Amsterdam: Sex, Drugs, Bicycles, Windmills, Cheese and a Monarch

I began my trip of Europe with Amsterdam - the place with the dam over the river Amstel and the capital city of the Netherlands. They are so called because they are the low-lying lands near the sea, from where a tiny group of sailors and entrepreneurs set out to colonise and conquer the world!







Population is one way to get a comparative view of European countries. As a citizen of an Indian city like Hyderabad, I will say the Netherlands is twice as large. Hyderabad’s population is 8.7 million, while Netherlands is 17.1 million, just a little smaller than Delhi at 19 million.




Mother carrying child on a bicycle. It is difficult to imagine today, how such a tiny little nation that goes around mostly on cycles and public transport could actually become the East India Company ruling trade to India in the 1600’s. We have to tear ourselves away from the cute version and imagine a bloodthirsty war-mongering seafaring nation with mighty ships and a navy. But then they were eventually overtaken by other equally tiny kingdoms like Britain, France and Portugal which soon established their own East India Companies!




The Netherlands was at its Zenith in the 17th century, were one of the best seafaring civilizations in the world, with expert navigators. This was the Dutch Golden Age.



And as any seafaring civilization which profited largely from trade routes, and businessmen from the East and West, they automatically had a high tolerance for different types of people, speaking different languages, from different cultures and religions. That tradition continues till today.




There are chessgames with giant pieces being played around the street corner..




And thousands of people Vondelpark sunning themselves..


A person from a ghetto making a statement in a subway tunnel...






Amsterdam is one of the most liberal countries in the world, where almost anything is allowed legally.

One of the first countries to legalize same sex marriages, and one of the only countries where psychotropic drugs can be legally sold and bought, including marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Where you can sell your body if you feel like it, and prostitution is also legal.



Coffee Shops are euphemisms where you can buy food, pre-rolled joints of Kush, Sattva, Hash, or just to have a drink.



The menu of joints and marijuana was highly interesting, and prices were very low.



There was even a Cannabis museum. But it also actively sells.



Notice the MDMA, Heroin, Coke and LSD packets at the back as well as combinations called Euphor-E, Trip-E and so on.




Cannabis can be eaten, dipped in chocolates, baked in pies, a thousand different ways to take it. If you are in a hurry to get home on the train, and want a high at the same time, you can just buy some lollipops and suck at them.

One would have thought such a high degree of freedom would be accompanied by equally high rates of misuse. But overall, comparisons with the US and Canada show that there is little difference in drunkenness of youth, or substance abuse. There is however, a marked difference between gender and use of alcohol and drugs in Dutch girls compared to boys.



These are not cannabis lollipops. They are sunflowers in the Van Gogh Museum. I had the strange feeling that there existed a surreal connection between Van Gogh's vivid colors and shapes and Amsterdam's.



But Van Gogh's yellows are due to his addiction to Absinthe. The toxicity of wormwood in Absinthe turns vision yellow - a side effect. And so one of the greatest painters may simply have been seeing things in a yellow light. I would prefer the tale of genius "where discourses on madness and creativity converge".



In 21st century Amsterdam, the first thing you notice is the number of bicycles! The population of the city is around 800,000. To my overactive imagination, there seemed to be more than a million bicycles!



For every car I counted as an experiment, I counted at least 8 bicycles anecdotally till I gave up after a few minutes when I came to a parking lot. It just took too much time!

Another feature dotting the landscape is a windmill. There are over 900 windmills of assorted sizes and functions all over the country. The sawmills operated by the windmills producing cheap wooden planks are thought to be integral to ship-building and the Dutch being a powerful seafaring nation.

Around 400 drainage mills serve no purpose than emptying out the low-lying areas of water, to the rivers on the other side of a dyke, and making farming possible.

If you looked for a windmill and didn't find it in this photograph, you aren't mistaken. I was generally talking of windmills - if the Dutch can build so many, I can talk about them even if I didn't bother visiting a windmill.



I took a train to visit Volendam, a quaint fishing village an hour away from Amsterdam.



Volendam: A street leading to the Harbor



Volendam: Fishing boats



Volendam: Fishing boats 2



A man and his best friend



A view of Volendam shops



Everything in this Cigar Band museum is wrapped up in used cigar bands! Look closely and you can make out zillions of cigar bands of different cigars from across the world!

Aside from the sheer effort needed to create such a monumental work, the amount of glue, etc. we must also consider how the poor man must have felt after smoking all those cigars!



Cheese Factory in Volendam. I had the best varieties of cheese during my visit to Edam-Volendam. Why was cheese making such a uniquely Dutch property in world trade? No one really knows, considering the highly involved process which in some cases takes years to produce a cheese. There were cheese markets in the area from the 1200’s, and the Dutch Golden Age really made cheese popular.



Cheese Factory Tour in Volendam



Cheese varieties in Edam-Volendam region: spicy, cumin, goat, paprika and natural. I kept tasting so many pieces of cheese that finally my taste-buds could no longer perceive the difference. They were all heavenly!



Moo



These dried eels are a delicacy made in Volendam.



Glimpses of Volendam



Glimpses of Volendam 2




Netherlands politically is still a monarchy. Granted they have general elections and a cabinet. But the king must sign every law, and when a government loses power, the cabinet must request the king to dismiss it! And the King’s Birthday is celebrated every year even today.




Despite being liberal, the country has till date, not apologized for its colonial past, or for its slave trade with America from the 1600’s till 1814 when they finally abolished slave trade. I hope someday, it will be emancipated enough to overthrow monarchy and adopt full democracy.



The sex museum, I decided, was worth a visit.



The sex museum was graphic enough to document bondage, discipline, sado-masochism, but the main serious exhibits were inside.



There were dozens of rare exhibits, some ancient, from Indian temple panels that effectively showed the domination of India as the sex capital of the world.



As well as Rajasthani renderings in the Mughal style portraying scenes from Vatsayana's Kamasutra.



How limited is my brain? I could not even imagine that centuries ago, the Asians could sculpt such bestialty into ivory. It seemed Japanese but I could be wrong.




I walked around most of Amsterdam and went in buses, trains and trams.



The House of Bols was a very interesting tour. Over a hundred years perfecting the extraction of liquors from fruits, seeds, and other botanicals, and with a taste at the end of the tour! Every whiff was sublime! At the end, they also give you a video capture of the emotions on your face when you drink their secret flavor bomb.



Most of the museums are located at at one place - Museumplein



A man waiting for a tram.





The Museum of Modern Art



Amsterdam: Crossing the street



Amsterdam: Walking the pavement



Amsterdam is like any city in Europe, with an ageing population, with its heydey long past, harking back to a Golden Age in the 17the century. But the life force in the city is still vibrant, and alive.