Despite the bikes and the clothes, Amsterdam was very beautiful, only without the appalling irony I had come to expect from the magazine article. (It helped that Lijsa lives in a slightly scruffy, part-Muslim district, far from the city center.) The architecture is historic, stately and small; some of it is restrained, some of it is opulent. The new buildings are tasteful and they merge well with the old. There are lots of good bars and cafés. The canals, studded with houseboats, are lovely to behold; sometimes I'd cross one of the elegant bridges over them even when doing so took me out of my way. Amsterdam feels intimate and colloquial. The Jordaan is different from Negen Straatjes is different from de Pijp, but each quarter exudes cozy communality. Lijsa and I often ran into people she knew; and even though there was nothing to talk about, she wondered what they'd be telling each other later about the two of us.
Lijsa's friends were kind and unpretentious. They spoke English crisply, grudgelessly. We ate dinner in their houses -- normal dinners, like you'd eat in an American home -- and I met their babies. Days I walked, just as I used to do in Austin and San Francisco. Big loops, getting lost on purpose. On the grounds that I am no longer seventeen or twenty-three, I avoided the Red Light district, where dope and pickpockets prevail, and where prostitutes pose in shopfront windows, tapping the glass to lure you in. Lijsa finally took me there, and late that night, after dinner at a famous Chinese restaurant called Nam Kee (try the oysters), she led us to an old part of town near her alma mater, and showed me her favorite street in Amsterdam. Like so many others, it was snug and narrow -- 'quaint' if you seek a slur, but that says more about you than about Amsterdam. Then, a bit tipsy, we biked home past old churches, over canals, and right by the Anne Frank House, which I never visited.
The traffic signs, in order to economize, abbreviated "Amsterdam" to "A'dam." I felt welcome.
