We woke up at about 0940, and just made the checkout time. At the station our bags went into lockers. Probably the most complicated, over-engineered lockers I’ve ever seen, since in order to store an item you needed to find an empty one, stow your luggage (ok so far), close the door, wait for it to automatically lock, insert money in a nearby touchscreen terminal, and take a printed ticket which was dispensed.The problem was not so much the complexity of the system as the springyness of the doors. If they weren’t locked, they sprung open, which obviously helps people considerably when they are on the finding an empty locker stage, but becomes an issue when trying to close them, because you actually needed to HOLD the door closed while the motorised locking mechanism engaged the bolts. All over the room loud clangs could be heard where frustrated people slammed the doors with ever increasing force, only for them to spring open again immediately, because the locking mechanism hadn’t had a chance to close the lock.
One woman near me was getting very upset. She’d already moved her luggage from one locker to another, and to no avail. When I thought she was getting dangerously close to damaging the door and her hand as well, I walked over and gently held the door closed. A whirr of electric motors, and the door locked. I did my best to wear a well-it-was-nothing-really expression, but I think it may have turned out more like this-is-so-simple-I-could-do-it-blindfolded.
At the international booking office, I wanted to book tickets for Berlin. There was no queue, only a numbered ticket dispenser where you would take a number and then wait for it to appear above one of the desks. This system seemed to be the mainstay of all such booking offices on the continent (based on the two or three I’d seen so far anyway), and I had come to the conclusion that it must be because the Europeans can’t queue.
The British are absolutely superb at queuing. Bus stops, stations, airports, museums – forming a line is as natural as breathing. But here the philosophy seemed to be survival of the fittest and that left the numbered ticket system as the only sensible way of restoring order. When the number on my ticket was called, we booked a four bed couchette on a Deutshe Bahn overnight service to Berlin, paying a supplement for the beds despite having interrail passes.
We split up to explore the town. I headed for a bike rental place off Dam, the central plaza. Amsterdam is a city full of bikes, so it seemed the obvious choice to get around. I got on the bike, and for a minute considered going back to complain, because the handlebars did not seem to have any brake handles. How could they rent me a bike with no brakes? A bit of fiddling with the pedals soon revealed that I should back peddle to apply the brakes. Probably makes the bikes cheap to manufacture, but I think given the choice I’d rather have proper brakes. I was already imagining the casualties that were going to result from the rental, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
Amazingly I managed to cycle across town without killing or seriously maiming anyone. Now I came to think about it, I realised that I hadn’t seen any other cyclists crash either, so maybe the Dutch have a natural ability to cycle bikes with odd brakes.
We managed to get far enough out of town to see a windmill, one of thousands that are scattered around the dutch countryside for the purpose of pumping water from the low-lying land. In fact many hundreds of thousands of Dutch people live on the bottom of former lakes, which have been drained dry and continue to be managed by the network of windmills. Much of this reclaimed land is several metres below sea level.
The weather had improved a lot since Brussels, so it was nice and sunny and a perfect temperature for a pleasant cycle through the suburbs.
Having returned the bikes more or less in the same condition as we hired them, Chris decided that he’d been in Amsterdam far too long without smoking some dope, so we found a nice coffeeshop near the hostel. Two other tables were occupied, and everyone was smoking, but fortunately for me the air conditioning was up to the task, and the air was pretty clear.
Chris ordered a joint and an espresso. I questioned the wisdom of ingesting a stimulant and a relaxant simultaneously, but who am I to judge the best way to kill yourself – I was drinking orange juice after all. A sign next to the entry for ‘joint’ on the menu said “For full range see resident dealer”. I found this very amusing – I suppose I expected the trade in weed to be more discreet, a sort of tolerated but not encouraged practice. In fact it seems to be as simple as picking up a packet of polos at the local newsagent, though not quite as minty fresh.
We found a street café to eat lunch and sat watching the trams go by while we waited to meet Sunil. In the end we sat there for about two hours, and only managed to get up when I reminded everyone that we’d be leaving Amsterdam that evening.
The three of us spent the afternoon on a boat tour of the canals and the harbour. The boat passed through old districts with classic narrow properties with slanted fronts and hooks on the roof. They were built like this because there used to be a tax on the width of each property, similar to the window tax in the UK that used to charge householders based on the number of windows in their house. In an effort to reduce the width of their houses, enterprising (and presumably very thin) Dutch householders would shrink the staircase to the bare minimum required to climb the stairs. As a result, furniture could only be moved in through the windows, which is why hooks started appearing on the roofs of buildings, used to winch large items up to the first and second floors.
There was still another problem though – the furniture would bang against the side of the house as it was winched up, causing damage to the house and also to the new sofa, or whatever it was being moved in. Houses were therefore built with a slant so that the hook was overhanging the front of the house by a couple of metres and furniture did not touch the sides when winched.
The sides of the canals were lined with low fences that were apparently built in the sixties to prevent cars driving straight into the canals. They still fail to prevent about one car a week from taking the plunge.
Before meeting for dinner, I went for a final stroll around downtown, with it’s eclectic mix of sex shops, coffeeshops, fast food places and department stores. It had had an irresistibly multi-cultural nature to it„ but at the same time I didn’t feel at home there. It was clearly too hip. With that thought I took a glance at the reassuringly capitalist Dutch stock exchange, and boarded a sleeper train to Berlin.