Ik geen fiets
My room last night was delightful. I had a huge bathtub, a comfortable mattress, and I was actually able to cool the room enough to sleep without dismantling my duvet. It was like a banquet for the starving, and I wish I could carry it with me for the rest of the journey. The breakfast was as delicious as the repose, and was followed by a canal cruise through Amsterdam, which I enjoyed thoroughly, and a visit to a diamond factory, which I could not have given less of a shit about. There was an antique clock included, without a clear explanation, in their small diamond-cutting museum, and it was the highlight of my visit. They were obviously just trying to sell us jewelry, and it put me in mind of a cruise I once took, except there was no mention of tanzanite.
Now we're at the city center and have been given "free time" for three hours. I've devoted this time to a little orientation walk around the area, followed by the monumental undertaking of finding food in the middle of a bustling tourist destination at noon on a Saturday. When we first arrived, I was impressed by the organization of their foot, bicycle and pedestrian traffic into three distinct paths with their own traffic signals to prevent collisions between them where they intersect. Then we got to the city center and I made some more disturbing observations. First, the cyclists do not obey their signals with any kind of regularity. Secondly, the bicycle paths are also utilized by the occasional moped or microcar with no apparent consequence for the driver. The most troublesome discovery, though, was that on the smaller streets there are, for all practical purposes, no sidewalks(because there are 11ty jillion bikes parked on what little is available), and pedestrians, bicycles and motor vehicles are all intended to share the narrow road. Luckily I learned this before I suffered any bodily injury and was able to escape quickly to a major thoroughfare. And now I'm here, at a restaurant called the Grasshopper that miraculously had an open table. My lunch is here, so I'll put down my phone and eat like a civilized person.
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That was some good bass. I had a little more time to walk around and explore after lunch, and the setting is beautiful and full of antique elegance. The store fronts themselves, however, are about as redundant as the ones found in a Caribbean port. There's weed, weed and weed, first and foremost, and I smell it everywhere, but I'm not very hungry, so hopefully I'll be ok if the new job tests me at orientation. I heard two kids joking about "the chip shop next to the pizzeria" and have quickly realized that, in this particular tourist district, it's about like saying "that place we went that time." I also have never seen so many Argentine steakhouses per block in my life, and doubt I would even if I went to Argentina. Surely none of this reflects poorly on the Dutch in general, of course, since I can't imagine that any of it is legitimately authentic or in any way representative of the remainder of the nation. There's no denying it's a major draw, though. People obviously visit here from all over the world, and I don't think I've ever been in a crowd so diverse. That has a value all it's own.
