[Reader-list] Amsterdam Diary

[zainab at xtdnet.nl]

Dear All,
Sharing my experiences of Amsterdam city on this list.
Cheers,
Zainab


In a Foreign Land
---
(Of Amsterdam City, People, Spaces and Experiences)

Prayers are answered. Alternatively, blogs are read! Well yes, that’s how
I got to Amsterdam. The desire and curiousity to see New York or Shanghai
got me to Amsterdam. From Mumbai to Frankfurt to Schipol, reading of Delhi
Metro, task-master-like bureaucrats, quick decision-making in bureaucracy
and management style of governance, I made it to Amsterdam on March 14,
2005.

Amsterdam is one of Europe’s most liked and loved cities. “It’s my
favourite city, it’s my favourite city,” different people told me at
different times. But Paul believes that the city is not as large as the
scale of its popularity. “It’s a small city. You will see,” he tells me as
we travel in a train from Schipol to Amsterdam.

On arrival to Centraal Station, I am led into my apartment at Nieu Markt.
My apartment 
 wow! From being in a little apartment in Mumbai to landing
into one which has several rooms, the experience of space and consequently
of freedom and individuality is something. I heave a deep breath as Paul
brings out the key to open the door of the building. As soon as I enter
the building, the feeling is different. The narrow stairway, the darkness
which engulfs it and the closed doors of other apartments in the building
make the experience a bit too eerie for me. In a strange country, in a
different land, the narrow stairways and the aloofness of people living in
the same building are disconcerting for me. I enter my apartment. The best
part of the apartment is the window in the living room. It’s a large
window. And I can see all of Nieu Markt, the little square and the people
of the city from here. Chinese, white, men, women, children and pigeons of
course – all are using this space, crossing paths and maybe meeting each
other. My mind begins to work for I am convinced now that I have
hyper-sensitive antennae on my head. Narrow stairways and large windows –
what’s this arrangement? On coming back to India, Daraius confirms my
doubts. “Do you know how people in Amsterdam transport their furniture and
heavy equipments to their apartment?” he asks me when I recount the
picture of narrow stairways in my apartment to him. “Wait a minute,” I
exclaimed, “they do it through their windows???” “Bingo!” Daraius said to
me, “That’s exactly why they have large windows. Everything is transported
into the house through the windows!” Hmmm 
 smart, isn’t that me?

In the evening of day one, we hit the streets and walk. It’s a Sunday and
the Dam Square, which is the most popular space in the city, is crowded.
People are in shops. People are walking on the streets. For me, walking is
a means of assimilating and understanding the city. I wonder whether it is
appropriate to ask people for directions here, just like I do in Bombay,
pretty much believing that it’s people’s responsibility to know the
directions!

Day one ends with lots of walking and catching up on sleep which has
eluded me in the aircraft!


Person 1: Day two is something I have been looking forward to. Interacting
with a person on email makes it all the more curious for me to meet the
person in person. Patrice is that person I am meeting today. Imaginations
and reality are fascinating. Constructing images and matching the images
to the person are experiences of fascination, horror, delight, wonderment,
etc. etc. etc. I don’t know what to say any further.

Patrice is there, sitting on a computer in the office. We say hello and as
promised, eat breakfast together. After breakfast, Patrice offers to take
me to a friend’s house. Along the way, I tell him how I find it difficult
to adjust to the fact that doors of the houses in my apartment building
are closed, “And, for all my life, I can just go on living in this
building without knowing the other residents. And for all I know, I could
just die in my apartment and nobody in the building would know that I am
dead. How can you go on living like this?” I rant and exclaim to him. He
speaks to me of his notions of individuality and the individual way of
life aka North American style and Northern European style.

Soon, we arrive at his friend’s apartment building. We walk up the stairs,
which in this case, are bright enough and wider. I am told that residents
in this neighbourhood belong to ethnic communities and there is
interaction between them unlike in most other neighbourhoods. As I walk up
the stairs, my mind and attention are focused on the closed doors. I watch
the doors carefully. One door has a silver Ganesha on it. “Ah, some sign
at last to determine who the occupants could be!” I say to myself. In a
different city then, I indulge in marking. And thus marking appears to me
a practice of understanding similarities and differences and sourcing out
familiarity.

