What’s left of the real, loved Amsterdam after a 30-year absence?
It’s been more than thirty years since I called Amsterdam home and almost twenty since I was last there. As I step out on to the square in front of Central Station, I’m still recovering from going through Dutch immigration.
For the first time in my life, I have been asked how long I plan on staying in my country of birth and the reason for my visit, before my Australian passport is stamped. The immigration people seemed very young, and I was tempted to ask them if their mothers knew where they were.
Station Square isn’t the sand-pitted, variously paved chaos it was thirty years ago. It is attractively tiled. Taxis are no longer blocking tram departures. There are no drug addicts and homeless people lying and standing about.
Is the Pope passing through shortly?, I wonder, as I pull my wheeled suitcase towards Dam Square. Have the addicts and the homeless been temporarily shunted out of town?
At a pedestrian crossing, I stop to let a taxi pass, until its driver sounds the horn imperiously, gesturing me to bloody well cross the road. Thirty years ago, using a designated pedestrian crossing as a taxi approached would have resulted in a death officially classified as a suicide.
What is going on? At least the taxi driver was rude. That is reassuring. That hasn’t changed.
I scan the shopfronts ahead for an all-night-all-day bar, I used to frequent. Back then, it was run in shifts by a snarling mother-son-grandson trio. The bar had no name. All three had severely thinning hair, dyed a shiny black, from the same bottle presumably.
On the day of the mother’s funeral, the son and grandson reportedly closed up shop for an hour only.
I finally pinpoint the location, but it is now a gift and souvenir shop, one in a row of many, aggressively discounting windmill fridge magnets and pair-of-clogs key rings.
I cross to the other side of the road and narrowly escape being collected by a tram, which slams on its brakes in a prolonged squeal of steel. Instead of pantomime abuse behind the tram’s windscreen, the driver smiles at me and my wheelie suitcase, waving away my apologies.
I reach Dam Square and become trapped in a vortex of fellow tourists, all pulling wheeled luggage or inexpertly pedaling hire bikes, chattering excitedly and creating a babel critiquing the merits and demerits of Amsterdam.
I manage to escape and see streaming past, on a stately Dutch grandma bike, in a flood of glorious blonde hair … yes, that’s ….
But it’s not, of course. It was thirty years ago.
I push on and then see an old friend, last seen from afar thirty years ago dressed in a Salvation Army issue great coat, walking, head bent into a biting wind, most likely on his way to the bar without a name.
But it is not.
