Amsterdam City Quotes

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

There isn’t a time set for Nikulin’s transfer. All we know for now is two Iraqi agents are going to Amsterdam—at least we think it’s that city. And we don’t know when this will occur. I will call you when we find out.

...the curious Dutch classification gedogen, which means 'technically illegal but officially tolerated.

Opinions differ on the question of whether a golden age is something you can experience while it's happening or whether it only comes into focus on reflection...no matter how grand and prosperous and momentous the time in which you are living may be, its grandeur is inevitably stained by the incessant drabness of the present.

Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it.

Cycling nowadays is tantamount to attempting suicide.

a basic component of individual rights is the right to own property.

For individual freedom can come about only, can be conceived only, if there is some sense of security to life.

Our City has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District. Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most peopke find sin. - taxi driver

The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and

So how, in an increasingly interconnected world, do we integrate and still keep our values?

You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It’s a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun.

For liberalism is a delicate thing. It encompasses so much -- constitutional government, democratic elections, freedom of worship, civil rights, free trade -- that we think of it as timeless and universal. But liberalism came into being in a real place and time, like a flame it has wavered in various eras, and it can be snuffed out.

There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might “go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation”).

I had been to Amsterdam a couple of times with Eric; we loved the museums and the Concertgebouw (it was here that I first heard Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, in Dutch). We loved the canals lined with tall, stepped houses; the old Hortus Botanicus and the beautiful seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogue; the Rembrandtplein with its open-air cafés; the fresh herrings sold in the streets and eaten on the spot; and the general atmosphere of cordiality and openness which seemed peculiar to the city.

I’ve been in Amsterdam, I’ve been able to enjoy many aspects of cycling here. One thing I have not been able to do yet is bike with my sweetheart. But now that you’re here, I’m so excited to ride around town with you among all the thousands of other cyclists while I hold your wrist or you hold mine.

Amsterdam is a city if sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

As happens so often in history at the dying of one age and the birth of another, an era of phenomenal ugliness, strife, and chaos was about to unfold.

In 1955, one sign—on the façade of a secondhand bookshop on Oudezijds Achterburgwal—read: BICYCLES PARKED HERE WILL BE DESTROYED.

handlebars. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, during various confrontations between young people and the Amsterdam police, it

There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation').

Another protester said that more cyclists on New York City’s streets looked “ridiculous.” She gave the reporter the tired refrain “This is not Amsterdam.” DOT has no Amsterdam-ometer in its traffic analysis toolbox to measure changes in the street on a scale of one to ten windmills. Analyzing

Many of the canal houses date from the Golden Age, the seventeenth century,” he said. “Our city has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District.” He paused. “Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Still, I had resolved to sit and talk with him and that is what I would do. He neither offered permission nor withheld it regarding the curtains, so I stepped over to the window and pulled them apart, glancing down onto the New York streets below. The yellow cabs were driving up and down honking their horns and the view between the skyscrapers held me for a minute. I had never fallen in love with this city—even after almost seven years my head was still in Amsterdam and my heart was still in Dublin—but there were moments, like this one, when I understood why others did.

A world that becomes more Muslim becomes less everything else. First it’s Jews, already abandoning France. Then it’s homosexuals, already under siege from gay-bashing in Amsterdam, ‘the most tolerant city in Europe’. Then it’s uncovered women, targetted for rape in Oslo. And if you don’t any longer have any Jews or (officially) any gays or (increasingly) uncovered women, there are always just Christians in general, from Nigeria to Egypt to Pakistan. More space for Islam means less space for everything else, and in the end for you.

[Charles the Fifth], pretty much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land management, divine right, mercantile colonialization, and obedience to authority along the strict metaphysical line of the great chain of being.

Each year, the city government, the police department and the local newspapers warned adult Amsterdammers to take precautions. Before going to bed the night before Luilak, adults were advised to: disconnect their doorbells, bring garbage cans indoors, close all windows, avoid sleeping in street-facing rooms and wear earplugs.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

This city is like no other city in the world. It is brilliant but it is bloated, and I've never called it home

Words are water in this city. One drop of rumour could drown us.

You know what I’ve often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.

There, she identified a recurring cycle that kept women in a downward spiral: families that were already poor and struggling to stay alive kept having more babies, dragging them down still further. In the 1870s she became the country’s first advocate for contraception, and one of the first anywhere. In the midst of a society and a medical profession that were rigorously Victorian in their attitudes about sex, she had patients conduct trials of contraceptives and concluded that the pessary, a kind of diaphragm, was the most effective birth control device.

You know what I’ve often said, ever since Auschwitz. Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Her hand was still on his cheek, her arm

Forgotten by everyone, that is, except by the city’s youths who used these bikes to indulge both their inherent mechanical skills and their penchant for vandalism. Under their guidance such bikes followed a familiar pattern of decay: “First, the bell disappears. Then the light and back rack. Finally, the seat, the tires and, sometimes, even entire wheels. But the frame remains standing—for hours, days, months, years. . . .

Sarah Wise’s The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum; The Coffee Trader by David Liss; Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto; Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underworld Lingo by Vincent J. Monteleone; David Maurer’s The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man; and Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists by Anthony M. Amore and Tom Mashberg.

Before us, hundreds of people passed, jogging and biking and Rollerblading. Amsterdam was a city designed for movement and activity, a city that would rather not travel by car, and so inevitably I felt excluded from it.

The thing that first knocked me out about Amsterdam, even on the coldest, greyest February day, was its beauty. The houses rise, red and grey, and seem to float swanlike above the canals. The sheen on the water is olive-green, and mallards with their brilliant emerald heads slide gravely under the bridges. if you close your eyes you can see the city peopled again by those who built it - seventeenth century burghers in their black coats, rich from trading with the Indies.

