Such a landscape would be impossible to traverse quickly without tunnels, so most of the train ride is spent in shadow. Then the darkness tears away in a blur of concrete, exposing the most breathtaking landscape you’ve ever seen. This happens over and over. The last of these increasingly stunning unveilings showed me my destination: Interlaken, appropriately set between two crisp lakes wrapped in Alps.

I discovered Interlaken through a combination of serendipity and irresponsible travel planning. I had three days to kill between leaving Italy and returning to Amsterdam, and thought it might be nice to spend a little time outdoors. I figured that any place in the Alps was as good as any other; all I needed was a cheap place to stay. So I cropped a Google Maps view around Switzerland and northeastern France and searched on the word “hostel.” Take a quick look through that list and see if you can guess which item caught my attention. I’m sure you’ll agree that the only acceptable answer is “Mystery Hostel.”

Some brief internet research indicated that I should probably avoid the Mystery, but the town where it was located seemed like a winner. I booked a more reputable hostel in Interlaken and was primed for my Swiss adventure. But that’s not exactly what I got.

I’d seen the word “tourist” crop up a few times while reading about Interlaken, which didn’t put me off. After all, shouldn’t a traveler stay in a place with amenities geared towards the traveling lifestyle? What I didn’t realize was that the word “tourist,” in this instance, was not so much meant to imply “traveler friendly,” but rather “This town has a Hooters.” I’m not kidding. I was looking for a weekend in a friendly Swiss backpacking village and instead I got girls in orange hot pants serving spicy chicken wings to lecherous Americans.

Interlaken is weird in many other ways. Across the street from the train station, for example, is a full-bore, Wal-Mart-style department store. It’s got groceries, clothes, electronics–the works. And it’s on the second floor of a mall. To manage the awkward situation of having dozens of customers with full shopping carts who need to get down to the ground floor, the whole center of the mall is taken up by two inclined moving walkways. I can’t explain how odd it was to see a line of European shoppers descending at a slow, shallow angle with their carts in tow–somehow reminiscent of cows to the slaughter–but I wanted desperately to release a full basket from the top of the walkway and watch it careen through the shopping center. It bet it could build up a good head of steam by the time it hit the bottom.

Stranger still were the snippets of the local teenage culture I witnessed around town. I arrived on a Friday evening, too late for a real excursion, so instead I wandered the streets after checking into my superb but empty hostel. I strolled through the heart of Interlaken, a giant public park too overgrown for public use, even in the perfect weather. The teenagers congregated, via bicycle, around the benches surrounding the park, and just kind of hung out there all night. The girls looked, pretty much, like normal teenage girls. The guys, though, were preposterously thugged out. Comically so. Their pants sagged to heroic depths, their hoodies were loose and covered in designer prints, and their hats could only have clung to their heads by way of some incredible static field. They looked, essentially, like back-up dancers from an old Nelly video, except, you know, white and Swiss.

My growing sense of surreality spiked whenever I took the time to notice where I was. I would walk down a street with a McDonald’s and a Casino, then stop, look upwards a few degrees, and remember I was surrounded by towering, beautiful mountains. And I did, the next day, break free of Interlaken’s Americanized grasp by taking a bus for about five minutes into an authentic, The Sound of Music-style village, complete with fluffy white sheep. I hiked up a trail jutting out of a street called Wanderweg, and managed a decent climb by following paths set up by an evidently bankrupt fitness company. After I wore myself out (who knew the Alps would be so steep?), I sat on a rock wall overlooking some abandoned alpine train tracks and dug into my lunch of bread, sausage, and chocolate that I picked up on the cheap from that second-floor department store.

At first, it seemed as if we had made a mistake. Though the full-sized Naboo Starfighter near the exhibit’s entrance was cool, the mall where it was displayed was mostly deserted and not especially Star Wars-like. The first displays in the show itself did little to bolster our confidence. They were all from the prequel trilogy, and the magic missing from these films was equally lacking in their props. Sure, Darth Maul’s outfit and a big pod racer were technically impressive, but they failed to evoke any sort of sentimentality. Monitors throughout the gallery looping scenes from those CGI-encumbered movies only magnified the underwhelming qualities engendered by the physical items in the gallery.

Then, around one corner, I caught a glimpse of a tag reading “Hoth,” the ice planet from the opening of The Empire Strikes Back. From then on the exhibition was pure geek bliss. Concept sketches and storyboards revealed delightful details. (For example, the shot in the wampa’s ice cave where Luke pulls the lightsaber into his hand with the force was actually filmed by yanking it out of his hand with a wire and playing it in reverse.) The snow-speeder models were amazing works of craftsmanship, and seeing the extra large AT-AT leg that crushed Luke’s speeder offered a moment of insight into the brilliance of Star Wars‘ groundbreaking special effects.

