Gay Pride is one of my favorite holidays in Amsterdam. Everyone is in a good mood and the weather always manages to cooperate. T and I made up a picnic and found a great spot by the water early in the day. Here are a few of my favorite photos from the Pride Parade.
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I’d been looking forward to this event all year. I missed out on the Drag Queen Olympics in 2015, arriving too late and with the wrong crowd to enjoy it. This time around I was eager to fully soak in all the rhinestones and sequins, so I got there early, parked myself in a good spot near the stage and […]
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Regardless of what you think of tipping culture in the United States, one of its clear advantages is that the rules are pretty consistent. Expensive, yes, but consistent. Service workers in the Netherlands get paid a livable wage so, in theory, tipping isn’t required. Perhaps if you’re particularly wowed by extraordinary service, you might be moved […]
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Living in Amsterdam necessarily means reckoning with FOMO in one form or another. There is so much that you could be doing that you cannot, within the limitations of space-time, do it all. Some weekends, T and I cope with FOMO by resisting the pressure to experience life and deploying a willfully ignorant response, buckling […]
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If you had asked me a year ago what I thought about tourists using bikes in Amsterdam, I would have been unequivocally in support of the idea. When T and I first moved here, I hadn’t ridden a bike since college, and even then my skills were pretty sub-par. I was (am?) a fiercely stubborn […]
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Indonesian food is prevalent in Amsterdam (Indonesia having been colonized by the Dutch), and one of the most popular Indonesian restaurants in town is Tempo Doeloe. According to their website, “Tempo Doeloe” roughly translates from Indonesian to “the good old days” and they are known particularly for their rijsttafels. A rijsttafel is a bit like Indonesian […]
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As I’ve mentioned before, checking out books from the Amsterdam public library isn’t free. Considering how otherwise literate and progressive the Netherlands is (with a few notable exceptions), this came as quite a surprise to me. But, like the efficient and functional infrastructure, the beautiful parks and the low crime rate that we presumably pay […]
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A lot of things have changed about my reading habits since moving to Amsterdam. The biggest shift came when I had to divest myself of most of the books that I’ve been accumulating more or less since middle school. This has had the obvious result of chopping down my TBR pile into a measly slim stack. […]
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It’s a damn shame, but the Indian restaurants in Amsterdam are all pretty crap. Honestly, you can get better Indian food in Louisville. The Dutch have Indonesian food as their go-to takeaway and that, plus Holland’s fairly bland palate and intolerance of spicy foods, means that good Indian food is tough to find. I’ve tried dozens of […]
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Over the weekend Amsterdam was host to a huge variety of urban sports demos and tournaments as part of Urban Sports Week Amsterdam. As an old, I was pretty unfamiliar to the world of urban sports (beyond skateboarding and tourist bashing) and it was delightful to wander around the city watching the kids do their flips. […]
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