Joel Jordon

This is a revised version of “Amsterdam II.” I’ve completely restructured the piece, which will hopefully help to give a much better idea of the contrast I was trying to show; I’ve also included a quote at the beginning that should make that contrast much clearer. Other major changes include a completely new introduction and an expansion of the section about bicycles. And it has a new title!

I could take the old draft off of my blog, but I’m going to keep it here because I think it’s kind of a cool way to show some of the developments that my work goes through.

Also, I finally learned how to create spaces in HTML, so there will now be proper section breaks instead of asterisks to separate the sections in my writing on here.

And I do plan on eventually writing about places other than Amsterdam: I have a piece on Paris and London in the works, which will hopefully be up here soon.

But anyway, here’s the latest (and probably final) draft of my Amsterdam piece:

 

I Am Not Sterdam

“Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour.”

- Jamaica Kincaid, “A Small Place”

 

I.

I am convinced that tourists are a species despised all over the globe and that by traveling all over the globe, they ensure that everyone gets the chance to despise them.

But regardless of how much I may not have liked it, I know that I was a tourist in Amsterdam. I stopped at street corners to take a big map out of my pocket and clumsily unfold it. I spoke English. I walked down a street in one direction, realized I was going the wrong way, and awkwardly turned around and headed in the other direction, letting everyone around me know that I was lost. I ate at a McDonald’s once. I took photographs, but bad ones; I didn’t want to have my camera out for more than a few seconds at a time because I wanted to try to hide the fact that I was a tourist.

Instead of traveling, I wish I could live in places for a few months at a time.

 

II.

It is very difficult to avoid getting run over in Amsterdam—not by cars, but by bicycles. Almost everyone here rides a bike. As a foreigner, I have not yet gotten used to the fact that the sound of a ringing bell indicates that a bike is right behind you and will run you over if you don’t quickly move out of the way. Of course, upon moving, you will probably crash into one of the many crotch-height poles that line the sides of Amsterdam streets.

Navigation in Amsterdam is kind of exciting.

 

In a suburb of Rochester, New York, I step through the front door to the outside of my house. I take a few steps to the driveway, open my car door and step inside. It’s about a ten minute drive to Wegman’s, upstate New York’s premier grocery store establishment.

When I arrive, I park near the front of the large parking lot—it would easily fit a whole block of buildings in a city—and I step outside. I walk briskly to the store’s automatic doors that slide open for me.

 

A sweet blueberry smell immediately hit me once I opened the door to a small bakery in Amsterdam. On the left side of the bakery, big windows let bright light in; against the windows were three tables with vases of flowers set in the middle. No one was sitting at the tables at the time, but they were inviting, and I wondered how often they were used. I’ve always thought of bakeries as the sorts of places where you bought your bread or whatever and brought it home, not ate it there.

Everyone stood in line instead of browsing the bakery’s selections, which must have meant that they were all regular customers who knew exactly what they were going to ask for when they got up to the counter. I was in line for several minutes; it wasn’t a long line, but it went at a slow pace. Everyone was chatting quietly in Dutch. I didn’t get the feeling of impatience that I get from standing in line for a ride at an amusement park; instead something felt right about this wait, like it was deliberately leisurely.

By the time I was second in line, though, I realized that I still wasn’t sure what to buy. I tried to look around and figure out what I’d ask for, but I got a little intimidated. All of the products were bread-based for sure, but they were odd Dutch variants on the things I was familiar with. Up until this point I hadn’t revealed my status as a non-Dutch-speaking tourist, and I didn’t want to give it away when I got to the counter and had to engage in a confusing conversation as I attempted to ask in English for one of these pastries or pies that differed slightly from the ones I’d find at home. I turned around and navigated my way to the front of the bakery, weaving between the people in the line that had formed behind me. I stepped outside.

 

Inside the suburban Wegman’s, a blast of air conditioning makes me shiver, and it smells like sterilized fruit; dim yellow lights don’t help to brighten the store’s brown displays. I pull a shopping cart from a long row and push it into the store. Its wheels rattle loudly on the store’s hard tiled floor. I move into the familiar aisles, passing by others with their rattling carts, and I take some food down from the shelves and put it into my own cart.

