Amsterdam 1998
Amsterdam definitely has an edge about it. As you wander around nothing seems innocent or accidental. The city ticks a few boxes in the Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll lifestyle cliché. Fuelled by vivid imagination or perhaps some coffee shop herbs it was easy to stereotype every good looking young person as a porno star, every ugly sole a drug dealer and the old as hiding some secret perversion. Of course this was profoundly unfair as some of the ugly and old were also probably porno stars.
Thus far on our adventure the tactic of stumbling into town and then finding a place to stay had not caused any problems. Saturday night in Amsterdam in the middle of World Cup fever was another story. The first sign of trouble was the lack of accommodation touts at the station. We had been warned of their scams. Normally you have to fight them off fiercely to progress to the street unscathed. Dealing out combination flying elbows and “Don’t argue” straight arms that Rotten Ronnie Andrews would have been proud of. But they were nowhere to be seen.
We hit the short list from the guide book - Three nearby hotels and three blanks - Getting more accommodation knock backs than a lifetime of nativity plays. The lack of rooms at the various inns was making us give serious thought to jumping back on a train to an outlying city or even just sleeping on an overnight train and then coming back in the morning. L’s mint on pillow obsession meant that we would fight tooth and nail to find a decent room at least until the last train left at 11pm.
We were just about to give up when we stumbled upon a travel agent with an accommodation broking service. The guy behind the desk looked like Jerry Garcia of Grateful Dead fame and after a few phone calls asked how we felt about staying in a five star hotel. We thought he was joking and had mistaken the bulky passports in out money belts for wads of cash. Then he clarified by saying that if we waited until 10PM, which was only a few minutes away, we could spend the night at the Oksana Hotel for $120US. Our jaws dropped. Two nights in a row we had stumbled into prime lodgings by the skin of our teeth. From our 20th floor lodgings we short listed a hit list of accommodation targets for the next day, washed our clothes in the bath and then dried them through a combination of the central heating ducts and hot ironing. We then settled in to watch Kate Winslet beat to death both the unfortunate mother of her friend and the New Zealand accent in Heavenly Creatures on the in house video.
 Everyone in Holland we ran into spoke good English, but anyone under forty seemed to speak it with an American accent. A by-product of a US-centric curriculum I suspect. Occasionally this got me into trouble as upon hearing the yank intonation I made an assumption that they had a greater command of the language than they actually did, or perhaps they just stumbled over my Occer pronunciation. The end result was hamburgers becoming chicken burgers, cokes becoming lemonade and chips delivered soaked in mayonnaise.
New lodgings. The PC Hoofthotel sells itself as being on the border of life and the museum quarter, presumably they don’t rate a day admiring Van Gogh’s as much fun. It is more along the cheap and nasty hostel line than what we had experienced thus far, a concession to practical reality. In Amsterdam space is at an absolute premium. The end result was thin buildings that extended ever upwards accessed via stairs that should more accurately be described as ladders. Paper thin walls, a bed, an old TV and a shared bathroom down the hall. The contrast with the night before was stark.
Café society of a different sort than I was used to. Menus offering a range of blends sorted according to potency. Fumbling over the papers - Butchered jobs hastily smoked - A fortnight’s stress drifting away in the Dutch breeze.
A print of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch has hung over the TV in my folks’ lounge room for as long as I could remember. The original is much bigger and I was amazed at the extra detail and the way that the colours glistened much more strongly than in reproduction. I spent several hours wandering around the grand masters in the Rijksmuseum, mingling with the mixed crowd of art snobs and tourists. Choosing which masterpiece would integrate best with the milk crate furniture and student bum décor of my Melbourne share house back home.
Rossebuurt after dark glows in a scarlet hue. This is the Amsterdam Red Light District we had heard about in lurid detail from previous travellers. The narrow streets either side of the canal were packed with sightseeing tourists window shopping, bored hookers stared from behind the glass trying to pick prospects from the slumming hordes. Wax figurines in Madame Tussaud’s museum looked more life like than some of these creatures.
Going to a sex show with your now ex girlfriend with whom you have a mutual lack of interest is a bizarre experience. Sitting upstairs in Cosa Rossa throwing back our two drink minimum watching half hearted performers bone a sequence of fat chicks on velveteen ottomans. It was as erotic as watching a nature documentary with your mum.
Back to the hotel - England versus Argentina on the tellie - Finishing off a few more beers and the rest of the baggie of herbs from earlier in the day. Vague memories of Beckham getting sent off amid the street screams, random bangs and shag noises from next door. The jungle sounds gradually subsided and I fell asleep against the pillow barrier that separated us like cold war Berlin.
The house in which Anne Frank lived her short life was only a few streets away from our hotel on the other side of one of the ever present canals. Despite the early hour the queue stretched for over a block. I decided to come back later when hopefully the crowds had dropped and so hit the wax museum instead. Madame Tussaud was located over looking the pigeon covered square known as The Dam and as you would expect was full of a range of historical figures and celebrities. Many of the featured characters seemed sure to have a potentially limited shelf life and I wondered whether a few years hence the Spice Girls would simply have their heads recast and be recycled as the next girl group flavour of the month.
Further down Damrak towards the station was a much more interesting museum. Dedicated to the art of interrogation, punishment and torture over the ages it had on display a range of nasty devices with which to extract confessions from the unwilling. As I wandered around the various floors I started to wonder whether a night on the rack might have been preferable to another restless sleep in our own bed of horrors back at the hotel.
A big feed at a Uraguayan Steakhouse – Outside the streets were draped in orange and buzzing. Every Dutchman worth his salt was gathered in front of a television watching the Netherlands quarter final game. The waiter who took our order ducked across the road every ten minutes for an update. At one stage it seemed all the staff were over there leaving us alone in the restaurant, apparently the only establishment in the city without a big screen TV. “Hey who’s cooking our steaks?” In the end we all cheered the Orange men on in vain.
The next day the queues at Anne Frank’s house seemed even longer. I wandered around the canals that radiate out like a spiders web from the CBD. Not many cars on the roads with most of the population seeming to zip around on bicycles straight out of a 1970’s garage sale.
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