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Amsterdam was the second stop on my current tour, at least partly because of my brother's enthusiastic reviews of the city. There are plenty of good reasons to visit Amsterdam, I'm sure, but if I'm honest I hardly knew anything about Amsterdam prior to my arrival except that Jack liked it. If pressed I might've been able to come up with a few other things--Anne Frank, pot, bicycles. I'll admit that I skipped the Anne Frank house and the pot. But the bicycles won me over.
There are heaps of bicycles in this city, and I mean that literally: they are heaped on bike racks, piled around lampposts, lumped into piles with no discernible base. And, the bicycles are used, besides: cyclists whiz around Amsterdam's narrow bike lanes, across rickety cobblestones, over bridges, along canals. And I joined them. I'm not sure I need to make another good decision for the rest of my trip, because I rented a bicycle in Amsterdam and that was a perfect decision. I took my bike out at night, flicked on the generator-powered headlamp, and rode circuits through the city's parks and alleyways with no destination in mind. I rode past tourist attractions I didn't bother visiting. I really don't care that I never visited the galleries of the Rijksmuseum, because I rode under the museum's ornate facade at night and that was enough. I am sure there's more to Amsterdam than I saw, but isn't that true of any place a person visits? And a few days spent flying through Amsterdam's streets on a bicycle will be enough for me to have something of this city in a pocket of my mind, a small point of reference. I'm writing this in the downstairs of a coffee shop (the kind that just sells coffee, thanks), and outside the window I see a cyclist fly past, and then another, and then another. Bicycles are ubiquitous here, and for that reason alone, I'm happy that's the one thing I've taken from this city. Which is good, because it's time for me to catch a train.