Edam

My first full day in Amsterdam involved getting the hell out of Amsterdam, as my friend and I took a bus out to Edam, just beyond the city’s outer suburbs.

Edam is a little town that almost redefines quaint, with its cobbled street, charming wooden houses, petite canals and overwhelming sense of pious Dutch orderliness.

 

 

You’d think that the village after which one of the famous cheeses in the world is named would be a monument to that cheese, with innumerable cheese shops with names that are cheese puns, statues of famous cheesemakers, and depictions of a town mascot named Eddie the Edam or somesuch plastered over every surface. But in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of restraint, the Dutch have elected to keep the town as a pristine and un-tacky as possible. I think I saw one cheese shop, and there was probably a cheese museum, because the Dutch, but otherwise it was nothing but cute laneways, immaculately restored but slightly wonky buildings, quaint little shops selling quaint little things (and gelato) and windowboxes full of spring flowers as far as the eye could see.

 

 

From Edam we walked along the dyke to Volendam, which doesn’t have an international cheese reputation to consider and thus unleashes the full trashy force of tourist pandering on its visitors and itself. Its waterfront is lined with junky souvenir stores, bad restaurants, and a positively unholy number of establishments at which one can dress up in traditional Dutch costume and have one’s photo taken. We looked in the window of one such business and saw dozens of pictures of Indian or Arab patriarchs in clogs and little fuzzy hats, clutching traditional Dutch fishing gear, and Pakistani or Chinese housewives in flared white bonnets and big embroidered dresses, clutching baskets of plastic tulips. None of the races involved, including the Dutch, came out of this looking good.

We had a local specialty called kibbling for lunch at one of the bad restaurants. It tasted about as good as you’d expect something called kibbling to taste.

 

 

From Voldendam, we took a ferry across the bay to Marken, a little fishing village on the end of a narrow peninsula; basically an island. The original little houses from the 19^th and 18^th centuries were painted in dark colours with bright white mortar, then varnished against the salty sea winds. Although it was supposed to be a tourist village, I actually found it depressing. I imagined living there 200 years ago, in 1823, and existing in this enclosed community, rarely seeing or meeting outsiders, having no job opportunities apart from near-subsistence fishing or village trades, never traveling even as far as Amsterdam, just living my entire life with the same few hundred people. How intolerable now that I know the luxury of traveling the entire world, choosing a job out of thousands of possibilities, having friends in Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Sao Paulo. Also, Lego and iPhones.

Perhaps it was this mindset that allowed me to feel so blessed later that evening, sitting in a fashionable tavern in central Amsterdam, listening to the people around me chatting in French, Dutch, German and every flavour of English, warming myself by a well-stocked fire with an espresso martini.

Explorer Sam seemed to agree with me, in between taking on a lucrative new sponsorship arrangement for my Instagram.