With the African experience slowing fading from sight in the
rear-view mirror, it was forward towards Europe. After eight months of cramped public
transport, run-down city-centres, living off poorly stocked grocery stores, and
evil death-glares by poor and angry Africans, the adjustment back into the “developed
world” would be nothing if not shocking. By this point, our plans for the
summer had been firmed up quite permanently.
Due to our dual-nationality status (my Dad was born in Plymouth,
England), Hillary and I were able to obtain, fairly easily, British
passports. This would allow us to try
and find work while in Europe which, for me (at this point), had become a
necessity to even be able to afford a flight back across the Atlantic, let
alone begin to tackle the quite foreboding mountain of debt I’d been
accumulating since the money went dry sometime in March (I still have $2000 in
traveller’s cheques sitting at home, so that will be a bit of help). As luck would have it, old family friends of
my dad and his parents own a chain of businesses in Cornwall, the south-western
most area of England. Good ol’ papa
Hertzberg pulled some strings, and we both landed full-time summer jobs in
Padstow. There will be more on that
later, but we still had a month to play with in Europe. There were, however, limitations to this
jaunt around the globe. As previously mentioned,
money was running tight, and moving from Africa to tourist hotbeds such as
Amsterdam, Prague, and Munich, was quite difficult to adjust to. We could no longer find a meal for a couple
of bucks, we were looking at an absolute minimum of $5 any time we wanted to
eat something. Finding hostels with good
kitchens and good proximity to grocery stores became very important.
Anyway, on to the action.
My flight left Nairobi on Saturday night, and arrived in Zurich early in
the morning. When I booked the ticket
over a year ago, I guess I didn’t really care about future Adrian because I
scheduled in a ten-hour layover in Zurich (taking a train to Amsterdam would
have taken less time than what I waited in the airport). I tried to see if I could get moved to an
earlier flight, but it was a minimum fee of 200 Euro for any change. I might have cared more if I had to wait in a
dodgy African airport, like Nairobi’s or Dar es Salaam’s, but I was so happy to
be in Europe at last that I hardly cared at all. When I finally arrived in the familiar
Amsterdam airport on Sunday evening, the sun was poking through the cloud and
lighting the warm spring air with a beautiful orange hue. I selected the new Japandroids album from my
iPod, collected my bags from the carousel with minimum fear of my belongings being
snatched from me, withdrew a large sum of cash from an ATM with no hassle from
those surrounding me, walked past the designer clothing stores, and strutted out
of the airport into the glorious Amsterdam evening with a grin from ear to
ear. This next month was going to be
good.
As a present to Hillary and me, and in an attempt to shove
the horror stories of Africa from our memories for a while, the parents had
paid for us to stay in an airport hotel for three nights upon arriving in
Holland. Think about it: I had just come
from staying in hostels that sometimes had power, occasionally had luke-warm
water, usually had staff that would attempt to steal your things, always had
uncomfortable beds and loud, smelly backpackers, and that were usually located
in incredibly dangerous areas (compared to the standard I had been used to, of
course), and now we were suddenly staying in a proper hotel room, with its OWN
BATHROOM with HOT water, a bath AND a shower, comfortable beds (holy mother of
god were they sublime), and staff that would be fired and potentially
criminally charged if so much as a penny was found missing from any of the
guests. Oh and I’ve forgotten to mention
to most important thing. This hotel had,
hands down, the most bitching breakfast buffet the world has ever seen. Literally anything you could possibly want to
eat or drink for breakfast was available in unlimited quantity. It was
surreal. But the cherry on top (or
actually, all of what I’ve just said is the cherry, this is the ice cream and
delicious hot fudge) was that I had finally returned to one of my favourite
cities in Europe: the ever-glorious Amsterdam.
 |
| Welcome to Holland. Have a joint to ease the pain of the past eight months. |
Now ok, some of you are probably judging me pretty hard
right now, but their toleration towards cannabis is far from being the only
thing going for Amsterdam. Some of you
will know that yes, I do enjoy the occasional smoke (but only on weekends and
never before 8PM), and I will admit that I spent a great deal of time high as a
kite, but most of my time in the city was spent exploring its beauty. They call Amsterdam “the Venice of the North,”
but really I think it should be the other way around. It’s easy, encouraged
even, to get lost in the small side-streets and canals of Holland’s capital
city, and as such, avoiding the unpleasant tourist tat on the main streets is
as easy as “out of sight, out of mind.”
If you’d like to spend the day sight-seeing, Amsterdam has that. If you’d like to spend the day hanging out in
fantastic public parks, there’s that too.
