I Should Be Going Dutch

....and the start of a long weekend, that I should have been spending in Amsterdam! But, thanks to an inconsiderate Icelandic volcano with an unpronouncable name deciding to erupt and spew an ash and debris cloud into the prevailing winds that now hover over Europe, not a plane is safe in the sky. I'm going nowhere! Such is life, ash happens....that sort of thing. But what would I have been up to if I had made it to Amsterdam?

Apparently, I could have expected to see anything in a city where everything goes....like perhaps a dude rollerblading down the main road in just a G-string (at least, this was the delightful sight that greeted my friends when they first arrived in Amsterdam on a freezing cold winter’s day... and they claim they hadn’t yet had chance to visit any “Coffee Shops” [1] that may have induced such visions!)

What would I have done if I'd encountered an almost butt naked man on the street, paused for a breather between rollerblading? Well, I’d have had to “Pass The Dutchie” on the left-hand side, [2] of course...because, like most of mainland Europe, the Dutch drive on the right. That is on the rare occasion that they do get into their cars, as almost every Dutch person has a bicycle and there are twice as many bikes as cars. [3]

I might have stopped and taken a sly look back at the rollerblading dude since, as well as being the tallest people in Europe, the Dutch are reputed to be the best looking. But apart from people watching, what would I have been doing in Amsterdam? Well, I may have taken a stroll around a museum or two... Amsterdam boasts more museums than any other city in the world. [4] They cover every sort of weird and wonderful topic, from famous painters (like the Van Gogh Museum) and famous diarists (the Anne Frank Huis), to museums on the history of sex and marijuana. There’s even a museum of cats...hardly surprising in a city of feline lovers, where there is a house boat known as  De Poezenboot, a home for stray cats.

I think I'd probably have passed on the clog shopping

One thing’s for sure, I’d have spent a lot of time on or beside water, exploring Amsterdam's lively canals. [5] Maybe I would have spotted one or two of the thousand original working windmills. I planned on visiting the famous floating flower market and feasting my eyes upon the tulips at the Keukenhof Gardens. While my budget wouldn't have stretched to shopping for diamonds, [6] I definitely wanted to rummage through the Waterlooplein flea market, and I had hoped to sample kaas (Dutch cheese), patat (potato chips with mayo) and pannenkoeken (pancakes), and have a meal in one of the city’s famous Indonesian rijsttafel (‘rice table’).

And I suppose no visit to Amsterdam would have been complete without a quick stroll through the Red Light District, to see the world’s oldest profession in action, so to speak. [7]

Ah, well...another time, perhaps. Have a chillaxing weekend y'all!

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Useless information in the shape of footnotes you probably won’t read:

1. After Scandinavians, the Dutch are the world's biggest coffee drinkers...but coffee is not the only thing you can buy at a “Coffee Shop”. Amsterdam has over 300 coffee shops that can legally sell up to 5 grams of soft drugs to each person.

2. "Pass the Dutchie" was a song recorded by the British group Musical Youth from their 1982 album The Youth of Today. The song was a cover version of the song "Pass the Koutchie" by The Mighty Diamonds, which deals with the recreational use of cannabis, "koutchie" being slang for a cannabis pipe. For the censored cover version, the song's title was changed to "Pass the Dutchie" (a dutchie being a cast iron cooking pot) and all obvious drug references were removed from the lyrics. The term "dutchie" has itself now become a drug reference; it refers to a blunt rolled in the wrapper from a Dutch Masters cigar.

3. Amsterdam has over 1 million bikes but only 700,000 Amsterdammers, and there are over 15,000 km of bicycle lanes in The Netherlands.

4. Measured per square meters. There are more than 40 well known museums in Amsterdam, 70 in The Netherlands in total.

5. The Netherlands has more than 4,000 km of navigable rivers, lakes and canals. With a quarter of the country lying below sea level, guarded by dykes and dunes, and nearly a third of the land having been reclaimed from the sea, Amsterdam will be one of the first cities to get flooded if global warming causes the sea levels to rise.

6. The world famous Koh-I-Noor diamond was cut in Amsterdam.

7. While prostitution itself is legal in most countries, soliciting in a public place ('street prostitution'), running a brothel, being a pimp or exploiting prostitution by taking money from prostitutes as a third person, is illegal. The Dutch government saw the existence of brothels as a given fact and decided therefore on a practical, realistic approach. If brothels are taken out of the underworld, they can be under supervision, they have to pay taxes, they have to accept regular visits by health inspectors and they can lose their permits if they employ minors.