We land up in Patrice’s friend’s house. And wonder of wonders! The door of
her house is completely open! “I have nothing in my house which can be
stolen,” she informs me when I tell her how amazed I am with the fact that
she keeps the doors of her house open! On her response, I wonder whether
the practice of closed doors is actually a practice of property. Is it?

Conversations, lunch and tea – the afternoon comes to an end. Patrice
invites me to his house for dinner in the evening. I am given a map to
locate the house. Oh, how I dread maps for I just cannot read and
understand them. For all I know, I may be holding the map upside down.
“What if I ask people for directions to your place? Do people respond to a
stranger asking for directions in this city?” I query with Patrice.
“Hmmm,” he contemplates and then says, “Well, there are very few people
who know the city well. A lot of people may not know what place you are
asking for. Then, there is also this thing that when strangers approach
people of this city, the latter think that the strangers are after their
money. You have to assess, calculate and be watchful of your behaviour
when you approach strangers for directions,” concludes Patrice. I brace
myself up for an evening of lost and found – I know myself, at least the
clumsier aspects of me!

I enter my apartment building once again before I am to leave for
Patrice’s place. The lights to the stairway are on. I am conscious each
moment of the amount of noise my boots make while I walk up and down the
stairs. “What if there is a senile old lady who lives in one of these
apartments and does not like the noise I make while walking?” I think to
myself. As I utter these words in my head, the lights go off mid-way and I
am left completely in the dark. “I knew it!” I start to say, cursing
myself, “I knew it that somebody, someday, will put off the lights while I
am making my way up to the apartment. And I am sure there is an old lady
living in here who does not like me,” I conclude, self-prophesizing! Later
on, I come to know that nobody has the time to take petty revenges by
switching off the lights in the building – it’s all about the automated
machines and my suspicious paranoia!!!

Come evening and I make my way to the tram station. On entering the tram,
I request the conductor to tell me when the stop will arrive. Trams are
interesting in Amsterdam, not very crowded, unlike the experience of
Bombay’s local trains. And therefore, each time when the tram stopped and
more people attempted to get in, I would find myself saying, “Oh no, it’s
getting crowded!” I am amazed how the very sense perceptions of crowd
operate in different scenes and settings. How the mind works in relation
with space!!!

The conductor shouts out to me and says my stop has arrived. As
prophesized, my journey of lost and found begins. I have been made to get
down at the wrong station. And true to my Bombay instincts, I,
unhesitatingly and completely shamelessly, start asking around for
directions. There is no problem I face! Either I am told “I am sorry”
else, I am directed some place “Go right, go left!” Ambling around, a
black boy instinctly knows that I am looking for directions. He guides me
to the street, “and then you ask around for the exact place,” he tells me.
I make my way to the street. Now, the next question facing me is whom do I
ask for directions. I begin to mark. “This one? No, no. that one?? No,
no!” In the this-one-that-one dilemma, I notice a man who looks Indian to
me. I approach him. He starts to talk in Hindi. I am certain he is a
Bombayitte. “Where are you from?” he asks me. “Bombay! And are you also
from Bombay?” I ask keenly. “Karachi,” he tells me. Well, not that far, I
say to myself. Thus I meet a stranger in a foreign city. His name is Aymen
Khan. Aymen drives a taxi in Amsterdam. He tells me how he has planned to
go back to his country this year itself. “No social life here,” he
exclaims sadly. “All I do is to watch STAR TV and ZEE TV in the evenings.”
True to the South Asian character, Aymen literally drops me to Patrice’s
doorstep. “Here is my mobile number,” he tells me, adding, “Just in case
you need anything!” He asks me my name. “Muslim huh?” he says. Now, wasn’t
I right when I said that marking a practice of discerning familiarities
and differences?

I am thoroughly excited with the lost and found adventure of today. Aymen
Khan is my discovery. I promise myself to meet him again. What are a
foreign man’s imaginations and practices of a foreign city? Aymen is
Person 2 in this city for me.