If you’d like to learn about a huge chunk of the history of human
civilization over the past millennium, well, Amsterdam’s got you covered. And, of course, if you’d like to get fucking
wasted and buy two-headed dildos well then hey, come join the party. Honestly, Amsterdam is the place to be, for
so many reasons. We spent most of our
time either in coffee shops (me) or H & M (Hillary), or else chilling in
one of the city’s many stunning public parks.
Perhaps the coolest thing about the city (for me) is its integration of
bike lanes into a working city. Every
proper street has bike lanes, and the traffic cycles work in bike traffic
too. This means that the drivers are
that much more clever and aware, and that being a pedestrian takes on a whole
other dimension. One of the most common
things to see in bike lanes near popular tourist areas is a group of tourists
with their heads down, unknowingly cutting off a swerving local. It must be frustrating as hell to live there,
but I think the regulars know which areas to avoid. Hillary and I decided to
chuck a modest amount of Euro and hire bikes for the day. With nowhere in
particular to go, we explored the city in a random, spontaneous fashion, occasionally
stopping to check out a nice coffee shop or record store. Oh yeah I forgot to mention: Amsterdam has
some of the best vinyl shopping I’ve ever seen.
I resisted the (very, very strong) temptation to treat myself to a
record or twelve, mainly because there was no way I could fit them in either of
my backpacks.
Being that Amsterdam is quite a popular destination for all
sorts of travellers, we met new people and enjoyed the splendours of the city
in company. Of particular note were two
English guys, friends since high school, one of whom was living and working in
Cornwall (where I am now, weird), and one who was living in Switzerland, near
Geneva. They both had a weekend off and
decided to meet up for the first time in a year, and Hillary and I were lucky
enough to be in on the party. The city
was absolutely buzzing with a pre-summer kind of excitement that can’t be
articulated. Everywhere you looked
friends were enjoying beers and splifs together or relaxing on patches of
freshly mowed grass; it was a glorious sight. To feel like we had actually
checked something significant off the Amsterdam tourist’s “must-see” list, we
visited the Van Gogh museum one day. It
was a good exhibit, and contained lots of interesting information, but, with a
few exceptions, I’ve never been much of a museum guy, and we were both more
keen on biking around the city, stopping when something caught our eye. We don’t
know if it was because we had come straight from Africa to the city of indulgence
in the land of excess, but for some reason, we both loved Amsterdam and didn’t
want to leave. After six days, we
finally dragged our heads out of the clouds and began to plan our next
month.
Train and bus tickets around Europe are quite expensive and,
unless you can afford to be there for at least a couple of months and can
afford a Eurail pass, the only thing you can do is snatch up the cheapest ticket
whenever you see it. Poor planning and a
lack of funds meant that we couldn’t do an incredible amount of exploring with our month in
Europe, but we settled on an itinerary of: Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Brussels,
and back to Amsterdam for our flight to London. Of these five cities, only
Prague would be new to me, but I loved Berlin the first time I’d been there,
Munich was playing host to the Champions League final, and Brussels was a convenient
stop off on the way back to Amsterdam.
So we bought all of our tickets in one go (to try to save a few Euro)
and set our itinerary in stone.
So, as much as I enjoyed Amsterdam on my second visit, it was
time to move on: to Berlin. I was there
in 2009 and it is one of my favourite cities in the world. On my previous visit, I was fascinated not
only by the visible scars of two world wars and ruins of the communist vs.
capitalist fiasco, but by the vibrant and unique street-culture that had
evolved there, not to mention the friendly and oh so sexy locals. If German
wasn’t such a completely different language from those which I can claim some
understanding of (English, a bit of French, and a tiny bit of Spanish), I would
seriously consider moving there, perhaps permanently. Come to think of it, I still might.
Anyway, we were finally out of Africa and back in familiar
territory. It was a strange adjustment,
but most of it passed by in a surreal haze of spending and a lack of fear for
my life. I will soon be putting together
a blog post that is somewhat different from what I usually do, and it will be
regarding my time in Africa, including my feelings towards the issues of
poverty, disease, and political corruption, as well as western and local
attitudes towards these things, how they differ, and why it matters. For now I hope you have enjoyed my brief
account of my time in Amsterdam. We
returned there for a few days at the end of the month, so I will go into a bit
more detail about the city itself in a later post. Stay tuned for tales from Berlin, Prague,
Munich, and Brussels, and also some musings on a continent lacking in capital but
rich in culture.
