Catching up with Nikki in Amsterdam

We don’t return on the Maglev to Pudong International. At 8am we wouldn’t be flavour of the month trying to squeeze onto Shanghai’s crowded train system with two large suitcases. Hailing a cab is easy, and this time it’s our turn to be the pushy perpetrators as we fight our way through dense traffic to Pudong International. Our failure to register at the Police station in town hasn’t fazed the authorities, and in no time we’re seated on our KLM plane. A long but uneventful flight (skirting north of the Ukraine) sees us in another continent and another timezone. Our body clocks still haven’t fully adjusted from NZ, and we’re dead on our feet at 6pm on arrival.

In a few minutes flat we’re through customs & immigration, validate our Eurail passes, and hop on

the train to Amsterdam Centraal. Nikki’s running a few minutes late (nothing new there!). It’s great to see my little girl again after so many months apart, and to see that her knee has pretty much healed after her canyoning incident in Interlaken. Nik gets us on the bus to David’s apartment (another AirBNB booking) near the Jordaan, and we lug our suitcases four floors up a narrow near-vertical staircase. Yes, this is a typical Dutch apartment!

I’ve done some background reading on Amsterdam and start setting out an itinerary - the Heineken

experience, the torture museum, the dungeon show, the hash museum, a few coffee shops, the red light district, the prostitution museum, the sex museum and the erotica museum. Pauline looks down her nose at me.  Guess when you're travelling with others a few compromises have to be made...

The Begijnhof is a delightful spot in the heart of town. As the Protestant

Reformation swept through northern Europe in the late 1500s, a small enclave of Catholic nuns was allowed to remain, and to this day 100-odd single women continue to live in this inner court of historic buildings.

We visit the Stejdlik Museum of modern art, cycle Vondelpark and Westerpark,

and stop in at De Kaaskamer for a fix - a wedge of three year old Gouda. All I can say is, “Blessed are the cheese makers”, and especially the Dutch ones who emigrated to NZ long ago, and brought their skills with them.

The view of the Oude Kerk steeple inadvertently draws us past a bunch of windows where girls are lounging around in their underwear. Whatever could this be? Must have wandered into some sort of lingerie fashion show. A tug on my hand suggests Pauline is anxious to move on.

Our travels are frequently interrupted by visits to cafes. It takes a bit of explaining what a “flat white” is, but we’re gradually educating the Dutch about the proper way to serve coffee.

But don’t try this in coffee shops, or they’ll look at you blankly, likely because they’re half stoned. Buy a joint? No problem. I wander in to a coffee shop for the experience (and a cheap second-hand high), but Pauline’s moving on, and if I linger too long I’ll never find her again.  There was a time you could buy magic mushrooms in the coffee shops too, but they’ve cracked down on that after a couple of tourists over-indulged, threw themselves in a canal, and promptly drowned.

You’d have to say the Dutch are a remarkably liberal and open-minded people. Desire a “soft” vice, whether caffeine, cannabis, tobacco, alcohol or the fleshy kind? Just go ahead and buy it openly.

Makes a mockery of the double standards we have in NZ where multi-nationals sell tobacco and alcohol for vast profits with our Government’s blessing, yet growing and smoking a weed in your back garden brings the law down on you like a ton of bricks. Ah - click! - that’s why it’s illegal - the multi-nationals can’t make money from it! Excuse my cynicism - but to me soft drugs are a public health and education issue - not a law enforcement issue.

There’s a little cafe in the southern part of town called Bakers & Roasters, and its claim to fame is

catering to Brazilians and Kiwis. An interesting combination, but Nik didn’t care - her eyes were too busy lighting up over L&P on the menu. They even know how to do flat whites!

We visit Nik’s student accommodation, and head out for our final dinner in Amsterdam. It’s been great catching up, but it’s not yet time for tearful goodbyes - she’s joining us in Copenhagen next weekend.

Pauline and I head for Centraal on Saturday morning and hop on the train to Enkhuizen. Time to reflect on Amsterdam. It’s been over 30 years since I was last here, and I love the place as much now as I did then. The canals, the architecture, the art, the people, the vibe - all combine to make this a really liveable city.

But as a cycle advocate what gets me is the ease by which ordinary people in ordinary clothes just hop on a bike to go anywhere. Pauline did it and loved it, but she wouldn’t dare at home. Auckland’s got a long way to go to catch up to Amsterdam in this respect.