Person 3: Today is day three and I am soon to meet Person 3. Before that,
an interesting incident occurs. Patrice and I are sitting in a café,
eating breakfast and drinking coffee. I am told that a cheaper way to
travel in Amsterdam’s trams is to pick up a ‘strip kaarten’ which is a
strip of fifteen tickets with a promise of seven and a half trips. “You’ll
get the strip kaarten in a super market,” Patrice tells me. In the midst
of breakfast, I dash into the neighbouring supermarket to pick up a strip
kaarten. The lady at the counter is an old woman. And a very irritable one
too! She angrily directs me to a machine which has, besides several other
things, the strip kaarten. I am not sure how to operate the machine.
Patrice comes in somehow. I am a complete Bombayitte. I fold the currency
note carefully and start to put it in the mouth of the machine. “What are
you doing?” says an irritable Patrice, “My god, give it to me here,” he
screams. I am more than happy to hand over the proceedings to him. He
inserts the note and starts to punch the number of the item we want to
purchase. Somehow, number four on the machine does not work properly. And
instead of number 44, we end up with an item from number 54. Oh shit! This
is a packet of condoms worth eight euro and some cents. I am almost to
tears now. “What will I do with this?” I start to cry to Patrice,
calculating in my mind that a dinner is gone if I am forced to end up with
condoms worth eight euro! Patrice indulges in a fight with the woman at
the counter. She angrily marches to the machine and in an instant, I have
the strip kaarten. Oh thank god for small mercies, I say to myself as she
takes back the packet of condoms. “I hate machines,” Patrice concludes,
“And here, the liberal economy is out to replace human beings with
machines,” he mutters.

I have a hearty breakfast. At 12:00 AM, Person 3 arrives. She is Mirjan, a
Surinamese Indian in Amsterdam. I have been introduced to Mirjan through a
French friend. Mirjan is excited to meet me – someone from Hindustan, from
back home – that’s her source of curiousity and excitement. I am sitting
up in my apartment and looking at people from the window. I am playing a
game – guess who is Mirjan on the streets??? People come and go. I mark,
mark and mark. Suddenly, a phone call comes in, “I can’t trace your
apartment.” I come down and there she is. I was right! I had marked her
correctly. Mirjan and her bike – that’s ‘em! We take to a café and some
drinks and talk to each other about our work. “Where would you like to go?
What places would you like to see here in Amsterdam?” she asks me. I tell
her that I have heard of the Red Light District and I want to go there.
Interestingly, my apartment is only a block away from the Red Light
District. Each day, looking out of my apartment, I had imagined the street
– so close, yet, so far! And I guess spaces acquire their characters from
individual imaginations. And then the spaces are marked as safe, unsafe,
great, etc. etc. etc.!

“Do you know that there are lots of people in Amsterdam who have been
living here for ages but have not been to the Red Light District?” Mirjan
asks me as we walk through the streets of one of the world’s famed
streets. “I am sure,” I responded to her. We spoke at length about Bombay.
Conversations centered around Suketu Mehta’s book ‘Maximum City’, the
charm of Bombay and ultimately, to Bollywood and film stars. “Shah Rukh
Khan is gay,” I remarked casually as our conversation steered towards the
fame and persona of SRK. “What?” she exclaimed disbelievingly. She nearly
stopped walking. “What are you saying? He is married and has two
children!” Mirjan justified. “But being married and having kids is no
criteria for not being gay,” I replied coolly. She immediately brought out
her cell phone and started shooting out text messages to inform her
friends and sister about what I had said. “My sister will be most shocked
when she knows about this,” Mirjan says to me. Now, I think that Bollywood
is the strongest link for Indian diaspora. And maybe even for South Asians
in general – TV and films! Fastest connection to home and culture!

Mirjan and I walk the city at length. She shows me the museum square,
“This is where one of the songs in the film Hum Tum was shot. My gosh,
there was such a hue and cry in our office at IBM when the shooting was
taking place. Everyone wanted to go and see it,” she informs me. And I
recollect that in the film, the same Museum Square was claimed as France.
Now, now 


I tell Mirjan about my family and our way of living. “That’s wonderful. We
are very conservative out here. I had to plead with my dad to let me move
to Amsterdam city because I was finding it hard to commute everyday from
Rotterdam to Amsterdam. He ultimately relented and got us an apartment
here,” she said. I began to wonder about culture, home and notions and
practices of culture and home. It’s amazing how things operate – reality
and imagination – applies to practically everything in life.

