Apple Pie Update: Week One in Amsterdam

I feel like my whole life has just been building up to culminate in this single moment: my first slice of Dutch apple pie. Just look at it:

This is the apple pie that I will base all of my future pies off of, and I give it a solid ¾ stars. The crust is somewhere in between a yellow cake and a puff pastry, and the apples are in chunks and perfectly seasoned with cinnamon. Delicious.

To make matters even better, I just had my first SUCCESSFUL bike ride around the city and am celebrating with some Stroopwafel. How Dutch am I now?! I like to think that my great-great grandparents would be proud.

Yet despite its excellent dessert scene, Amsterdam has been the most confusing city that I’ve ever temporarily lived in. I didn’t expect Amsterdam to be this challenging. After all, I grew up in the Seattle area, the Amsterdam of the West Coast! Our library was designed by Rem Koolhaas! We’re pragmatic liberals! We have legalized marijuana! How different could it really be?

Oh, how naïve I was, before my first bike ride [and crash], my first look at a squatters’ settlement, my first traumatic foray into the Red Light District. Amsterdam is not the Seattle of Western Europe. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

I am living on the east side of Amsterdam, bordering the canal belt. Everything is the city is just a 25 minute bike ride away at maximum. If you can bike, that is. I have learned daily that I am not a good biker. I blame North American urban planners, the PNW for having hills, my family for not teaching me how to bike until age 9, and my ancestors for not preserving our Dutch biking skills. Because of these things, I now crash into poles on a daily basis and hyperventilate every time I have to pass a car.

I am always at the back of the bike pack whenever we travel anywhere, with the one other American and my Australian roommate. My 26 classmates are from 20 different countries, and we have every continent represented. Getting to hear about everyone’s cities on a daily basis is like the cheapest way to travel the world. I have learned so much about everyone’s public transportation systems, parks, and infrastructure that I feel like I could probably land on a plane in Hong Kong today and know exactly how to navigate to the city center. It’s also wonderful being around people who care about and are interested in the same things that I am. Normally, no one wants to stay up late chatting about public housing, but here, everyone does! It’s wonderful.

Our class at University of Amsterdam is entitled “Planning and Living in Cities.” Everyday, we have a lecture until lunch time and then take an after-lunch field trip to do a case study of what we just learned. So far, we have covered the history of Amsterdam, gentrification, mixed-use developments, and squatting, with social housing on the agenda for tomorrow.

For the history of Amsterdam, we took a walking tour around the city center and Red Light District. The latter was by far my greatest culture-shock moment. Amsterdam is currently implementing the 1012 plan, an initiative to “clean up” the Red Light District. They hope to make this area a place where locals will actually want to go and to attract a different sector of tourists to the city. The plain mainly includes purchasing brothels and turning them over to local entrepreneurs to start businesses with subsidies.

We visited one of these new businesses, a video-game themed bar in the space of a former peepshow that is right across from an existing brothel. This is perhaps not where I would choose to spend my time at 4 pm on a Monday afternoon. While I understand the city’s rationale of believing that legalized prostitution is “safe” prostitution, I was not prepared to see a barely-clothed woman standing across the street from us, smiling and sealed in a glass window like a packaged Barbie.

And one thing was definitely clear: 1012 is not going as planned. The owner of the bar explained to us that, rather than drawing locals into the district with his business, he instead has had to change his business model to fit the needs of the tourists. His bar is very popular, but many of the other establishments that are open during the day, like coffee shops and bookstores, are less successful. And then he said something chilling that’s been on my mind every since: every time a sex worker’s glass window is closed, she likely ends up in a basement.

The business owner described the urban planners of Amsterdam as largely out of touch with the realities of the city and not realizing the widespread impacts of their seemingly well-intentioned plan. I think he really got at a key tension in Amsterdam’s identity: the globalized image that is marketed to tourists is not necessarily a true, local, and authentic presentation of the city. Even the city’s mayor jokingly referred to the global perception of Amsterdam as the world’s Sodom and Gomorrah, but stated that this does not capture the true image of the city that locals bike through everyday.

And to some extent, he’s right. Amazing things are happening in Amsterdam. It’s the most international city in the world with 180 nationalities represented. It leads the world in cycling cities. It has great public spaces. 45% of the housing market is social housing, and Amsterdammers truly care about right to the city for all residents. Overall, the city is bright, diverse, and functional.

But to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to reconcile these two images of Amsterdam, that Dutch apple pie and women’s bodies are for sale on nearly the same block. It’s not what I’m used to, and it’s not what I’d ever want to be used to. I don’t exactly know what to think about this contradictory city, but I do know that I will be spending two more weeks being perpetually confused by Amsterdam.