The show only got better from there. One room contained Han Solo frozen in carbonite, the full Boba Fett costume, concept models for Jabba the Hutt, and Leia’s slave bikini. Can anyone offer me a better description of nerd heaven? Then, the next room featured a life-size forest speeder, an Ewok outfit, and models of several Rebel star fighters. This all built up to the stunning finale, a final room containing the man himself: Darth Vader. Even today, examining all the costume’s finer details up-close, it still looks amazing. His leather gloves are sinister yet functional and his chest-panel doesn’t look tacky and glued-on like I expected it too. Vader’s costume is intimidating.

The same room also featured perhaps the most striking prop in the exhibit: a large, detailed model of a Star Destroyer’s bridge. It’s inspiring to imagine a team of men working to make each crevice and window, lavishing care on the delicate geodesic radar domes, and perfecting every centimeter of the ship’s big guns.

Knowing how much passion went into these effects is part of what makes them so remarkable, and it’s a big reason why the original films movies are still impressive. Objectively, they may look worse than a computer-generated simulacrum, but the human agency behind the old visuals gives them far more life than a rendering can impart. It’s no big deal to see the props from the newer films, however exquisitely-crafted they may be. Any errors or imperfections could quickly be scrubbed away digitally. With the old movies, almost everything you’d see on the screen needed to be rendered as a physical reality. After seeing these constructions up close, I’m certain that this physicality is what makes the galaxy far, far away so convincing.

“Normal,” however, is not the word I would choose to describe how I felt as I stacked seven different brands of round milk chocolate cookies onto the countertop. The clerk did not ask questions, which was probably for the best. My prepared explanation–”I’m a writer”–in retrospect would likely not have clarified the matter.

The chocolate cookies at Albert Heijn are interesting for a few reasons. The first is that there are a fucking lot of them:

This is only about a third of the cookie/biscuit section in the store, which is just one of several sections that stock sweets. I had to narrow my focus to the field of “round, milk chocolate-covered cookies” to find a reasonably-sized sample group, and I still rejected several candidates on the shelves. For all their talk of crufty pragmatism and cold modern design, the Dutch sure love their sugary snacks. Which is not to say, of course, that they keep their impeccable design sense away from their desserts:

Only the image of a muscular, thick-veined euro strangling a squalid, emaciated dollar kept me from buying this beautiful tin of biscuits. Still, that the cookies inside would warrant this kind of packaging hints at another reason to glorify these chocolaty treats: they are delicious. Out of concern for my cardiovascular fortitude, I recently banned myself from sweets altogether, but the deep-burning craving created within me by just a few months of shopping at Albert Heijn still managed to concoct this flimsy rationalization for buying hundreds of cookies.

I’m not too distressed about the purchase, though, because of the final reason why I love Dutch cookies: they’re cheap! This whole spread cost me just over seven euros:

Let the judgment begin! Criteria: the MIT-developed Evaluative Chocoindex, which factors deliciousness and price into a logarithmic ratio.

[A note on photography: I would prefer that you blamed the excellent Photoshop Express beta for any imperfections you see in these shots instead of my weak-sauce point-and-shoot, my middling photography skills, or my amateurish editing technique. It is beta, after all.]

Chocolade Spritsen

These are about as basic as the cookies get, and they look like nothing special. The key ingredient here, and what elevates everything on this list over something you might get at a Safeway stateside, is the rich, exquisite milk chocolate. In America, you’d have to pay a Whole Foods mark-up to get the same chocolate you’ll find at fire-sale prices in the Netherlands. (This surely holds throughout the rest of Europe as well.)

So, while these Spritsen are unremarkable, they get the job done in the simplest possible way. Very Dutch. Plus, at 75 cents, they’re the cheapest of the lot.

Space

The Space cookies feature the second best packaging in the biscuit aisle, next to the gorgeous tin mentioned earlier. Their retro-funk aesthetic, though, combined with the cosmic branding, is profoundly misleading in the Amsterdam snack-food culture. Let’s just say that, in certain establishments here, asking for a “spaced-up” product is to request something entirely different from caramel. At least, that’s a rumor I heard somewhere.

Sadly, I can’t recommend Space. (The cookies, I mean. Not, like, the extra-planetary realm.) Bringing caramel to the chocolate and biscuit party, in this case, turns company into a crowd. Though the caramel is sweeter, gooier, and less tacky than in American candy, it proves too sugary by a hair in this implementation. You also pay 95 cents for four Spaces, making them among the priciest of this bunch.

Choco Prince

Like Space, the Prince Brand™ Choco Prince cookies come wrapped individually, and they attempt to squeeze a sweet filling between layers of milk chocolate and biscuit. But the Choco Prince succeeds where Space fails because his vanilla filling has a subtler sweetness and smoother texture than Space’s caramel. (Caution: do not read the preceding sentence as double entendre.) The one issue I did have with these cookies is that I did not find them particularly regal. But, at 1.14 euros per box of six, I’d recommend the Choco Prince over Space as the best cookie to toss in your bag or pocket before heading out for a night on the town.