That evening, Paul and I eat dinner together and we walk the Red Light
District by the night. I watch everything carefully. “There might be
surveillance cameras here,” Paul informs me. I have my passport on me. I
am told that at any point in time, I can be asked for producing evidence
of my identification and if I don’t have proof on me, I can be slapped
with a fifty euro fine! There are women in showcases everywhere. East
European women, black women, Oriental women – large bosoms, bulky breasts,
fat thighs, shiny clothes, blonde hair, tweaked eyebrows – it’s all here.
Liberals and libertarians I have known harp about professionalizing
prostitution and swear by the liberality of Netherlands. As I walk the Red
Light District tonight, I am not so fascinated with this achievement. Sex
and intimacy are personal to me. And therefore, the domain of sex is
personal for me. I don’t really know what happens when sex is made a thing
of public domain. Here, in the Red Light District, sex appears like yet
another commodity to me – for sale, in showcases. My mind quickly races
back to the Foras Road streets in Mumbai and there is something very
different about prostitution there – it don’t appear so commercial and
packaged back home. But then 
 these are my imaginations and my opinions
on sex, society, politics and space and I have no moral takes on
prostitution. What happens when prostitution is kept illegal? What happens
when it is made legal? Does the state have control over individuals’
bodies? Does taxation extend to skin of the individual citizen? Wow!

Day Four: I am going to take a long distance train to a district in
Netherlands today. My fame of traveling on the Mumbai’s local trains and
watching people has reached Amsterdam. “You must take a train here,” Paul
says to me. So be it! At Centraal Station, we have purchased tickets and
board the train. There is no crowd at all in the trains. The seats are
different from those in the Mumbai trains. The train moves on after a
while. I watch the sights and scenes from the closed windows of the train.
A little while later, a uniformed man enters the train. I presume that he
is the ticket checker and ask Patrice if we have to show him tickets. “You
ain’t checking tickets right?” Patrice says coolly to the man. He laughs.
I can’t understand. “He is a Customs’ Officer,” Patrice informs me. He
smiles at us. Somehow, a conversation begins between us. “I now work in
the postal department,” he starts. “Netherlands is a small country.
Therefore, the world likes to dominate over us. And we are a foolish
people. We are selling out our industries and successful companies to the
French and the rest of Europe. Look what we have done with KLM Airlines.
We are giving it up to the French,” he says in his fat voice. “My
grandfather was from Poland. He came to this country during the Second
World War II. We were stopped at the border and not allowed to go into the
country. We lived in the camps at the border for a while and then got
allowed in here,” informs Customs’ Officer about his history. I start to
wonder whether he is Dutch or Polish. How do senses of nationality and
belongingness to nations develop given varied historical origins and
roots? “We are a liberal country, here in Netherlands. I have served for
long at Schipol. You know that for American flights, there is a more
stringent checking procedure. I have to be with my American counterparts
at the airport and check on people. But I find that they are lax in their
security procedures. The Japanese are funny people. Once, I asked a
Japanese woman to show me her passport. The photo on her passport had her
along with her cats. I said to her that this is not permitted. She said
the cats are like her children and therefore she has photographed herself
with them. When I turned to the last page of her passport, I saw a dog’s
picture alongwith her. I said to her, ‘Madam, is this your husband?’ The
Japanese are rich people. You will see them at the airport, spending
hordes of money on duty-free shops. They are lugging bags of shopping and
goods along with them at the airport.” He then went on to tell us about
USA. “America is a beautiful country. But a shit place. Once, my car broke
down in the middle of the road and I had lost my luggage. Finally, I
managed to get a taxi. We somehow began a conversation. The taxi driver
recognized my Polish accent and asked me if I was a Pole. ‘Sure enough’, I
replied. And he did not take any money from me for the ride. In New York,
you have to be careful of the taxi you take. For all you know, the taxi
driver has arrived only a flight before you have!” He went on to elaborate
all the places he has worked in – postal department, army, medicals,
disaster management. He recounted his experiences of building dams. And in
great awe, he spoke of how the Netherlands abounds in water. “It’s all
about nature, eh. You can’t fight nature,” he says. He emphasizes on the
importance of customs and the needs for custom officials. After a point,
he gets off at a station.

