Dionysus was the Greek god of ecstasy, symbolizing personal delivery from the world though physical or spiritual intoxication. In the Greek epics he is depicted as a hostile force and met by the city with resistance. He would be a fitting deity for Amsterdam.

Years ago, I learned that a childhood friend had been struck by a car and killed in Amsterdam. Memories of the news and the friendship were rekindled the following year as I connected through Schiphol Airport on the way to visit my sister in Florence. She had just been in the Netherlands for a visit and, though her own experience in Amsterdam was blemished by harassment and a dismal hostel, she had good things to say about the nominal Dutch capital. Returnees dwell so misleadingly on the exceptional nature of the Red Light District that you rarely hear about the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh or the parks that comprise the gorgeous city outside of the coffee shops.

cLuckily, an opportunity to discover an entirely different aspect of life in the city proper presented itself when I learned that another friend from college was attending graduate school at the Universiteit van Amsterdam and living in the Centruum. When my, usually stolid, friend heard I was coming, he immediately became animated. He and his friends played pick-up soccer in a nearby park once a week and my visit would overlap. I would have to rent a bike, too, he stated matter-of-factly; there was an implication that the city was not much good without one. After talking to him, I felt confident about the good, clean spirit of the trip: bicycling and football in Amsterdam, what could be better?

Weeks later my plane landed like a basketball on a Schipol runway. €3.60 and twenty minutes saw me on a train from Schiphol to the nineteenth-century, Dutch Renaissance-styled Centraal Station. Amsterdam was not what I had expected. The pavement stones swooped along the canals like the bones of sea creatures. Along Prins Hendrikkade the ship-like NEMO museum jutted into the IJ (formerly a bay, today a lake). Forget the joints, I thought, where are the pirates?

In fact, the streets were broad and immaculately clean. There were no signs of pirate activity whatsoever, or the debauchery hinted at by social conservatives and evangelicals (You know what the Dutch are up to…over there!) Cranes dotted the harbor, the tell-tale signs of new construction and an active port. Whatever they were up to, it seemed worthwhile.

My most potent observation, however, concerned bicycles. They were everywhere! Overlapping each other as far as the eye could discern, bikes were propped and stacked in endless columns. When I found my friend, our first and last walk was to MacBike; henceforth, I would be rolling around the city. “Don’t turn away for a second” I was warned by the woman who took down my information. “And always use both locks. We have four to five hundred bicycles stolen everyday here.” Read More...