Bos

Amsterdam isn’t all insufferable virtue signalling, legal drugs, perverted sex acts and pompous museums. To demonstrate this, my friend took me cycling in the Amsterdam Forest.

Amsterdam Forest, or Amsterdamse Bos in Dutch, is a vast man-made “wilderness” park created during the Great Depression, in part to provide employment to thousands of displaced workers. Nearly a hundred years later, the woods are full of mature trees, and there is a goat farm, an Olympic rowing lake, a cherry grove, restaurants and hotels, and untold kilometres of cycle paths, horse riding trails and walking tracks. At nearly three times the size of Central Park in New York City, it’s a beloved resource in a cramped and crowded urban spread.

It’s also right next to Schipol airport, meaning that every few minutes the idyllic view of rolling fields and budding woods is shattered by a roaring KLM Boeing 767 heading off to Rome or Dubai a couple of hundred metres overhead.

My friend rode his own bike, while I rattled along on a rented OV Fiets bicycle, a simple but solidly-built machine with a fixed gear and reverse pedal brakes, designed to be idiot-proof and probably also being-ridden-into-the-side-of-a-canal-barge-proof. I liked it; complicated bikes with a dozen gearing options and shock absorber settings and such just distract me from the simple pleasure of pedal-pushing. Which in this context was important, as I needed my wits about me because bicycles are serious modes of transport and the locals speed and swoop around on them with the completely unwarranted assumption that everyone else knows all of their little road rules and customs. I guess it gives them another excuse to abuse tourists who aren’t in the know and thus feel superior yet again.

We spent a while relaxing in the cherry grove. We were a few days too late for the full display of the flowers, but my intrepid minifig laughs in the face of danger and tracked down the last blossom for me.

 

 

 

As evening fell, having tired ourselves out, we detoured to a house party for internationals in a neighbouring suburb. It was a fun party, I suspect because there were no Amsterdam natives there. The guests were from Honduras, Iran, Argentina, Turkey, Spain, Chile, non-Amsterdam parts of Holland and, of course, Australia, and I did my best to keep up as they chatted in Spanish, Dutch and English. At least the karaoke later in the evening was in the international language of Drunken Yelling.