We travel around the countryside for the rest of the day. It’s different
from being in a city – quite obviously! We visit Hoorn. And then, we hit
the trains again. This time around, given my instinct of trains in Bombay,
I try to rush inside the train before people have gotten out. Then, it
occurs to me to ask Patrice, “Am I supposed to let people get out before I
get in?” He smiles and says, “Yes, of course! See, we have forgotten these
little things of life.” Well, not actually, I say to myself. It’s a matter
of city instincts and habits. Along the way, Patrice informs me about the
government in Netherlands is planning to tighten ways of traveling on
public transport, the systems of metallic cards and strict fines if you
forget to punch your metallic card when you get into a train or a tram. I
listen intently and finally ask him, “Is all this geared towards getting
people to travel in cars?” “Of course,” he says to me.

We arrive at Centraal Station. As the train enters the station, I am
somehow reminded of Seealdah railway station in Kolkatta. It feels exactly
the same here – the sense, the crowds, the touch! All of it!!!! For the
rest of the evening, I ponder briefly over the importance of public
transport in a city. How important is public transport? Perhaps at some
level, public transport provides the public space where people in the city
meet and negotiate sharing of space.

For the next two days, I am attending a conference on Creative Cities.
It’s all about making your cities creative baby! Fashion industry, travel
industry, advertising industry, bringing Bollywood to Amsterdam – that’s
what creativity is about. Well – not exactly! Sitting through the
conference, amidst experts of various orders and kinds, I understand that
modern society is about ‘industrializing’ and ‘ordering’ everything that
is loosely organized – loose businesses and loose spaces – everything
under the sun has to be ordered and controlled. Creativity then becomes
one more specialization in the plethora of expertise and specialization. I
wonder whether ‘one can MAKE cities CREATIVE?’ Aren’t cities creative by
themselves? What makes a city creative? One element is public transport.
Another is diversity. But can these elements be consciously ‘created’? I
am not sure.

As evening on day one of the conference approaches, I decide to figure out
my own creative plans. I have Aymen Khan and we have decided to meet up.
We meet at the same place where we had accidentally met each other. Aymen
and I go to a bar. He orders lemonade for both of us. People are doping in
the bar. “I live close by from here. My parents and I live together. I
don’t get along too well with my father. Otherwise, there is no problem in
taking you to our house. I can introduce you to my wife,” he justifies to
me. Aymen has been in Amsterdam since twenty years now. “It was nice when
the currency was Gilders. Now, with the Euro, everything is expensive.”
Aymen has traveled to different places across the world. “I have been to
America as well. In Europe, you can afford to live with your family. But
in America, it is too expensive to be with your family. You can earn lots
of money in America. I have friends who are taxi drivers in the US. We
travel together.” Aymen has seen parts of Europe. “It’s nice. But now I
want to go back home,” he says to me. Aymen’s day begins when he gets up
at about 10:00 AM in the morning. “I eat breakfast, go for a bath, and
then I am around in the house. If I feel like, I bring out the taxi later
in the day. I am back home in the evening. We watch TV. At 8 PM, I go out
and chat on the internet in a friend’s cyber café. Then, some of my
friends get free from work. We talk with each other and then, I am back
home at 11 PM at night. Earlier, it was a lot of fun. But now, all my
friends are married and have children. We don’t get time to be with each
other. In Pakistan, my friends and me go out late in the night, at 10 PM,
walk the streets, eat kebabs, and have fun together. It is not possible
here,” he says. Yeah, sure, I think to myself. The buzz of a city lies in
the vibrancy of its streets. Street food, street markets, these are what
give the city its life. Back here in Amsterdam, it’s about bars,
restaurants and cafes – everything ordered and packaged neatly inside.

Next evening, Aymen and I meet again. He takes me to Dam Square. We enter
a shopping mall. He is wondering what places to take me to. “Let’s go to
this shopping mall,” he ultimately concludes. Inside the shopping mall, I
am conscious of the CCTV cameras and surveillance machines around me. I
wonder whether Aymen is thinking about this. Maybe not! I have not asked
him. The insides of the shopping mall remind me of the ones back in Bombay
and also the ones I have been to in Bangkok. “I would rather buy from
shopping mall,” Aymen tells me. “Once, I was in Pakistan. My friend there
happened to ask me one day what trousers I was wearing. I told him that I
had purchased these from a store in Amsterdam for a hundred Gilders. My
friend was astonished. He took me to a market where similar trousers were
being produced for three hundred Pakistani rupees. We picked up a pair on
his insistence. I wore them on my return journey back to Netherlands. But,
when I sat in the aircraft, the zip tore open and all through the journey,
I was worried about my trousers slipping off me. I’d rather spend more
than buy cheap and take tension!” he tells me.

