Beverwijk and Amsterdam

I enjoyed the luxury of not having to get up by the clock in the morning. After a leisurely breakfast I did a bit of shopping at nearby Heemstede Centrum, taking the opportunity to toss the old shirts that I had bought some 15 years ago from Hema, a Dutch department store chain, into a donation bin. It was a satisfying symmetry to return those shirts to their country of origin, heh. Then I caught a bus to Haarlem NS. I didn't have enough coins for the automat, which only take coins and PIN cards, and was annoyed to be charged 0.5€ extra for buying at a counter. I made a note to accumulate enough coins for the return trip.


My destination was the Zwarte Markt near Beverwijk, the most famous weekend bazaar in the Netherlands, as the website name suggests. It isn't a black market as the name might lead you to think but a bazaar with exotic (i.e. non-Dutch) goods as well as a wide variety of household goods and foodstuffs. I thought it was walking distance from the town but when I failed to find it, I asked a migrant shopkeeper and he told me to catch a special bus from the station to the other side of the tracks. Despite the small size of the Netherlands, it can be inconvenient to walk between locations. I found that this bus didn't take the standard strippenkaart but cost 2.50€. Sigh, I'm getting nickeled and dimed here, I thought.


The bazaar was sprawling and immensely popular. It must have just grown like topsy. You name it, somebody was selling it. I was tempted by some of the music CDs but decided to wait until I got to Kuala Lumpur. I did however buy some lokum (Turkish Delight) as presents to take home. They were chunky and not as dainty as the ones I had in Istanbul 4 years earlier, but were tastier and more varied than the ones in Sydney. I also had an indifferent kebab roll for lunch here. I  mistook the bottle of chili for ketchup and had to wipe a lot off with a napkin before I could eat the roll.


(I should have taken some pictures in the market but my archive shows that I didn't, sadly.)

Then from Beverwijk station I caught the train to Amsterdam. Centraalstation seemed to be under renovation, as always. Everything was as I remembered it on the Damrak, the main drag heading out from the station: the glitzy tourist traps, the canal tour boats, the crowds. It was like stepping back into a time warp.

I headed off to the somewhat quieter district of Jordaan, which is more picturesque but also more upmarket. In the Lindengracht (site in Dutch) market I ate a brodje haring, which is a salted raw herring with onions in a bread roll. It peaks at the end of spring and the beginning of summer, and called Hollandse Nieuwe. It was as good as ever for me.

The market has the usual stalls selling apparel and other personal goods.

From there I caught a tram to Leidseplein, the square which is focus of Amsterdam nightlife. It was still the same as I remembered, except that the blaring pop music had been replaced by blaring rap and techno. This is the Stadsschouwburg, which is the municipal theatre.

By the side of the tram tracks cutting through the square were these open air tables packed with customers.

This is the Bulldog, a well-known coffee-shop at Leidseplein. In Amsterdam a coffee-shop means a place where legal amounts of cannabis can be smoked.

Just the facility for a urinary emergency after a night's heavy drinking.


Amsterdam is an energetic place where you have your finger on the pulse of entertainment; where you can catch the latest offerings. It's a playground for the Dutch; nowhere else in the Netherlands is like Amsterdam, it is sui generis. In that respect it had not changed, but I had, and this glitter no longer held for me the fascination it once did.

A couple of the famous Amsterdam trams that go ding!


It was comforting to see that some things stayed the same. Despite the energy, Amsterdam is also a homely and livable city, if you can afford to live there. The lack of tall buildings in the city and the preponderance of bicycles and public transport over cars are also factors. On a fine day, sipping a beer outdoors in Amsterdam is one of the coolest things I remember doing.

Flower beds in the national colours.


A lot of people in the street were dressed in orange and a smaller, braver minority was dressed in green. Holland was playing Ireland that evening. It turned out later that Ireland won the Eurocup match 1-nil.

On turning a corner in a quieter part of town, I found myself at a familiar door. It was where S, my supervisor during my internship in Amsterdam, and his partner C lived. Out of curiosity I rang the doorbell, and C poked her head out of the window of the top apartment. It turned out that I had caught S and C at the right time, as he travelled a lot, but happened to be in between trips. I accepted pre-dinner drinks and snacks with them and their guests. It seemed that one of the guests had a keen interest in the Minoan civilisation and had just returned from Crete.


I declined to stay for dinner because I didn't want to get home late as I had to resume my travels the next day and I wasn't in the mood for conversation anyway. Pretty much everyone I used to knew at the institute where I did my internship had gone their separate ways. What would my life have been like had I accepted a job in the Netherlands instead of migrating to Australia? Quite different, without doubt. It's quite pointless to indulge in hypotheticals, but I had an inner feeling that I had made the right choice.