Eventually I push my cart back toward the front of the store to the checkout lanes. I stand silently in line for a few minutes; the people in front of me stare straight ahead. After a quick transaction during which the cashier and I barely share a glance, I cart my groceries outside to the parking lot.

 

Seas of parked bikes can be found all over Amsterdam. The sidewalks are practically littered with their tangle of metal and rubber. Sometimes you will find bikes attached upside-down to railings and hovering precariously over canals—don’t worry, they’re locked down by the strongest bike locks on Earth—bike locks that are, imaginably, a necessity in a city where bikes could otherwise be picked off the street as easily as cherries from a tree. When you see so many bikes lying around, it might at first be hard to believe that people are actually using them to get from place to place and not just, say, discarding them on the side of the road; but you will quickly realize that bikes are, in fact, not only in constant use, but also tend to be directed toward you by madmen bent on killing you with them.

Some of these wild bicyclists include those who fly along the city’s extensive bike paths wearing bright yellow and sunglasses and looking a lot like Lance Armstrong. Others, however, pedal along at a more leisurely pace. You might expect to see mainly young adults on bikes, but an afternoon in Amsterdam paints a comprehensive picture of bicycling as a lifelong means of transportation: you will frequently see older people riding bikes, as well as children, accompanied by their parents and growing accustomed to pedaling from place to place with a trusty pair of training wheels.

Where I grew up, I learned to ride a bike at a very young age, too, but it was something that was strictly a part of childhood recreation. If workplaces and schools and stores and homes weren’t so far apart from each other in the suburbs, bikes might serve a practical purpose beyond youthful recreation; but, for most suburbanites, bicycles quickly become the rusted relics of long forgotten childhoods, when you used to spend whole days with friends branching out along the paths through the woods nearby your home or practicing how to ride the whole length of the street without holding onto the handlebars or building a tiny ramp out of a plank of wood laid diagonally on blocks of concrete to give you the chance to fly in the air for just a brief moment. After all this is over, bikes are dusted off only on rare nostalgic summer afternoons.

In Amsterdam, you can tell the difference between the tourists who haven’t ridden a bike since they were children and the natives for whom bicycling remained a constant part of their lives. Rented bikes tend to come standard in one solid color, usually red or yellow, and the tourists are always moving very slowly and seem not to have complete control over their handlebars, and the front wheels of their bikes are wobbling back and forth a little, and the person riding ahead is always turning around and looking back at the other person and laughing, and you get the feeling that they’ve both somehow forgotten how to ride a bike even though there’s that idiom about how you never forget how to ride a bike.

 

In the parking lot, the warmth and brightness of the sun is easy to appreciate after the chill and muted yellows and browns of the interior of Wegman’s. The cart moves differently along the parking lot’s flat pavement; it doesn’t bounce up and down and there’s just a consistent droning sound instead of a rattling.

After I’ve unloaded my groceries into the car and returned the cart, my hands feel numb from all of the cart’s vibrations, and it seems like I should still be holding on to something. When I get into the car I grasp the steering wheel and drive home.

 

III.

Amsterdam has these nifty fast food establishments called automaats where you can buy food out of a wall. They’re sort of like big vending machines, and you can get whatever you want without having to interact with another living person. So, at an automaat, I bought a kaassoufflé, which I guess translates to “cheese soufflé,” although it’s not a soufflé. Someone told me it was a “cheese puff,” but it definitely doesn’t resemble any Cheeto I’ve ever seen. I might describe it as breaded cheese, more or less. In any case, it’s not bad.

But so while I was eating a €2 kaassoufflé (it should have been €1.40, but no machines in the Netherlands will ever, ever give you change), a group of drunk Dutch girls my age were yelling.

“I fucking hate tourists! I want to stab them! Go back to where you came from!”

She was speaking English, undoubtedly to ensure that any tourists around her understood her desire to stab them. She was leaning backward into her friend, who was laughing while holding her up. But then the girl who was yelling stood up straight and started singing.

“Go shorty, it’s your birthday!”

I finished my kaassoufflé.

I wrote this piece for my travel writing class. I used my first post about Amsterdam as a jumping-off point, and you’ll see that I start out with some writing taken straight from that post. My purpose in this piece, though, was to evoke the feelings I described in my previous post by actually writing about Amsterdam (and some other places) in detail. So, basically, while my previous post was a pretty straightforward explication of my thoughts, here I’ve tried to be more subtle and only imply my themes using anecdotes. Please tell me what you think.

