Since we're doing Ol' Yurp: this week I went on some business in North Holland, and seeing as how I'd never been there before, I decided to do some walking around, near its so-very-easily-accessible central train station, to get the feel, or whatever I could thereof.
Speaking of trains: I must say that Europe's railway infrastructure is quite a marvel to behold. You can get from Schiphol1 to the centre in fifteen minutes, and the undersea trip from Amsterdam Centraal to London St. Pancras takes only a few hours. We can but venture to speculate why poor Romania wasn't included in the loop: maybe there's actually no actual interest to do that, since it's too remote and the Russians would rather deal with all the trouble; or maybe Western Europe has been trying hard to integrate Romania into its infrastructure for the last two decades, and the country in question is so mind-bogglingly ungovernable that everyone else is just about to give up. As an admittedly biased stupid Romanian kid, I think that there is a bit of truth in both views, but that none of them may stand on its own.
That aside, my first impression of Amsterdam, just like, say, Rome or Naples, or, why not, Brașov and Sibiu, was actually the very same as I'd previously highlighted in the Sibiu post: namely, that it's a tourist trap surrounded by a "developed" modern area that I unfortunately haven't gotten any chance to see... maybe next time.
What I mean by this is that the canals are a work of marvel, and the architecture is absolutely beautiful and properly revealing of a town that has seen its better days during the Renaissance. But it's been nigh on half a millenium since then and... sadly, this perplexing beauty is soiled with, and eclipsed for the most part by none other than its inhabitants. Don't get me wrong, I met some really nice and cool people in Amsterdam, and some of them were there for at least one generation, and I don't think there's any problem whatsoever with the slowly decreasing number of white heads in the region. That's fine; but just as much as skin colour doesn't matter, the way people carry themselves and their actions fucking do. And I'm sorry to say this, but by now, there's not that much of a difference between the orcs of Amsterdam and those of Bucharest; and with this, I suspect that the problem with Amsterdam's centre doesn't even lie as much in the local orcs as it does in the visiting ones. I guess that's what happens when your main propaganda point as a town is this dick smoking a joint:
Compare and contrast with:
or
So by now I suppose I should say: The Netherlands, a land of strange contrasts, amirite? This is, dear folks, the result of more two decades, give or take, of social engineering. I'm sorry, but whatever this is, I can't really call it "socialism" anymore than I can call a chainsaw "a very large electric saw"; both pairs have their share of words in common, but the objects in each pair clearly don't match. And the worst part is that this is what we're going to keep on rollin' with for the next few decades: a relatively large number of distinct populations who have nothing else in common other than the space they inhabit. I mean... I know, maybe in a certain view this particular version of Europe is better than nothing at all, but it's still not much of a culture to thrive in, and the drugs and the prostitution ain't making people more "creative", or otherwise better in any particular sense; and if they're making them worse, they're also doing this in no particular sense, since sense is what's there's so very little left of all around.
Buuut anyway, here's Amsterdam's Royal Palace, in all its glory:
and some more local rudimentary art in one of the residential areas:
and Amsterdam Centraal:
and above, some food porn from a local Thai restaurant, Rakang, that I wholeheartedly recommend. I looked for traditional Dutch food, trust me, but other than the stroopwafels, the bitterballen and such, I've been told that the Dutch have scarcely any food culture.
At this point, I suppose that some of y'all will hastily interject to let me know that I've missed all the great spiritual European treasure that lies carefully stored in the museums. Fair enough, that I have missed this time around, so maybe I'll get back to Amsterdam some other time and throw a more definite assessment upon it after seeing more of it.
Oh, and by the way, Holland looks quite nice from up high, even without the smoke:
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The local airport, I suppose a sort of a skip-hole if we're to judge it solely by the name? ↩