24 hours in Amsterdam
When I got off the train at Amsterdam Centraal late yesterday morning, I was overwhelmed with a sense of coming home. Since I was last there in 2003, I've been feeling like a bit of a wanker lately for claiming it's as much as home for me as San Francisco or Sydney. But I felt compelled to stand on the platform for a while and take it all in. In my gut, I knew this was definitely a home.
It's amazing how little it's changed. All these cool little shops I expected would have disappeared were still there: the fossil shop on the side of Ruysdaelkade, the 'Australian' ice cream company that's actually Belgian but sells amazing chocolates as well, the other chocolate shop on the Staalstraat that hopeforyou fell in love with, Female and Partners, and despite rumours I'd heard, 'smart shops' were open and trading freely. The only changes I noticed is that the automated announcements on the metro are now in a male voice (the automated announcements in Sydney have changed gender the other was in the last five years, too-realignment surgery or cultural exchange?), there's a new metro connection, and, sadly, the hairdresser that used to be underneath my place on Ceintuurbaan has been replaced with a nail salon. Oh, and the Rijskmuseum is undergoing renovations, so I wasn't able to ride through the busking tunnel that often featured Himalayan throat singers. There was a lot of construction around town, actually, including the same roadwork on Ferdinand Bolstraat that was there five years ago-apparently they're building an additional metro line.
I'd also forgotten just how much of a breeze cycling around Amsterdam is. I remember it being much better than anywhere else I'd been, but I'd forgotten that city riding is actually pleasurable there. Priority rules favour cyclists, and the few places they don't, cyclists have their own traffic lights. I guess another thing that's changed is that motorcycles don't run red lights all the time like they did when I lived there; apparently they've started cracking down on that.
I rode about 20km yesterday, including to Het Nieuwe Meer. The ride to halimede and science_vixen's place was more challenging than I expected because of all the roadworks along the bike paths... I guess that's also something that's different.
Words can't describe what a pleasure it was to catch up with halimede again-it had been way, way too long since we'd had a real conversation, even though I've probably had more in-depth IM conversations with her than anyone else. I'll be making more of an effort to keep in touch in future. It was also nice to see Xavera Hollander again, which is where I spent the night. She seemed livelier than when I saw her previously-maybe she was jetlagged last time she was in San Francisco.
I'm going to do my best not to let it take so long before I'm there again, and to be there for longer than just one day next time. Then again, I've been saying I've been wanting to visit places like New York, Boston and Seattle again for even longer. The world isn't as small as they say.