*

It is very difficult to avoid getting run over in Amsterdam—not by cars, but by bicycles. Almost everyone here rides a bike. As a foreigner, my ears have not yet gotten used to the fact that the sound of a ringing bell indicates that a bike is right behind you and will run you over if you don’t quickly move out of the way. Of course, upon moving, you will probably crash into one of the many crotch-height poles that line the sides of Amsterdam streets.

Navigation in Amsterdam is kind of exciting.

*

The Netherlands is known to have a much more tolerant and accepting culture than just about anywhere else on Earth: same-sex marriage was legalized here before anywhere else, prostitution is legal, and smoking marijuana, although technically illegal, is basically allowed. This remarkably high level of tolerance has a lot to do with how, throughout its history, Amsterdam has been an international city, and its people have prided themselves on their trading businesses. The people of the Netherlands have been in constant contact with other cultures, which is echoed in the education most of them receive: many have learned how to speak Dutch, German, French, and English.

But no matter how tolerant you are, I think it’s pretty easy to get annoyed when you see someone brandishing a camera every few seconds and snapping pictures. I’m not sure any natives find it easy to tolerate tourists.

No matter how much I may not like it, I know that I am a tourist here; still, I try to hide it. This, unfortunately, makes it very difficult to take pictures. It’s already hard enough when you’re moving with a group most of the time, because if you stop for just a moment you could completely lose them in the crowd. This on top of the fact that I was so concerned with coming off as a tourist that I never wanted to have my camera out for more than a few seconds at a time, which doesn’t exactly give me much opportunity to take a decent photo.

*

In a suburb of Rochester, New York, I step through the front door to the outside of my house. I take a few steps to the driveway, open my car door and step inside. It’s about a ten minute drive to Wegman’s, upstate New York’s premier grocery store establishment.

When I arrive, I park near the front of the large parking lot—it would easily fit a whole block of buildings in a city—and I step outside; I walk briskly to the store’s automatic doors that slide open for me. The blast of air conditioning makes me shiver when I step inside, and the store smells like sterilized fruit; dim yellow lights don’t help to brighten the store’s brown displays. I pull a shopping cart from a long row and push it into the store. Its wheels rattle loudly on the store’s hard tiled floor. I move into the aisles, passing by others with their rattling carts, and I take some food down from the shelves and put it into my own cart.

Eventually I push my cart back toward the front of the store to the checkout lanes. After a quick transaction during which the cashier and I barely share a glance, I’m carting my groceries outside. The warmth and brightness of the sun is easy to appreciate after the chill and muted yellows and browns of the store’s interior. The cart moves differently along the parking lot’s flat pavement; it doesn’t bounce up and down and there’s just a consistent droning sound instead of a rattling.

After I’ve unloaded my groceries into the car and returned the cart, my hands feel vaguely numb from all of the cart’s vibrations, and it seems like I should still be holding on to something. When I get into the car I grasp the steering wheel and drive home.

*

Seas of parked bikes can be found all over Amsterdam. The sidewalks are practically littered in their tangle of metal and rubber. Sometimes you will find bikes attached upside-down to railings and hovering precariously over canals—don’t worry, they’re locked down by the strongest bike locks on Earth—bike locks that are, imaginably, a necessity in a city where bikes could otherwise be picked off the street as easily as cherries from a tree. When you see so many bikes lying around, it might at first be hard to believe that people are actually using them to get from place to place and not just, say, discarding them on the side of the road; but you will quickly realize that bikes are, in fact, not only in constant use, but also tend to be directed toward you by madmen bent on killing you with them.

Some bicyclists fly along the city’s extensive bike paths wearing bright yellow and sunglasses and looking a lot like Lance Armstrong. Others pedal along at a more leisurely pace, sometimes in couples or groups. You can usually tell who the tourists are because rented bikes tend to come standard in one solid color, usually red or yellow, and the tourists are always moving really slowly and seem not to have complete control over their handlebars, and the front wheels of their bikes are wobbling back and forth a little, and the person riding ahead is always turning around and looking back at the other person and laughing, and you get this vague feeling that they’ve both somehow forgotten how to ride a bike even though there’s that idiom about how you never forget how to ride a bike.