We walk the streets. “I hope you are not getting tired walking,” he asks
me. I tell him that I enjoy walking around. “When I was in Chicago, I told
my friend one day that we must walk around. Believe me, nobody walks in
Chicago. Everybody has cars. In fact, there are no footpaths on the roads
for pedestrians,” Aymen tells me as we are walking by the markets and
streets. Finally, we approach Centraal Station. He heaves a sigh. “I
haven’t been here for ages,” he starts to say. It’s time to head back
home. We enter a tram. “Don’t go back. Stay for some more days,” Aymen
says to me softly. We say goodbye for the evening.

Back in my apartment, I think of strangers in a city, of memories, of home
and all of that which makes us human and wanting to belong 


Day Seven: Today is my last day in Amsterdam city. I go over to Museum
Square. I visit the museums, walk around the city myself, and travel
through all the places I have been going to in all these days. A sense of
sadness pervades me today. Suddenly, there is a relationship which I have
with this foreign city and I don’t feel like leaving so soon. But back I
must go, for the Dutch consulate in Bombay is waiting for me to report
back in person ‘so that I don’t have problems in getting a visa the next
time I wish to go to the Netherlands’!!!

Patrice has invited me to dinner with some Dutch people this evening. I
land up at Wester Markt way before time. I am to enter house number 197. I
start to look around – house number 196 is here. And the next house is
198. Damn! Where is house number 197? I think maybe it is above 196 or
below 198. But no! Heck. It takes me half an hour to realize that all the
even numbered houses are on the left hand side and the odd numbered houses
are on the right hand side of the canals!

Our hosts are two old men and one old woman and a big, fat dog. We are
chatting and eating and I tell Patrice how I am feeling sad about leaving
the next day. “Departures are always sad,” he says with a sense of
coldness to me. Post-dinner, over coffee, the lady of the house begins to
talk. “It’s crazy, this whole business about producing identification when
walking the streets. The other day, I was walking my dog along the road.
Two police officers came over to me and asked me to show proof of my
identification and also that of my dog. I told them that my papers were at
home and they could come over and see the papers. But the officers refused
and said that I should be carrying papers with me on the streets.
Ultimately, I was slapped with a fifty euro fine for myself and thirty
euros for my dog.” She was evidently disgusted with the laws prevailing
over the country. “It’s getting stricter and stricter,” she concluded.
Then she began narrating yet another incident. “There is a hawker who
sells cartons to us. We run a bookshop and often require cartons. He
collects cartons discarded by supermarkets and then sells them to us on
weight basis. One day, the supermarket, in an effort to evict him from the
area, played a trick. When he was sorting out cartons as usual, he found a
bunch of bananas amidst the pile. Now, something which does not belong to
you or to me belongs ultimately to the state. This hawker was tempted with
the bunch of bananas. He picked them up and as he was putting them in his
bag, the police appeared from somewhere and caught hold of him. The
bananas were put in the cartons by the supermarket fellows. The hawker was
fined and for the next six months, he is not supposed to be seen in the
area else he will be jailed.” Patrice and I were shocked on listening to
this story. Regimes of governance in cities across the world appear to be
tightening up. Is governance becoming more of a business of slapping fines
and filling up treasuries with fine money? That’s what it appears to me 


That night, at 1:00 AM, Patrice and I quietly walked the streets back to
my apartment. Noises, sounds, cackles, laughter, smell, sights and scenes
– and people. That’s what cities are made up of, I guess. Spaces,
memories, emotions, feelings, vulnerabilities, masks, superficialities,
confusions, complexities, depths, and the works – that’s what cities are
made up of!



Zainab Bawa
Bombay
www.xanga.com/CityBytes
http://crimsonfeet.recut.org/rubrique53.html