house get very busy. Book ahead. We only saw the Van Gogh – it was very nicely done, a fine collection (eventually set up as a dedicated museum in the ’70s by Theo VG’s grandson) and very well curated.

Take a canal and harbour cruise, too, it’s the sedate antidote to trudging round these galleries trying to better yourself. And hire a bike. Most of all just enjoy those gables.

Come on then, love, let’s go home. We jump aboard a double decker train with free WiFi that takes us back to the airport, past waterways and ’60s buildings. The sights from Schiphol to Amsterdam city centre conjure my university days in a grey campus on a huge man-made lake. Or Regents Canal, now lined with apartments upgraded from council housing, as it winds through the leafier parts of East London.

Discover more of the world with our Europe travel guides, including this mouthwatering guide to eating and drinking in Stockholm.

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A Wanky Travel Guide to Amsterdam
Title:
A Wanky Travel Guide to Amsterdam
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Coffee, history, art, science and tall, open-minded Dutch people with yellow hair. Amsterdam has it all going on. And yes, plenty of what you expected too.
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