*

The sweet smell of pastries and pies leads me into a small bakery in a quaint part of Amsterdam. Inside, bright light streams through the windows. Everyone stands in line instead of browsing the bakery’s selections, which must mean that they’re all regular customers who know exactly what they’re going to ask for when they get up to the counter. I’m in line for several minutes; it’s not a long line, but it goes at a slow pace. Everyone is chatting quietly in Dutch. I don’t get the feeling of impatience that I get from standing in line for a ride at an amusement park; instead something feels right about this wait, like it’s deliberately leisurely.

By the time I’m second in line, though, I’ve realized that I’m still not sure what to buy. I try to look around and figure out what I’ll ask for, but I get a little intimidated. Up until this point I haven’t revealed my status as a non-Dutch-speaking tourist, and I don’t really want to give it away when I get to the counter and have to speak English. I turn around and navigate my way to the front of the bakery, weaving between the people in the line that has formed behind me. After stepping outside, I walk across the street to the convenience store.

*

At one of Amsterdam’s nifty “food in the wall” establishments, I bought a kaassoufflé, which I guess translates to “cheese soufflé,” although it’s not a soufflé. Someone told me it was a “cheese puff,” but it definitely doesn’t resemble any Cheeto I’ve ever seen. Basically, a kaassoufflé is breaded cheese. It’s not bad.

But so while I was eating a €2 kaassoufflé (it should have been €1.40, but no machines in the Netherlands will ever, ever give you change), a group of drunk Dutch girls my age were yelling.

“I fucking hate tourists! I want to stab them! Go back to where you came from!”

She was speaking English, undoubtedly to ensure that any tourists around her understood her desire to stab them. She was leaning backward into her friend, who was laughing while holding her up. But then the girl who was yelling stood up straight and started singing.

“Go shorty, it’s your birthday!”

I finished my kaassoufflé.

By the end of my semester abroad in Europe, I want to figure out how to be a traveler.

Jamaica Kincaid’s “A Small Place” has made me scared to be a tourist. Before reading her essay, I knew the hollowness of tourism—how easily you can travel somewhere as long as you stick to the touristy parts, don’t venture outside of your comfort zone, and ultimately don’t really experience the culture of the place at all.

But Kincaid gets political, and she really drives the point home that it’s a terrible thing to be a tourist. Tourism is a privilege that only the relatively well-off have the opportunity to enjoy; those that don’t have the same opportunity to leave the places they live naturally find tourists reprehensible. To those who cannot travel but see a tourist enjoying himself, he must come off as “[a]n ugly thing,… an ugly empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that.”

Kincaid was writing about Antigua, a small Caribbean island frequented by tourists. I’m traveling in Europe, and the politics at play here aren’t quite the same: there are many people in Europe who do indeed have the opportunity to be tourists themselves. But I think Kincaid’s essay is still relevant to me, because my ability to travel comes from being relatively well-off, and she’s made me scared to be a tourist.

This is a good thing, because I think it will help me try to be more of a traveler. Of course I’m still a well-off tourist at the core of things, but I hope that, if “A Small Place” has helped me recognize the privilege and opportunity that I have, I won’t let it be wasted; I’ll really try to experience the cultures of the places I visit.

It’s certainly not easy to do, but I have a few months to practice.

*

It is very difficult to avoid getting run over in Amsterdam. Not by cars, but by bicycles. Almost everyone here rides a bike. As a foreigner, my ears have not yet gotten used to what the sound of a ringing bell indicates—i.e., that a bike is right behind you and will run you over if you don’t quickly move out of the way. Upon moving, it is quite likely that you will crash into one of the many crotch-height poles that line the sides of Amsterdam streets. Navigation in Amsterdam is an adventure, to say the least.

*

The Netherlands is known to have a much more tolerant and accepting culture than just about anywhere else on Earth: same-sex marriage was legalized here before anywhere else, prostitution is legal, and smoking marijuana, although technically illegal, is basically allowed. This remarkably high level of tolerance has a lot to do with how, throughout its history, Amsterdam has been an international city, and its people have prided themselves on their trading businesses. The people of the Netherlands have been in constant contact with other cultures, which is echoed in the education most of them receive: most have learned how to speak Dutch, German, French, and English.

