I completely forgot to share photos from my city bike tour in my last post. Oops. So, here are some of those photos, along with my Amsterdam Airbnb host who invited me to his roof deck dinner party. He’s my fave.
BTW, if you click the photos, it will open the full size in a new tab. You’re welcome.
In total, I took 4 different guided bike tours in Amsterdam: 2 city tours, 1 countryside tour, and 1 city food tour. And in addition to that, I also took a canal cruise/tour. Damn, I took a lot of tours. One thing that stuck out to me, having done so many tours with all these tour guides, is that there’s a few topics all of them talk about but have slight variations that make me question the validity and accuracy of what we were being told. Like, how much of it are they just making up? And have they done their own research? I sure haven’t, so they could tell me the most outrageous things, and I’d believe them like the good little tourist I am. But for your enjoyment, here is something I found really interesting.
The Leaning Houses
If you didn’t already know, Amsterdam was built on top of marshland, so the ground is very soft. That’s one of the reasons that Amsterdam has all these canals and excellent water management systems. They’re so good, in fact, that their architects advise other countries and cities on water management strategy.
Knowing that everything is on marshland, I suppose it makes sense that the dancing houses exist. They look super cool, very whimsical. One of the tour guides remarked that everything is leaning in a different direction, but for some reason, the building that housed an Irish pub is, ironically, standing tall and straight.
Yet, these are not only houses that lean. In fact, if you walk down the streets along the canal, you’ll see that there’s a ton of leaning facades. Why though? Here’s what I’ve heard.
Explanation #1
The land is soft, so everything has been slowly sinking over the last few hundred years, and the dancing houses are just the worst of it. This reminds me of the popular belief that the architect of the DuBois library at the UMass Amherst campus forgot to factor in the weight of the books into his design, so the library is slowly sinking into the ground. Not sure if that’s actually true, but fact checking it would take away all the fun.
Explanation #2
Back in the day, Amsterdam was a port city for trade, and all the valuable goods were transported to warehouses via the canals. Also, warehouse/home owners were taxed, not on the square footage of their property, but on the width of their property parallel to the canal. So, instead of building their properties flat and wide, they built them tall, narrow, and deep. (Side note, this explains why I had to go up a million very steep steps to get to my Airbnb flat.) But because they were so narrow, it was impossible to bring goods up to their attic rooms by stairs. (Pivot! PIVOT! If you get that reference… 💯) Oh, they stored the goods in the attic or the upper levels, because if there was a flood, their goods won’t get wet. Anyways, so how did they get the stuff into the top floors? Using a rope/pulley system, which is why these buildings all had a hook sticking out of the wall at the top floor. To this day, if you have to move into a traditional Amsterdam home, you have to move in all your furniture using the pulley system. I wonder if this is where the “death by falling piano” trope originated.
A whole paragraph later, I still haven’t gotten to the point. LOL stick with me, I promise it’s all relevant!
Ok, so, goods were being pulled up to the top floors of these buildings via rope/pulleys from the canal. But as you might also know, Holland is a pretty windy place, hence being famous for their windmills. What happens when you have an object that is free-hanging by a rope and there’s a strong wind? If you have a common-sense grasp of physics, you’d know that the object would sway in the wind. And if there is other stuff sticking out, even a little bit, from the wall, the swinging object would hit it. So how did the Dutch solve this problem? By making the facade lean ever so slightly outward, in the direction of the canal, so that if there is strong wind, their goods would swing like a pendulum but not hit anything. Fucking genius.
As you can probably tell, I like the second explanation better than the (lazy) explanation of “oh the ground is mushy and people from back then were dumb and built stuff that didn’t last”. Like, come on, people built things to last forever back then. It’s not like nowadays where they build cookie cutter homes like how Forever21 make clothing: can’t last even one cycle in water or the washer.
To the credit of the first explanation though, it can’t be entirely false, considering the existence of those dancing houses. The trick, I’m told, of telling the difference between intentional leaning architecture and the effects of mushy land, is to (1) see if the first floor facade stands at 90 degrees, and (2) consider if the building is next to the canal.
When people I meet ask me what my favorite place has been on my trip, I always tell them I absolutely loved Amsterdam and wouldn’t mind moving there. But I don’t smoke weed, don’t frequent brothels, and am not a British lad on a stag do. So what else is there? Well, it’s the culture and the people, which sounds like such a pretentious answer to the question of why I liked it there. I will admit that the food is mediocre at best, but everything else made up for it. I loved the historical architecture, the parks, and how it’s a fairly small city, which is also why I fell in love with Boston after visiting it once when I was 18 and decided to move there at 21. Well, that and a job. You don’t turn down a job offer immediately out of college. That’s just hubris.
The People
Let’s talk about the people first. Apparently it’s a pre-requisite to be 10/10 hot in order to work as a customs agent at the Amsterdam airport. I have never seen so many attractive men and women in a single space before 🥵 I almost definitely wished I had to be pulled aside for “additional customs checks” 😉 Sadly, customs was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
The Culture
I can’t talk about the culture of Amsterdam without mentioning the bicycles. I’ve already mentioned all my near-mishaps with cyclists. And after almost a month of living in the city, I have learned the true hierarchy of the roads:
- Trams – you can’t reasonably expect a tram to yield.
- Cyclists – goes without saying and is inclusive of all vehicles on 2 wheels.
- Motorized vehicles with 4 or more wheels – they will absolutely yield to cyclists, even if they have the right of way.
- Pigeons – I’ll explain…
- Pedestrians – I was told by someone I met that, as a pedestrian, I am a liability. I disagree, because I am definitely more of a liability on a bicycle, but point taken.
Listen, the pigeons. They are fucking vicious. Not only do they not give you the right of way as a pedestrian, sometimes they’ll fly straight at your face. So, when I cross the street, I look left and right to make sure there’s no oncoming trams, cyclists, cars, or groups of pigeons just standing around.
Apparently there’s a negative stereotype about “Dutch directness”, where the Dutch are perceived as rude and cold. In my opinion, this is the perfect example of how some people are nice but not kind and others are kind but not nice. The Dutch are definitely the latter. They just want you to quickly get to the point so they know how they can help you ❤️
One of tour guides was telling us about the three things the Dutch are known for. One of them is the directness I just mentioned. The other two are tolerance and the lack of blind respect for authority. So, you’re telling me that they are tolerant to different people, cultures, and lifestyles even if they are contrary to their own? And, they only do things because it makes sense to do so rather than because some authority figure tells them it’s the law? Um, did I die and go to a functioning society? I want to stay forever.
I feel like I can talk about Amsterdam and the Netherlands forever, but I’ll end it here today, with some random photos I like from Amsterdam. It’s already been too long of a blog post. Speaking of blog posts, you know what, MRS, fuck you. You don’t like how inconsistent I am with keeping up with this content? Here’s your free.99 refund. I’m too busy having experiences so that I can milk it for content. Content that takes me forever to write. Yet, you probably only scroll through for the photos and give me zero acknowledgement that you’ve even clicked on my post.
But please keep reading though, my self esteem needs your external validation 🥲
Love,
S
+5 external validation
You’ll earn more if you post anything slightly more recent…