Twenty-eight: Inter-City Rumble

Cousins Nick, Mariam, Genevieve and and Max flew in from Portland a few days after I returned from Seattle. Over the years we've developed (more specifically Mariam and Kim have developed) a semi-facetious "my city is better than yours" rivalry, so we were excited to thow Amsterdam into the mix.

We met up at Schiphol's clearly marked "meeting spot", then took convenient, comprehensive public transportation right to the apartment. Portland's MAX Lightrail? Not even close. They slogged through the jet lag via a downtown stroll (read:death march,) a bunch of cafe sitting, and some shopping. Mariam and I visited the Tulip Museum (did the world learn nothing from the horrendous tulip crash of 1637?), one of Amsterdam's 50-something "educational" museums which also include the boathouse museum, the erotic museum, the sex museum, the hash marihuana & hemp museum, the coffee & tea museum, the fluorescent art museum. I ask you, what does Portland offer in this vein?

There was a lot of biking. If we held a competition to determine the visitors who best embraced Dutch cycling culture these guys would get the gold. Admittedly the Portland lifestyle equipped them well, though it could not have prepared them for the awesomeness that is the Netherlands' superior bike lane network. We biked along the Amstel River to the outlying village of Ouderkerk. We biked to the Rijks (where Max and Eve's art appreciation gave me an inferiority complex re: my mall-loving teen years,) we biked to the 9-streets, we biked to the Anne Frank House, we biked to the botanical gardens, we biked to the Van Gogh on Friday evening when it's open late and the crowds are light. After dark we biked through Museumplein, De Pijp (cafes, bars, restaurants) and a satellite red light district (again Portland, I'm not seeing an equivalent.) We biked through Hogue Velue to Kroller-Muller, where of course the art and sculpture were big hits. Mariam, Max and I biked to Paradiso to see the Portland band Blitzen Trapper perform a great set (ok, I'll admit that Paradiso is probably no better than the Crystal Ballroom.) We biked to Ajax stadium where we watched a "friendly" Netherlands vs. UK football match (sporting events in Portland? The Beavers? I don't think so.) If this is "friendly", I can't wait to see the other kind. We sat next to the the visitors' section - note plexiglass wall with serrated metal. It's a good thing they were quarantined, because Brit fans are nuts!

We sat at many outdoor cafes (does Portland even have outdoor cafes?) where we played a lot of bananagrams - aka speed scrabble. We had dutch pancakes, drank a lot of beer and ate a lot of cheese and hagelslag.

We rented a sailboat in Volendaam. As you can tell from the photos, Genevieve really loved this particular outing. We visited Den Haag and checked out the Javier Marin sculpture exhibit. We sat on the beach in Scheveningen, we wandered the streets of Delft and Haarlem. Almost everywhere we went we stumbled onto gift-yielding flea and antique markets. Um, where in Portland are you going to find something more than 50 years old?

By the end of the week, Amsterdam had racked up a lot of points. In fact I'm pretty sure they all fell in love with it and want to move here. Or perhaps spend a semester abroad? Or at least visit again...