The Dutch life is beautifully attuned to the deliberate pace of bicycle riding. It has the same calm and slow rhythm which allows the Hollander time off for coffee in the middle of the morning, for tea in the afternoon, and tea again in the evening. . . . To a Dutchman a bicycle becomes a matter of individual expression, almost a part of the body, controlled subconsciously and leaving him free to meditation. There is no noise, no smell of gasoline, so he can notice little things like birds and flowers, which the automobilized American leaves in the roar and dust. An

Many of the canal houses date from the Golden Age, the seventeenth century,” he said. “Our city has a rich history, even though many tourists are only wanting to see the Red Light District.” He paused. “Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.” •

Harlem was named after the Dutch city of Haarlem, Brooklyn after the small town of Breukelen, and Flushing after the southern Dutch city of Vlissingen. Wall Street was originally De Waal Street and Broadway was once better known as Breede Weg. Several other Dutch words also made it into the American vocabulary: cookie, waffle, noodles, brandy, coleslaw.

Yet the need for justifying the wealth and power of great corporations in the eyes of the people has never been greater. Why not hark back to Florence, Venice, Antwerp and Amsterdam? The great corporations could devote wealth and energies to cleaning up, improving and adorning our cities. Each large corporation might adopt a city and vie with other corporations to see whose city shines brightest. In the center of each financial district there should be a large plaza in which periodically poets, singers, storytellers and artists of every sort would compete for rich prizes. The corporations should see it as their duty to spot and encourage talent, and celebrate greatness. There should be social intimacy between the powerful and the creative.

Many kids would hit the streets at about 4 a.m., though early birds got started even earlier; the first calls regarding disorderly behavior usually reached the police by 2 a.m. Celebrants of Luilak (which means “lazybones”) would ring doorbells, beat drums, blow horns, crash pot lids together, scream “Luilak!,” sing a Luilak song, drag strings of empty tin cans behind their bikes, overturn garbage cans, bang windows, break windows, light bonfires, ignite fireworks, drink bottles of milk left out by the milkman, set buckets of water over doorways and trigger false fire alarms. They did anything and everything to annoy sleeping adults. This yearly debauchery—particular to Amsterdam and a few surrounding towns and with unknown origins—was centuries old.*

Amsterdam is a city that offers something to everyone. While it's known for being more adult-oriented, there are so many things to enjoy here regardless of the kind of traveller that you are. If you are the kind of traveller who has a limited budget, you can still have a great time if you knew the cheap things to do in Amsterdam. By simply exploring the energetic streets of Amsterdam, you'll be rewarded with so many interesting sights without spending a single cent.

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers. The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power? Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition.

Prostitution is not exactly a reputable business over there either, even though the girls actually have to pay taxes on their earnings, and submit to regular health check ups. Even the prostitutes have universal healthcare over there. The benefit of legal prostitution is obvious: tax income for the city, healthier girls, and safety. In Amsterdam, each girl has an alarm button next to her bed that she can press if one of her "customers" tries to rape or hurt her. The police will arrive within minutes and protect the girl from harm.

More impressive than the size of the silently protesting crowd was the orderliness and simplicity with which it was dispersed. Assured that Hinton had received the proper care, Malcolm approached the crowd, raised his arm, and gave a signal. One bystander described it as “eerie, because these people just faded into the night. It was the most orderly movement of four thousand to five thousand people I’ve ever seen in my life—they just simply disappeared—right before our eyes.” Malcolm’s silent command also left a strong impression on the New York City police. The chief inspector at the scene turned to Amsterdam News reporter James Hicks and said, “No one man should have that much power.”2

The Netherlands capital of Amsterdam amsterdam cruise is a thriving metropolis and one from the world's popular cities. If you are planning a trip to the metropolis, but are unclear about what you should do presently there, why not possess a little fun and spend time learning about how it's stereotypically known for? How come they put on clogs? When was the wind mill first utilised there? In addition, be sure to include all your feels on your journey and taste the phenomenal cheeses along with smell the stunning tulips. It's really recommended that you stay in a city motel, Amsterdam is quite spread out and residing in hotels close to the city-centre allows for the easiest access to public transportation. Beyond the clichés So that you can know precisely why a stereotype exists it usually is important to discover its source. Clogs: The Dutch have already been wearing solid wood shoes, as well as "Klompen" as they are referred to, for approximately 700 years. They were originally made out of a timber sole along with a leather top or band tacked for the wood. Nevertheless, the shoes had been eventually created completely from wood to safeguard the whole base. Wooden shoe wearers state the shoes are usually warm during the cold months and cool during the warm months. The first guild associated with clog designers dates back to a number exceeding 1570 in Holland. When making blockages, both shoes of a set must be created from the same kind of timber, even the same side of a tree, in order that the wood will certainly shrink in the same charge. While most blocks today are produced by equipment, a few shoemakers are left and they normally set up store in vacationer areas near any city hotel. Amsterdam also offers a clog-making museum, Klompenmakerij De Zaanse Schans, that highlights your shoe's history and significance. Windmills: The first windmills have been demonstrated to have existed in Netherlands from about the year 1200. Today, there are eight leftover windmills in the capital. The most effective to visit is De Gooyer, which has been built in 1725 over the Nieuwevaart Canal. Their location in the east involving city's downtown area signifies it is readily available from any metropolis hotel. Amsterdam enjoys its beer and it actually has a brewery right on the doorstep to the wind generator. So if you are enjoying a historic site it's also possible to enjoy a scrumptious ice-cold beer - what more would you ask for? Mozerella: It's impossible to vacation to Amsterdam without sampling several of its wonderful cheeses. In accordance with the locals, probably the most flavourful cheeses are available at the Wegewijs Emporium. With over 50 international cheese and A hundred domestic parmesan cheesse, you will surely have a wide-variety to pick from.

