Home Abroad

Amsterdam is not what I expected. I didn’t really expect anything from Amsterdam. I knew that my eleventh grade anatomy teacher told us that he and his wife spent their summers in Amsterdam. — When pressed for why, he effectively said, “You’ll understand when you are older… Or you won’t.” That man had a huge propensity for dropping wisdom into his everyday conversation and he once beat up Ed Harris. — I knew that prostitution and marijuana were the primary draws of tourism, but also understood that was likely a derivative view of the city. Nevertheless, it was only ever an ancillary interest somewhere in my mind.

Ending up in Amsterdam for the first time was kind of a fluke. My last employer offered a paid 4-week sabbatical after 5 years tenure. After a long complicated for-another-time work story, my husband and I booked a “fuck you” tour of western European cities on my exact five year anniversary. The only plan we had going in to the trip was that my husband wanted to go to at least one of the World Cup matches in France. Amsterdam made for a logical first stop since a. it had the best flight prices and b. it gave us easy train access to France. We’d do a few days in each: Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London, Barcelona; and spend the last week on the beach in Sitges, Spain.

When we landed in Amsterdam, it was approximately 8 AM. We had been travelling for nearly 24 hours. The line for passport control was backed up into the terminal, it was almost a 90 minute wait. We accidentally got on the wrong train out of the terminal and had to double back on the subway…