“This city’s a shopping mall with pot,” I said.
Matt, who’d hopped a bus from Heidelberg (where he studies something lucrative and boring) to meet us in Amsterdam, thought about this, nodded, and grinned. “Yeah.”
“Why would you go to another country to buy a watch?” Luke asked.
We’d seen it go down on the flight to Copenhagen: the mother of a sleeping baby flipped open the in-flight catalogue, pointed to the picture of a watch, and passed her credit card to the flight attendant. Not one for attachment to material possessions, Luke watched this transaction unfold in rapt fascination. Like a koan, it was still on his mind days later.
“Because you think it’ll ameliorate the relentless pain of your existence.” I smiled.
I’m the sort of traveler who’s happiest when he has to mime a friend’s deadly fish allergy to a street vendor who’s only ever spoken an obscure dialect of a dying language. The pursuit of tradition – to see and celebrate the customs, practices, and foods unique to a culture – this is what fuels my wanderlust. In Amsterdam, I was seeing mostly stoners and department stores – until a couple insiders pointed us in the right direction.
Noa, our cat-lovin’ captain, suggested, “If you need to eat the meat of animals, Blauwhooft, where mostly go Dutch people.”
We ordered deer steak, guinea fowl, and whatever else our Dutch-speaking server could describe to us: “You know, it is the animal which have the horn, the males.”
Drinking Texels at Blauwhooft, we felt like we’d been let in on something. It’s a great sensation when you’re traveling, and one we enjoyed again when S.T. Smith, Professor of Shakespeare at Universiteit van Amsterdam and Luke’s third god-uncle once removed (or something like that) took the three of us to Realisme 2014, a four day art show whose first night coincided with our last in Amsterdam.
We lost ourselves in a maze of sculptures, paintings, and photos. There were short films, there was champagne, and there wasn’t an I <3 AMSTERDAM shirt in sight.
At the end of the day, “authentic” is a tricky word. Most global cities pander to a tourist economy conducive to tacky souvenirs and multinational corporations. But, if in Amsterdam, these things frustrate you, all you have to do is look to the architecture, look to the canals, look at the lights on the water.
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