Finally, Europe’s post-war history is a story shadowed by silences; by absence. The continent of Europe was once an intricate, interwoven tapestry of overlapping languages, religions, communities and nations. Many of its cities—particularly the smaller ones at the intersection of old and new imperial boundaries, such as Trieste, Sarajevo, Salonika, Cernovitz, Odessa or Vilna—were truly multicultural societies avant le mot, where Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and others lived in familiar juxtaposition. We should not idealise this old Europe. What the Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski called ‘the incredible, almost comical melting-pot of peoples and nationalities sizzling dangerously in the very heart of Europe’ was periodically rent with riots, massacres and pogroms—but it was real, and it survived into living memory. Between 1914 and 1945, however, that Europe was smashed into the dust. The tidier Europe that emerged, blinking, into the second half of the twentieth century had fewer loose ends. Thanks to war, occupation, boundary adjustments, expulsions and genocide, almost everybody now lived in their own country, among their own people. For forty years after World War Two Europeans in both halves of Europe lived in hermetic national enclaves where surviving religious or ethnic minorities the Jews in France, for example—represented a tiny percentage of the population at large and were thoroughly integrated into its cultural and political mainstream. Only Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union—an empire, not a country and anyway only part-European, as already noted—stood aside from this new, serially homogenous Europe. But since the 1980s, and above all since the fall of the Soviet Union and the enlargement of the EU, Europe is facing a multicultural future. Between them refugees; guest-workers; the denizens of Europe’s former colonies drawn back to the imperial metropole by the prospect of jobs and freedom; and the voluntary and involuntary migrants from failed or repressive states at Europe’s expanded margins have turned London, Paris, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Berlin, Milan and a dozen other places into cosmopolitan world cities whether they like it or not.

Wasn’t it Pieter Stuyvesant who said that first boatload of Jews could stay in New Amsterdam only as long as they took care of their own and asked for nothing? So take care of ourselves we did. They always told us how lucky we were to grow up in the Orphaned Hebrews Home, schooling us in its illustrious history. Didn’t we weather the blizzard of 1888, kept warm by our own stockpile of coal, fed from the ovens of our own bakery? And while children all over the city succumbed to cholera at the turn of the century, didn’t we emerge unscathed, the city’s water filtered before it reached our lips? After the Great War, people fell to influenza by the tens of thousands, but in the Home not a single child died. No matter how impressive, though, our Home was a kind of ghetto, the scrape of metal as the gates swung shut the same sound in Manhattan as in Venice. I

In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes. We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music. We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)

In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

It was clear just how much Tommy loved the city. New York City. The CKY Grocery on Amsterdam had giant, bright red Spartan apples every day of the year, even if it wasn’t the right season. He loved that grocery, and the old, shaky Persian man who owned it. Tommy emphatically, yet erroneously believed that the CKY Grocery was the genuine heart of the great city. All five boroughs embodied distinct feelings for him, but there was only one that he’d ever truly romanticized. To him, Manhattan was the entire world. He loved everything between the East River and the Hudson; from the Financial District up to Harlem; from Avenue A to Zabar’s. He loved the four seasons, although autumn was easily the most anticipated. To Tommy, Central Park’s bright, almost copper hues in the fall were the epitome of orange. He loved the unique perfume of deli meats and subway steam. He loved the rain with such verve that every time it so much as drizzled, he would turn to the sky so he could feel the drops sprinkle onto his teeth. Because every raindrop that hit him had already experienced that much envied journey from the tips of the skyscrapers all the way down to the cracked and foot-stamped sidewalks. He believed every inch of the city had its own predetermined genre of music that suited it to a tee. The modal jazz of Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter was absolutely meant for the Upper East Side, north of 61st Street. Precisely between Gershwin and gospel. He loved the view from his apartment, even if it was just the leaves of the tree outside in July or the thin shadows of its bare branches crawling along the plain brick wall in January. Tommy loved his career. He loved his friends. And he loved that first big bite of apple I watched him take each and every morning. Everything was perfect in the city, and as long as things remained the way he wanted them to, Tommy would continue to love the city forever. Which is exactly why his jaw dropped when he opened the letter he found in his mailbox that morning. The first bite of still un-chewed apple fell out of his mouth and firmly planted itself within the crack of that 113th Street sidewalk.

The Biggest Property Rental In Amsterdam Amsterdam has been ranked as the 13th best town to live in the globe according to Mercer contacting annual Good quality of Living Review, a place it's occupied given that 2006. Which means that the city involving Amsterdam is among the most livable spots you can be centered. Amsterdam apartments are equally quite highly sought after and it can regularly be advisable to enable a housing agency use their internet connections with the amsterdam parkinghousing network to help you look for a suitable apartment for rent Amsterdam. Amsterdam features rated larger in the past, yet continuing plan of disruptive and wide spread construction projects - like the problematic North-South town you live line- has intended a small scores decline. Amsterdam after rated inside the top 10 Carolien Gehrels (Tradition) told Dutch news company ANP that the metropolis is happy together with the thirteenth place. "Of course you want is actually the first place position, however shows that Amsterdam is a fairly place to live. Well-known places to rent in Amsterdam Your Jordaan. An old employees quarter popularised amang other things with the sentimental tunes of a quantity of local vocalists. These music painted an attractive image of the location. Local cafes continue to attribute live vocalists like Arthur Jordaan and Tante Leeni. The Jordaan is a network of alleyways and narrow canals. The section was proven in the Seventeenth century, while Amsterdam desperately needed to expand. The region was created along the design of the routes and ditches which already existed. The Jordaan is known for the weekly biological Nordermaarkt on Saturdays. Amsterdam is famous for that open air market segments. In Oud-zuid there is a ranging Jordan Cuypmarkt open year long. This part of town is a very popular spot for expats to find Expat Amsterdam flats due in part to vicinity of the Vondelpark. Among the largest community areas A hundred and twenty acres) inside Amsterdam, Netherlands. It can be located in the stadsdeel Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, western side from the Leidseplein as well as the Museumplein. The playground was exposed in 1865 as well as originally named the "Nieuwe Park", but later re-named to "Vondelpark", after the 17th one hundred year author Joost lorrie den Vondel. Every year, the recreation area has around 10 million guests. In the park can be a film art gallery, an open air flow theatre, any playground, and different cafe's and restaurants.