But no matter how tolerant you are, I think it’s pretty easy to get annoyed when you see someone brandishing a camera every few seconds and snapping pictures. Since I have been inspired by Jamaica Kincaid to vow to try to not be a tourist, this means trying to figuring out how and when it is appropriate to take pictures.

Before leaving for Europe, I actually didn’t even own a camera. I’ve never liked taking pictures, and my reason has always been that attempting to commemorate something just gets in the way of actually experiencing it.

I still stand by this belief, but I also thought I might piss off a lot of people I know if I went to Europe and didn’t even take pictures of anything. And I’ve realized that there might be some practical uses for photographs—including them on this blog, for example, or using them as memory cues when I sit down to write.

But I had an incredible struggle with trying to figure out how and when to take pictures in Amsterdam. I was moving with a group most of the time and so couldn’t stop to take a picture without completely losing them as they passed around the next corner; and I was so concerned with coming off as a tourist that I never wanted to have my camera out for more than a few seconds at a time, which doesn’t exactly give me enough time to take a decent photo.

On top of that, I just couldn’t figure out what deserved to be photographed. Who am I to decide that this exact moment in time—instead of, say, a moment five seconds later or five seconds earlier—should be captured? Why should I be capturing this or that car or bicycle in a picture when waiting just a few more seconds would mean not capturing them at all? Maybe all of this seems a little unimportant and I just shouldn’t think so much about the pictures I’m taking, but I’m an inexperienced, obsessive-compulsive, and confused photographer, and these are the questions I ask myself.

Maybe this is why I’m a writer and not a photographer. As a writer I can sit safely behind a desk, I can avoid revealing a camera and thus keep my status as a well-off tourist hidden, and most of all I can maintain control over everything. The stuff I capture in writing isn’t dependent on the world whirling around me at the moment of the capture like it is with photographs; with writing I’m afforded the ability to combine moments or excise them as I please.

This has its own pros and cons. On the one hand, writing lets me first think about everything and then attempt to express myself as honestly as possible. On the other hand, it allows me to edit myself; here, for example, in this post titled “Amsterdam,” it has allowed me to almost completely keep from talking about Amsterdam.

*

Having grown up in a suburb where it was pretty much impossible to go anywhere except by car, I find Amsterdam’s bike culture fascinating. I’m willing to bet that it makes everyone a lot healthier, more sociable, and happier all around.

After all, when you’re using a car to get from place to place, you’re really only outside for a maximum of several minutes at a time: between your house and your car, and between your car and the (probably indoor) place you’ve driven to. Hence you’re always kind of confined, which puts some pretty strict limits on your potential socializing with others. You’re really only engaging with other people in just a few very small spaces (your house, your car, and the store), and you have very little physical contact with anyone.

Of course, once you introduce walking or biking it doesn’t mean that you’ll instantly begin to have in-depth conversations with all of the strangers you happen to run into on the street. It’s more subtle than that. You’ll be physically closer to other people, and you might share a smile with a stranger or two. These are all small things that I think can have a big impact on an entire community.

However, I think it takes an entirely different culture than what you’ll find in most of America to have a community fully embrace intercommunication and socialization. For what it’s worth, a lot of complete strangers in the small Dutch town of Well greet me with a friendly “Hallo.” I’m usually too taken aback to respond before they pass by me.

*

I really do want to be honest and sincere in my writing more than anything else. To that end, I want to clarify that I have no intentions of vilifying Americans or America or tourists or tourism. The fact is that I’m an American tourist whether I like it or not, and to try pretend I’m above other American tourists would be dishonest and unfair.

My main purpose here is only to express my thoughts about my experiences. Whenever comparing or criticizing, I try to keep my own perspective in mind and I try to avoid pretending I’m outside of or above those comparisons and criticisms. And keep in mind that none of my theorizing (e.g., about how bicycle culture makes everyone happier) is based on any research, and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

*

How do you experience culture? Is it just learning the history of a place? Visiting museums and churches? Or should you wander through a city, stumbling upon random people and places? Does it even make sense to seek to experience something as abstract as “culture”?

I think I’d need to live somewhere to really feel like I’m experiencing the culture of the place. By its very nature, travel typically only offers brief glimpses of different cultures, and in my brief travels I’m not even sure how successful I’ll be at getting those glimpses. I’ll try my best.