Returning to Amsterdam

This week I went to Amsterdam to attend a committee meeting. It's quite a committee- comprising folk from all over the mobile phone industry and it meets every 3 months at locations around the world (next stop Korea). The committee (part of a foundation) is charged with trying to decide what software should be part of its software platform.

It's been a while since I stayed overnight in Amsterdam. In fact I think all my previous trips have a day here or a day there except for one... It was around September 1982 and Paul and I were inter-railing around Europe... We'd arrived in Bergen in Norway only to discover that the Youth Hostel had closed for the Winter! With nowhere cheap to stay it looked like the best thing to do was head back towards Belgium and the boat home, our main stopover being Amsterdam.

It took a while to travel down to the Netherlands and as we rolled through Germany we were joined in the compartment by one other fellow inter-railer. We chatted... he had a box of Jaffa Cakes (half cookie half cake)... we shared and all went well... until we arrived at the Dutch border. By now Paul and I were quite used to the border crossings with the curt guards scrutinizing our passports and tickets. Needless to say Paul and I passed inspection, but our fellow passenger was unceremoniously told to get off the train. He said goodbye to us and headed off down the train platform to somewhere other than Holland. As far as I know to this day this guy was no different to us, just a fellow traveler seeing the world from a train. Except for one thing.... he was black. I've never forgotten that.

Walking from Amsterdam's Centraal Station to the Vondel Park Youth hostel late at night wasn't much fun either. People wanted to sell us stuff that we really didn't want to buy. The Youth Hostel (later featured on an Episode Dr. Who) had very big door which was shut tight and an intercom system that we use to gain access. Inside, every locker had been prised open and the lock smashed. The place looked like the inside of a housing project gone seriously wrong. Robbed once we slept on top of our things, the night passed and we headed off to another country....

As the taxi pulls up to the Vondel Park Hotel on the quiet Vondel Straat I am left with these images and wondering just how different it's going to be. The hotel turns out to be quite delightful. It describes itself as a "Boutique Hotel" which I think means that someone has spent some considerable time looking at every aspect of the interior decor and crowding ornaments, statues, paintings and plants tastefully in it. The overall decor is black and oak. It works for me. My eye is pleased almost everywhere I look and the place feels cozy rather than a museum. It also has a free community laptop which I toy with.

First night the girl serving at the bar is Polish (of course) and rambles away about her life of late night buses and early studies at the University. Second night the guy at the bar is very Gay and seems to find everything is a rush and a stress. The peaceful ambiance is wrecked for me and I decide to eat elsewhere, but before I go I note he has taken time out of his busy schedule to apply first aid to an elderly American tourist who has fallen downstairs and cut his knees open. He is very thoughtful and caring in his attentions despite the whirlwind of customers, checks, orders, specials, drinks turning around him. People who care about people. It's so nice to see this.

The committee meeting takes place at an upmarket Radisson Hotel in Rusland. It has none of the quaint decor of my hotel and is little piece of America in the heart of Amsterdam. Next to the Radisson is the Mars Embassy which strangely enough doesn't seem very busy. Next to the Mars Embassy is BasJoe's Coffee shop where you can buy cappuccino, freshly squeezed orange juice or cannabis or hash. The interior decor is like a coffee shop from the 1960's and I don't mean that it has been done out like a 1960's coffee shop, I mean it is an unchanged 1960's coffee shop. Some of the posters are new and there is a widescreen TV showing the latest SKY sport but apart from that the place is a dusty time capsule. It's as if the coffee shop opened in the 1960s and started selling weed and that was just soooo cool. So cool in fact that there was no point in making any changes or bothering to do anything else. In fact life has just been so mellow since then it really can't get any better.

I've known people who have found God and given their lives to him and others who have found cannabis and given their lives to that. To me there's not a lot of difference. They simply become lost to the outside world and this place embodies that. As the taxi goes round the Dam you can see how much this is a young peoples city, but you can also see the young people who stayed just that little bit too long.



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