Hij genoot van de verschillende afvalcontainers die overal stonden, van de ingeblikte groenten in de ziekenhuiskoele winkels – supermarkten werden ze genoemd –, hij genoot van de trams en hun heupdans die de passagiers heen en weer schudde wanneer zij klingelend een bocht maakten, hij genoot van de bomen die overal voor schaduw zorgden, compleet met een kroost van groene houten banken en een vuilnisbak, hij genoot van de grachten, die rimpelend een wiegenlied voor hem zongen, hij genoot van de vooroverhellende en schuine grachtenpanden, hij genoot van de standbeelden bedekt met patina en duivenuitwerpselen, hij genoot van het bruisen van zo veel mensenlevens, hij genoot van de pleinen en de onberispelijke kantoorgebouwen met ramen waarin het universum weerkaatste, van de vele straatbelichting, de neonreclames – de stad was 's nachts een ware boomgaard van kleurig neon –, hij genoot van de markten waar het rook naar gezouten vis, gebrande noten en kaas, van de vele eethuizen die met de mensen mee waren geëmigreerd, hij genoot van de fietsers die elke verkeersregel overtraden, hij genoot van het stille lawaai en de zinderende sensualiteit die de meisjes uitwasemden en van verliefde stellen die hun liefde op straat uitstalden voor voorbijgangers, hij genoot van het wolkenheer, van de regens en de buien, van de natte zonnen op regendagen als beslagen brillenglazen, van de regenplassen en hun weerspiegelingen, hij genoot van de chaos, van de beierd ver weg tussen het hooi van zijn doofheid, hij genoot van de duiven, van de zwervers met hun winkelwagentjes vol onbegrijpelijke huisraad, van de drankschuiten die over de effen straten kapseisden, zijwaarts hellend door een overbelaste lever, hij genoot van de sissende venters van genotsmiddelen, hij genoot van de drukke winkelstraten waar alles wat men nodig had te koop was en alles wat men niet nodig had, hij genoot van de rosse buurten en de uitstalling van vrouwelijk vlees, dat niet aan duitloze hem besteed was, van de vele kroegen en bars waarin klanten dronken en kwetterden en zich ontlastten zoals de vogels in de johannesbroodboom van Cheira en Heira, hij genoot van de welvaart die de mensen zichtbaar goeddeed, vooral de vrouwen met hun papieren tassen vol nieuwe aankopen in de weekeinden en hun ontspannen roddels en koetjes en kalfjes op terrassen, op vensterbanken achter de geraniums, hij genoot van de broeders die steeds in aantal toenamen en hem eerbiedig bejegenden wanneer hij hun bedwelmende koopwaar weigerde, met eerbied want hij was een van hem en het deed hem goed om te zien dat ze hoe dan ook werk hadden gevonden, hij genoot van de levendige rusteloosheid van dit alles, van de Amstel die voor verfrissing zorgde en het land bevloeide en het meest genoot hij van de ultieme wonderen in het park, dat hij nu betrad.

joke around—nothing serious—as I work to get my leg back to where it was. Two weeks later, I’m in an ankle-to-hip leg brace and hobbling around on crutches. The brace can’t come off for another six weeks, so my parents lend me their townhouse in New York City and Lucien hires me an assistant to help me out around the house. Some guy named Trevor. He’s okay, but I don’t give him much to do. I want to regain my independence as fast as I can and get back out there for Planet X. Yuri, my editor, is griping that he needs me back and I’m more than happy to oblige. But I still need to recuperate, and I’m bored as hell cooped up in the townhouse. Some buddies of mine from PX stop by and we head out to a brunch place on Amsterdam Street my assistant sometimes orders from. Deacon, Logan, Polly, Jonesy and I take a table in Annabelle’s Bistro, and settle in for a good two hours, running our waitress ragged. She’s a cute little brunette doing her best to stay cheerful for us while we give her a hard time with endless coffee refills, loud laughter, swearing, and general obnoxiousness. Her nametag says Charlotte, and Deacon calls her “Sweet Charlotte” and ogles and teases her, sometimes inappropriately. She has pretty eyes, I muse, but otherwise pay her no mind. I have my leg up on a chair in the corner, leaning back, as if I haven’t a care in the world. And I don’t. I’m going to make a full recovery and pick up my life right where I left off. Finally, a manager with a severe hairdo and too much makeup, politely, yet pointedly, inquires if there’s anything else we need, and we take the hint. We gather our shit and Deacon picks up the tab. We file out, through the maze of tables, and I’m last, hobbling slowly on crutches. I’m halfway out when I realize I left my Yankees baseball cap on the table. I return to get it and find the waitress staring at the check with tears in her eyes. She snaps the black leather book shut when she sees me and hurriedly turns away. “Forget something?” she asks with false cheer and a shaky smile. “My hat,” I say. She’s short and I’m tall. I tower over her. “Did Deacon leave a shitty tip? He does that.” “Oh no, no, I mean…it’s fine,” she says, turning away to wipe her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I just…um, kind of a rough month. You know how it is.” She glances me up and down in my expensive jeans and designer shirt. “Or maybe you don’t.” The waitress realizes what she said, and another round of apologies bursts out of her as she begins stacking our dirty dishes. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. Really. I have this bad habit…blurting. I don’t know why I said that. Anyway, um…” I laugh, and fish into my back pocket for my wallet. “Don’t worry about it. And take this. For your trouble.” I offer her forty dollars and her eyes widen. Up close, her eyes are even prettier—large and luminous, but sad too. A blush turns her skin scarlet “Oh, no, I couldn’t. No, please. It’s fine, really.” She bustles even faster now, not looking at me. I shrug and drop the twenties on the table. “I hope your month improves.” She stops and stares at the money, at war with herself. “Okay. Thank you,” she says finally, her voice cracking. She takes the money and stuffs it into her apron. I feel sorta bad, poor girl. “Have a nice day, Charlotte,” I say, and start to hobble away. She calls after me, “I hope your leg gets better soon.” That was big of her, considering what ginormous bastards we’d been to her all morning. Or maybe she’s just doing her job. I wave a hand to her without looking back, and leave Annabelle’s. Time heals me. I go back to work. To Planet X. To the world and all its thrills and beauty. I don’t go back to my parents’ townhouse; hell I’m hardly in NYC anymore. I don’t go back to Annabelle’s and I never see—or think about—that cute waitress with the sad eyes ever again. “Fucking hell,” I whisper as the machine reads the last line of

