A Canal Tour Through A Carnal District

After leaving the Hague, I decided to go for one of the canal boat tours. After all, how many cities can be toured by boat? Amsterdam probably wins that award. So I bought tickets to embark on a boat that was large and touristy, but at the very least close to the water.

Honestly, the tour wasn’t anything spectacular, but I do love being close to the water. It also let me see much more of Amsterdam than I’d expected to and make some realizations that I had not previously made.

For one thing, I realized that Amsterdam is king when it comes to architectural oddities and artsiness, or building-sculptures as they appeared to me. There were buildings that twisted around in every direction, take on bizarre forms, and often gaudy coloring.

Most of what we saw were old buildings, however. And much like DC, they knew the value townhouses when designing this city. But unlike DC, it looks like even the very rich live in townhouses. The result is a block of townhouses with about 40 rooms to a house. Consequently, you wouldn’t necessarily even know a mansion-townhouse from any other if you saw one unless you looked carefully to see how many doors there were. Townhouses tend to blend into one another.

And almost every house has a beam protruding outward toward the street from it’s rooftop, close to a big window. Apparently the native architects considered staircases a waste of space, and loathed making wide staircases just so that the owners could move their furniture and other bulky items in and out. Their solution was to make standard an easy place to fix up a pulley and make some large upstairs windows, and give the extra space to other rooms in the house. So the staircases in Amsterdam are almost all thin and steep, although moving into an Amsterdam home is probably less exhausting. Then again, I’ve never tried to fix up one of those pulley systems.

Along the tour we passed a huge and elaborate Chinese restaurant on the water. “It seats 900 Chinese men” the captain of the boat announced “or 600 Americans.” The joke got much laugh and even applause from other ship passengers. I’m not sure if it was meant as a friendly jest toward America (as a fat American I can’t really argue) or whether it was genuine anti-American sentiment that caused the comment, but I felt uneasy about it either way.

After that I came home, did laundry, ate a veggie burger dinner, and now I’m here. Or am I?