I arrived in Amsterdam at 5:30am after a 9 hour flight from Nairobi. I had a lay over until 2pm so I wanted to see a bit of the city where 54,000 bikes get stolen per year. I put my my bags in a locker ($10 for the day), went through customs, bought a Time Out’s guide to Amsterdam and headed to the train that takes you into the city. I failed to study the little dutch phrase section of the book in the 10 seconds that I owned it and the only person I saw around me to talk to about the train times was a KLM flight attendant. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose but I do have to note that the KLM flight attendants remind me of those sci-fi movies where the very put together and attractive woman appears on ominous pre recorded video messages to remind you to throw away your trash or what to do in case world is ending. Then later in the movie, the world is in fact ending and she is still reminding you that here on Planet Telon all plastic containers should placed in their proper receptacle while planet sized meteors rip apart the “back to the future” style mall. They are incredibly nice until you a) stand up before the seat belt sign is turned off b) stand in front of the food cart or c) inadvertently/inevitably bump into to them when walking in opposite directions in the aisle. I was fortunate to be the person watching instead of the being perpetrator. Creepy KLM Armageddon lady transformed instantly into one of those evil teachers that would inform little Norbert in front of the entire class (or plane) 7 year olds how wrong it was to wet his pants. You could then imagine my hesitancy in wanting to communicate with the Dutch Ice Queen on her home turf. I could just imagine her announcing to the entire terminal that the arrogant American failed to master another language besides English. Thankful she just told me the direction to head in and informed that I was too late to make the next train (totally made it). Gracias muchacha.
Oh, I forgot to mention that 1) it was snowing in Amsterdam…a lot 2) I packed for the equator not the arctic 3) I was smack dab in middle of a ferocious bout with food poisoning from a beef samosa I ate in the nicest coffee shop in Kenya…irony at it’s finest. I got to Amsterdam’s central station at 7am on Saturday morning. The earliest anything opens in Amsterdam on a Saturday morning is 9am. I was torn between wanting to make the most of my time in the city, wanting to stay remotely warm, and wondering how long I could make it between now and the next time I have to “deal” with the food poisoning. At this point my stomach was pretty resistant to any food after a day of samosa rejection so I was pretty hesitant to eat anything. Not too big of a deal since Amsterdam doesn’t wake up until 8:59. So I rolled the dice and got some Starbucks before I headed out. My plan was to see the Anne Frank Haus and the Foam Photography Museum. They were on opposite parts of town, so I headed towards the one that looked closest, and that would be the photography museum.
Ghost town.
For the exception for the people on the tram (a super cool above ground electric train) and the 476 million bikes on the street, it was a complete ghost town, but a completely beautiful ghost town. Canals, crotchety old bikes, and boats and bridges covered in snow. I got off the tram at my stop and the sun was just beginning to rise over the buildings at the eastern end of one of the canals. My exit from Africa here in Amsterdam couldn’t have been different than Lwala. Here I was standing in the middle of this old western European city filled with centuries of high brow culture (not including the “coffee shops” and red light district) and Nords. The GDP of the city of Amsterdam is larger than all of Kenya. There is no way to fully soak in the difference because everything is different. At least apples and oranges are fruits. This is like comparing apples to aircraft carriers. I suppose that’s why people default to surreal when trying to describing the unexplainable. Finite perspectives provide for limited words. I had just walked out of a village in Kenya where I just started to figure out how to get home by myself and here I am trying to take in a city with trams and snow on the ground. Maybe that’s why I just took pictures of bikes.