On May 10, 1933, National Socialist student groups marched “against the un-German spirit” and burned “un-German writings” in street actions designed to attract publicity. By now it seemed inevitable that the Franks would emigrate to Amsterdam. “When the Jews write in German, they lie,” the Nazis had proclaimed. The works of Thomas, Klaus, and Heinrich Mann, of Arnold and Stefan Zweig, of Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Werfel, not to mention the Communist writings of Marx and Engels and the books of Bertolt Brecht and many others, were tossed into the flames in many German cities to the accompaniment of shouted slogans; it was as though the demonstrators wished to burn the authors themselves at the stake. Otto Frank’s favorite poet, Heinrich Heine, whose poem “Lorelei” every schoolchild knew by heart, was declared a nonperson. In future textbooks, “Poet unknown” would replace the name of Heinrich Heine, a poet who had written a hundred years earlier, “Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

Amsterdam itself was the greatest trade city in Europe up to the Industrial Revolution, and was home to the first stock exchange and insurance company. The Netherlands is considered by many historians to be the first truly capitalist nation in the world.

We both enjoyed dinner at a local restaurant and talked until after midnight, leaving only when the staff made it clear that they wanted to close.The next day after breakfast and a reluctant goodbye, I caught the morning train to Hamburg, Germany. Amsterdam had been bombed by the Nazis at the very beginning of the war, destroying about a square kilometer in the central section of the city. The surrounding infrastructure had also been bombed and getting from place to place was not easy. Many bridges had been destroyed, and getting around took much longer than it should have, but people took it in their stride and were patient. The train to Germany was pulled by an old steam locomotive, which chugged through the Dutch lowlands and typical picturesque communities. Looking around I saw little or no signs of war damage in these rural areas. It was not until the train reached the border, that the horrors of World War II became apparent.

Once every few weeks, beginning in the summer of 2018, a trio of large Boeing freighter aircraft, most often converted and windowless 747s of the Dutch airline KLM, takes off from Schiphol airport outside Amsterdam, with a precious cargo bound eventually for the city of Chandler, a western desert exurb of Phoe­nix, Arizona. The cargo is always the same, consisting of nine white boxes in each aircraft, each box taller than a man. To get these pro­foundly heavy containers from the airport in Phoenix to their des­tination, twenty miles away, requires a convoy of rather more than a dozen eighteen-wheeler trucks. On arrival and family uncrated, the contents of all the boxes are bolted together to form one enormous 160-ton machine -- a machine tool, in fact, a direct descendant of the machine tools invented and used by men such as Joseph Bramah and Henry Maudslay and Henry Royce and Henry Ford a century and more before. "Just like its cast-iron predecessors, this Dutch-made behemoth of a tool (fifteen of which compose the total order due to be sent to Chandler, each delivered as it is made) is a machine that makes machines. Yet, rather than making mechanical devices by the pre­cise cutting of metal from metal, this gigantic device is designed for the manufacture of the tiniest of machines imaginable, all of which perform their work electronically, without any visible mov­ing parts. "For here we come to the culmination of precision's quarter­millennium evolutionary journey. Up until this moment, almost all the devices and creations that required a degree of precision in their making had been made of metal, and performed their vari­ous functions through physical movements of one kind or another. Pistons rose and fell; locks opened and closed; rifles fired; sewing machines secured pieces of fabric and created hems and selvedges; bicycles wobbled along lanes; cars ran along highways; ball bearings spun and whirled; trains snorted out of tunnels; aircraft flew through the skies; telescopes deployed; clocks ticked or hummed, and their hands moved ever forward, never back, one precise sec­ond at a time."Then came the computer, then the personal computer, then the smartphone, then the previously unimaginable tools of today -- and with this helter-skelter technological evolution came a time of translation, a time when the leading edge of precision passed itself out into the beyond, moving as if through an invisible gateway, from the purely mechanical and physical world and into an immobile and silent universe, one where electrons and protons and neutrons have replaced iron and oil and bearings and lubricants and trunnions and the paradigm-altering idea of interchangeable parts, and where, though the components might well glow with fierce lights send out intense waves of heat, nothing moved one piece against another in mechanical fashion, no machine required that mea­sured exactness be an essential attribute of every component piece.

then through the Indian Ocean, down around the Cape of Good Hope, and up to the Atlantic. The entirety of the world via water. So many of the places I went exist in my mind like a brochure when I try to recall them. Elephants in Tsavo East National Park, an elevator packed with people riding from Salvador’s upper to lower city. The rippling heat of Delhi and the bright turquoises, saffrons, and fuchsias of women’s saris. I learned about silk and sashimi, about wild animals and barren deserts. I also learned about intractable poverty, caste systems, indigenous tribes—things I might have learned about America if I’d been paying closer attention. But this is perhaps the most profound lesson of travel, that you don’t really know the place and culture you’ve come from until you’ve left it. Today, I think that even if I had someday left the States, without that voyage, I’d have trod the familiar: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Montreal. Instead, Semester at Sea gave me the courage to imagine a different kind of travel, and a blueprint for how to do it. To see the sights, certainly, but to understand that it was meeting people that really mattered. In this, I also count a legacy from my father, the salesman who could talk to anyone about anything.

By 1636, Amsterdam’s Jews, who numbered no more than 1 percent of the population, controlled 10 percent of the city’s trade and, dealing mostly in luxury items, accrued nearly 20 percent of the profits. Their

What you’ve worked so hard to make your own— what you love—disappears or changes into something unrecognizable: landscapes and waterscapes, roads, bridges, buildings, villages and cities, people too. They don’t ask you first, they just do it. - The End (1937)

Of course, Amsterdam’s flourishing mercantile classes did not invest only in art. Trade also financed the construction of the concentric canals encircling the city. Each of these was given a name indicative of the class of resident it hoped to attract: the Gentleman’s Canal (Herengracht), the Prince’s Canal (Prinsengracht), the Emperor’s Canal (Keizersgracht). A northern Venice was born, albeit with colder weather and worse food. Along the canals, handsome townhouses were built in classical or neo-Renaissance style, complete with ornamented façades, large windows and high-ceilinged rooms for entertaining guests. The houses were taxed according to their width at the front, so a unique shape of building evolved: narrow fronted but very tall and surprisingly deep, often with a sizable garden hidden Tardis-like at the back. Many included what the Dutch called doorzonwoningen, individual rooms running the whole length of the house, so that sunlight could shine all the way through from the windows at either end. Steep staircases saved valuable space inside, with elaborate systems of ropes and pulleys enabling front doors to be opened from upstairs by tugging on a loose end. Building smaller rooms on the upper floors than on the lower ones helped enhance the sense of perspective when one looked up from the street, exaggerating the height of the buildings. Gabled rooves were topped with flagpole holders pointing out like fingers, together with cranes and pulleys for lifting in furniture that would not fit through the narrow interior staircases.

On the night of February 25, vowing to “wipe the mouths of the savages,” he launched a surprise attack on the Pavonia encampment. Company troops massacred scores of men, women, and children, Wiechquaesgecks as well as Hackensacks. At daybreak, wrote David De Vries, the exulting soldiers returned to Manhattan with stories of how infants were “torn from their mother’s breasts, and hacked to pieces in the presence of the parents, and the pieces thrown into the fire and in the water, and other sucklings, being bound to small boards, were cut, stuck, and pierced, and miserably massacred in a manner to move a heart of stone.” Some of the victims, De Vries added, “came to our people in the country with their hands, some with their legs cut off, and some holding their entrails in their arms.” Volunteers attacked a smaller Wiechquaesgeck camp at Corlear’s Hook, the bulge on the East River side of Manhattan, with similar results. The heads of more than eighty victims were brought back to New Amsterdam for display, and Kieft made a little speech congratulating his forces on their valor.

madness. As

2012 Andy’s Message   Young, I have clear memories of Amsterdam. Last year, I returned to the canal city for a vacation. ‘The District’ in 1968 was very different compared to 2011. This area is now a well-organized vicinity with numerous cafes, eateries and new editions to the vibrant landscape. The ban on brothels was lifted in 2000. The De Wallen activities are now actively regulated and controlled by the Dutch authorities.               Do you remember the prostitutes were predominantly Dutch, German, French and Belgian back then? Now, there are numerous Latinas, Blacks and Asians (mainly from the Philippines, the Golden Triangle and Thailand) working in the vicinity. They’re now liable for taxes.               Many coffee shops had also sprung up. Though food, alcohol, and tobacco are generally consumed outside the cafes, these establishments are licensed to sell cannabis and soft drugs.               You remember those narrow alleyways that Jabril took us down, where the sex workers sat elegantly in windows that resembled living rooms? These are now one-room cabins that prostitutes rent to offer their sexual services from behind a window or glass door; often illuminated by red lights - better known as “kamers.” ‘The District’ is now a tourist attraction…

Last but not least, the gay establishment Jabril took us to is now a menswear boutique, retailing provocative undergarments, sexy swimwear and erotic wear.               Young, I’d love to visit Amsterdam with you. I’m sure we’d have fun reminiscing about our young years in the canal city.☺               Love, hugs and more,               Andy.

MOST CITIES ARE designed on grids that fill them with hard angles. Not Amsterdam, which has a softness about it imparted by the watery curves of the 16th-century canals that fan out through the city. Though its gabled canal houses and narrow medieval streets give it an undeniable old-world charm, Amsterdam’s thoroughly contemporary takes on arts, architecture and design show that it has modernity in a firm embrace. It’s a city that invites wandering, with a tram system and a plenitude of bicycles (about as many as there are residents) that make navigating as fun as it is easy. Thanks to the locals, most of whom speak English, you’ll feel instantly welcome and will be spared the indignity of trying to pronounce Dutch (don’t even try). Spend as much time as possible on foot, the better to enjoy the city’s theatrical quality: The huge, unshaded windows of the canal homes allow you to peer right in, testimony to the Dutch ethos of having nothing to hide.

God is blessing the church in China with extraordinary growth. However, when Chinese churches and ministers who had experienced God’s blessing in their rural ministries entered the mushrooming cities of China and tried to minister and communicate the gospel in the same ways that had been blessed in the countryside, they saw less fruitfulness. Over a decade ago, several Dutch denominations approached us. While they were thriving outside of urban areas, they had not been able to start new, vital churches in Amsterdam in years — and most of the existing ones had died out. These leaders knew the gospel; they had financial resources; they had the desire for Christian mission. But they couldn’t get anything off the ground in the biggest city of their country.2 In both cases, ministry that was thriving in the heartland of the country was unable to make much of a dent in the city. It would have been easy to say, “The people of the city are too spiritually proud and hardened.” But the church leaders we met chose to respond humbly and took responsibility for the problem. They concluded that the gospel ministry that had fit nonurban areas well would need to be adapted to the culture of urban life. And they were right. This necessary adaptation to the culture is an example of what we call “contextualization.”3 SOUND CONTEXTUALIZATION Contextualization is not — as is often argued — “giving people what they want to hear.”4 Rather, it is giving people the Bible’s answers, which they may not at all want to hear, to questions about life that people in their particular time and place are asking, in language and forms they can comprehend, and through appeals and arguments with force they can feel, even if they reject them. Sound contextualization means translating and adapting the communication and ministry of the gospel to a particular culture without compromising the essence and particulars of the gospel itself. The great missionary task is to express the gospel message to a new culture in a way that avoids making the message unnecessarily alien to that culture, yet without removing or obscuring the scandal and offense of biblical truth. A contextualized gospel is marked by clarity and attractiveness, and yet it still challenges sinners’ self-sufficiency and calls them to repentance. It adapts and connects to the culture, yet at the same time challenges and confronts it. If we fail to adapt to the culture or if we fail to challenge the culture — if we under- or overcontextualize — our ministry will be unfruitful because we have failed to contextualize well.

The exodus takes different forms in different countries. In Spain, many gifted young émigrés come from ordinary families without the connections to enter the Spanish elite. France exports ambitious people who can’t join the French elite because they didn’t go to a grande école. This amounts to a geographical reshuffling of elites. Amsterdam may be the future for cities like Paris and Madrid: a backwater inhabited by an increasingly impotent national elite, a delightful place for paceless mornings of coffee and newspapers.

Love your children, for they are the seeds that will make this city bloom.

Take care, take care. This city thrives! It's money gives you wings to soar. But it is a yoke on your shoulders and you would do well to take note of the bruise around your neck.

According to the innovation charity Nesta in the UK, the five cities that are globally best placed in terms of having the most effective policy environment to foster innovation are: New York, London, Helsinki, Barcelona and Amsterdam.

He immediately began to de-privatize. He revoked the licences to the unpopular Imperial Continental Gas Association and fashioned it into a company owned by the municipality. The same happened with the water pipeline over the dunes and the Amsterdamse Omnibus Maatschappij (Amsterdam Omnibus Company), which had run a number of horse-drawn trams in the city since 1875. In doing all this, Treub instigated an evolutionary process that was to give a lasting social basis to city policy. From

All unemployed Jews are sent to labour camps in the countryside. A survivor remembered that “It was like a Russian winter. The snow lay metres deep on the tracks and froze over. To be there made one feel as though one was overwintering in Nova Zemlya.”27

Cinemas always go way up in my estimation if their bar stocks interesting beers like Texels Skuumkoppe rather than just the big mass-market brands.

However, it is on the grand scale of cities like Amsterdam or Bruges and towns like Goslar that the archetypal contest between order and anarchy is played out with gusto. They are a kind of parable, externalising the triumph of order and harmony over dissonance, remembering that harmony depends as much on clash as correspondence.

Between the whores' world and God's world, like a river dividing two empires, stretches an intense smell of urine.

She had long since stopped finding it ironic or eerie that the city at large paid no attention to a murder, whether the victim was a prominent citizen or a guttersnipe.

Netherlands, which has a restrictive immigration policy compared to the United States. Most European nations, including the Netherlands, after all, have universal health insurance coverage, which makes drug treatment and psychiatric treatment more available, and the Dutch government subsidizes more housing. Finally, the Netherlands’ big success was with heroin, which has effective pharmacological substitutes, methadone and Suboxone, not with meth, which lacks anything similar. But there may be fewer obstacles than appear. The Netherlands has a private health-care insurance system similar to that of the United States and covered the people who needed health care in ways similar to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which significantly expanded access to drug treatment, including medically assisted treatment, in the United States.4 San Francisco subsidizes a significant quantity of housing, as we have seen. While California is larger than the Netherlands, the population of Amsterdam (872,000) is nearly identical to San Francisco’s (882,000).5 And while California’s population and geographic area are larger and more difficult to manage than those of the Netherlands, California also has significantly greater wealth and resources, constituting in 2019 the fifth-largest economy in the world.6 And the approach to breaking up open drug scenes, treating addiction, and providing psychiatric care is fundamentally the same whether in five European cities, Philadelphia, New York, or Phoenix.

A little after three a.m., as a cold whispering rain fell over steep-gabled slate, husbands pulled wives close in the clammy darkness. Nursemaids rose from narrow beds to check on bundled babes; massive-headed mastiffs whined by banked heartfires as household cats insinuated between dream-running; and in their warm, summer-smelling loose boxes, arch-necked carriage horses stamped and rolled white-rimmed eyes, leaning against the barred partitions to press flank to flank. The City of New Amsterdam tossed restlessly.

In Amsterdam, a city with a growing immigrant population, there has been an explosion of drugs, crime, and violence.

One of Rembrandt’s more famous paintings… The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp … depicts a scene that took place in the old spice weighing tower in Neomarket … The building not only served to regulate the traffic in nutraceuticals like cinnamon and nutmeg, but was also used by the Amsterdam Guild of Surgeons for their annual public dissection… The famed surgeon Nicolas Tulp looks on… Apparently he was as skilled at wooing an audience as wielding a scalpel. He later held the position of city treasurer 8 times, and of burgomaster (mayor) 4 times.

At the same time they turned over the whole province to the city of Amsterdam; but the effort was vain; the colony of the south continued feeble and languishing, and the temporary success against Lord Baltimore was soon clouded by events at the north. In the charter which Winthrop obtained from Charles II., Connecticut and New Haven were consolidated, and all Long Island and the northern New Netherlands were declared within the Connecticut boundaries.

That brewery, owned by Oloff Stevenson van Cortlandt, stood near the spot Murphy’s Tavern occupies today. Beer was central to life in New Amsterdam; when Peter Stuyvesant arrived in 1647 to take over the colony, he found “one full fourth of the City of New Amsterdam has been turned into taverns.” Men, women, and children drank beer every day, often at every meal. Even today, in places of poor sanitation, beer can be healthier than water.

The best addition is a bronze map of New Amsterdam. Sculpted by Simon Verity and based on a 1660 city survey, the map brings the old town into sharp relief.

On February 2, 1653, New Amsterdam became an official city and the city tavern became the Stadt Huis (“city hall”).

and she giggled as she walked against the current of bodies in the crosswalk. The subway was right there, but she didn’t want to take it yet—the beauty of New York City was walking, was serendipity and strangers, and it was still her birthday, and so she was just going to keep going. Alice turned and walked up Eighth, past the crummy tourist shops selling magnets and keychains and i ♥ ny T-shirts and foam fingers shaped like the Statue of Liberty. Alice had walked for almost ten blocks when she realized she had a destination. She and Sam and their friends had enjoyed many, many hours in bars as teenagers: they’d spent nights at the Dublin House, on 79th Street; at the Dive Bar, on Amsterdam and 96th Street, with the neon sign shaped like bubbles, though that one was a little too close to home to be safe; and some of the fratty bars farther down Amsterdam, the ones with the buckets of beers for twenty dollars and scratched pool tables. Sometimes they even went to some NYU bars downtown, on MacDougal Street, where they could dash across the street for falafel and then go back to the bar, like it was their office and they were running out for lunch. Their favorite bar, though, was Matryoshka, a Russian-themed bar in the 50th Street 1/9 subway station. Now it was just the 1 train, but back then, there was also the 9. Things were always changing, even when they didn’t feel like it. Alice wondered if no one ever felt as old as they were because it happened so slowly, and you were only ever one day slower and creakier, and the world changed so gradually that by the time cars had evolved from boxy to smooth, or green taxis had joined yellow ones, or MetroCards had replaced tokens, you were used to it. Everyone

The Dutch had created an empire at sea that allowed them to funnel wealth directly into the city of Amsterdam. In turn, they were able to transmute that wealth of spices into a Golden Age for the Dutch people.

While prostitution is legal and regulated (only EU citizens can prostitute themselves, since, as with any other job, a work permit is required),

Patti Smith wrote to me in Amsterdam in 1971, and she said, 'I always loved you because you could find the laughter loophole in any tragedy.' If you're going to be up close with life, the one perk you get from experiencing pain is that you also get to experience what is hysterically funny about it. There's something just so absurd about life that is quirky and weird. For instance, there is something completely funny - a laughter loophole - in most of the rapes that happened to me. In Bad Reputation! I tell the story of this guy who tied my legs together, and I thought, 'Well, how's he going to rape me if he ties my legs together?' I guess everybody has those experiences. It's a way to maintain sanity. The reason why I chose realism was because I was just so stunned by how crazy real life is. I suppose because my early experiences were with camp - with Vaccaro, for example- everything has been a sideshow carnival. I wanted to show the ridiculousness of reality. (from an Interview with Dominic Johnson)

In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes. We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music. We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was a product of Amsterdam’s vigorous Jewish community. To this day, Amsterdammers’ proud slang term for their city is Mokum, the centuries-old Jewish name for it. (For that matter, Amsterdam slang for “see you later” is the Yiddishism de mazzel.)

Rachfahl noted that the Protestant Ethic thesis was contradicted by the geography of the rise of industrial capitalism. For example, Amsterdam and Antwerp developed industrial capitalism very early when both were Catholic cities, while the Protestant Scandinavian cities were very late to develop industrial capitalism.

Thus, war broke out again in August 1643, this time including previously uninvolved Indians: the Wappingers, who were closely related to the Lenni-Lenape and lived along the eastern side of the Hudson River.  The initial violent act came when Wappingers attacked a boat laden with beaver furs coming down the river from Ft. Orange and made off with the furs after killing two of the crewmen.  Other Indians attacked other boats on the river, resulting in deaths on both sides.  In September, the Indians on Long Island attacked farms and killed settlers there, after which terrified colonists fled to New Amsterdam or took ship back to Europe. It was during this time that a wall was built across lower Manhattan, and it ended up lending its name to Wall Street.

According to a Jesuit priest who passed through in 1643, New Amsterdam had speakers of no fewer than 18 different languages, and half of the population of New Netherland may have been non-Dutch.  Along with the previously mentioned Walloons, many residents were Germans and French Huguenots, and a fair number were Scandinavians.  Around the mid-17th century, the first Jews arrived in New Amsterdam from Brazil, becoming the earliest Jews in any of the colonies that would go on to become states in the United States.  The 1639 map shows an encampment on Manhattan for black slaves, and, after mid-century, the numbers of slaves greatly increased as ships brought more to the colony directly from Africa.  New York would subsequently have the largest urban population of African-Americans in the northern English colonies.

In its diverse makeup, New Amsterdam had resembled Old Amsterdam, which was a city renowned for its tolerance of different religions, but Stuyvesant’s hard-nosed Calvinism made him intolerant of other religions; he attempted to outlaw all but his own, and to expel Jews who arrived in the 1650s. The West India Company, however, forced him to reverse his decree: the Company was interested in harvesting the wealth and services such new immigrants could provide.

Not surprisingly, it didn’t take the English long to make changes; 2 days after Stuyvesant's surrender, New Amsterdam was once again blessed with a new name. This massive territory was now to be called “New York.” The now crown-owned region traced its borders around present-day New Jersey, Delaware, Vermont, and included portions of Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. The name paid homage to James II, the Duke of York and soon-to-be King of England.

The Netherlands was the first European country to stop persecuting people suspected of witchcraft - what was probably the last witch trial there in 1610 ended in acquittal. Foreign students came to Dutch universities, and philosophers - like Descartes - found the atmosphere propitious for original thought. Germans came to join the Dutch East India Company, and Jacob Poppen, who arrived penniless from Holstein, became a burgomaster of Amsterdam and died a millionaire in 1624. English sailors served in the Dutch fleets. For twelve years the Pilgrim fathers found a friendly refuge in Leiden - “a fair and beauteous city of a sweet situation,” according to William Bradford, one of their leaders.

New Amsterdam was a city the way decapitation was a paper cut. Both could make a person bleed and both would hurt like hell, but only one made bystanders start screaming.