Fijnproevers (”fine-proovers”)

The most preposterously delicious cookie I’ve ever eaten. The chocolate is creamy, the biscuit is light and crisp, and the chunks of toffee harmonize the flavors into a full-bodied sweetness. You might think that the bolstering presence of toffee gives these cookies a Human Growth Hormone-like edge over their competition, but I’ve had a simple chocolate-and-biscuit cookie from the same company, and those too proved championship-worthy. The Fijnproevers have their fundamentals down pat, and they use a complementary flavor to its fullest potential. But, as they say, you get what you pay for. At 1.67 euros, these are more than 50 cents costlier than the next most expensive cookie.

Chocolade Tarwebiscuit

As much as I love the Fijnproevers, I must declare these Tarwebiscuits the overall winner. They’re stock-simple, just chocolate and biscuit, and you get around 25 of them for 95 cents — by far the highest cookie-per-euro return available at Albert Heijn. The chocolate is a step down from that on the Fijnproevers, but the dense, slightly tangy biscuit lends these cookies a complex and mature flavor. They are also excellent when dipped in coffee. I did experience a moment of panic, though, when I ate a bunch of these for the first time before noticing this word printed on the biscuit:

Happily, it turns out that “digestive” simply describes this particular genre of cookie, and not its effect on the human gastronomic system. Though I feel guilty for betraying the Dutch by selecting a cookie invented in the U.K., and though I resent the scheming Englishman who named this snack, I cannot deny the thrifty brilliance of the digestive biscuit. I suppose, after a millennium of culinary ineptitude, the British were due for at least one success.

Licht Bruintjes (”licked brown-tyuhs”)

The Tarwebiscuits got me excited about tubes of chocolate cookies, so I eagerly picked up these Bruintjes. Do not make the same mistake. While superficially similar to my pick of the litter, this variation is ruined by its stiff, brittle biscuit texture, which doesn’t even hold up to a quick latté dunk. These cookies are like stale Ritz crackers covered in chocolate, and the jagged sugar crystals make them feel grainy and sharp in your mouth. That they cost 9 cents more than the far-superior Tarwebiscuits only cements their status as Amsterdam’s most disappointing cookie.

Gangmakers

These don’t fit into the “cookie” category at all, but come on–they’re called Gangmakers. While I’m big fan of The Wire, I never felt that I could truly empathize with the inner-city plight of Bodie or Michael until I ate one of these tasty cakes, lined with a thin undercoat of raspberry jelly.

The scene was calm as I traipsed around the square yesterday. Groups of teenagers lounged on the monument, practicing their bershon expressions. Tourists milled about, scurrying to dodge the phalanx of cars, trams, and bicycles buzzing past on a bisecting street. Some children had chosen to commune with nature by wandering into a mass of pigeons, and I was touched by the sound of their laughter as diseased pests perched on their little forearms.

The featured attraction that day was a performance group I’ve dubbed “Amsterdam’s Hodgepodge of Incompetent Living Statues.” Six costumed men stood atop boxes in a scattered formation near the center of the square. None seemed to realize that the entire point of a living statue performance is to remain perfectly still (as still as, oh I don’t know, a statue) because they constantly reached down from their perches to awkwardly rest their hands on tourist’s shoulders for snapshots.

A bejeweled Neptune with an imposing codpiece was the group’s most elaborate member, and commanded significant attention. The Grim Reaper also appeared popular, drawing on support from the disaffected-teenager demographic. Only Caesar looked the part of an actual statue, with immaculate marble-colored robes and makeup. The brightly-colored Rastafarian had abandoned any pretense of statue-ness as he conversed with a group of stoners, and the Franciscan monk in a black mask and white facepaint looked sad and lonely without a single onlooker. And then, of course, there was Darth Vader.

Last Saturday, this air of easy-going fun in Dam Square was displaced by outrage and anxiety. Angry Dutch words boomed from a stage at the foot of the Palace (which only rarely serves any official function). Older pedestrians, fear obvious on their faces, skirted the fevered crowd around the stage. The police looked on, their expressions far more sober than when leaning against vans around nightlife hotspots. The crowd, for their part, seemed indignant and determined, unperturbed–perhaps even invigorated–by the cold fog.

The event was a demonstration against Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who serves in the parliament on an anti-immigration platform. Specifically, the protest opposed Wilders’s intent to release a short anti-Islam film called Fitna. As this New York Times profile describes, Wilders is an outrageously outspoken figure, best known for his ridiculous bleached hair and inflammatory rhetoric. Since I arrived at the beginning February, the whole city has been on edge about his film and what reaction it might elicit. One need look only as far back as the Danish Muhammad cartoons to see how easily this situation could get out of hand.

The demonstrators must have been disappointed when Wilders loosed Fitna onto the internet yesterday. Given that the first Hostel was set in Amsterdam, it should come as no surprise that Wilders has co-opted the central philosophy of American torture porn: shock over substance. The film opens with the infamous cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, which proves to be the most nuanced commentary in Fitna’s fifteen-minute run. Wilders fills the remaining time with scenes of brutal violence, radical speeches, and chilling newspaper headlines, inter-spliced with passages from the Koran. To say that the film looks like it was produced with iMovie would be to libel Apple’s developers, and this amateurish production cheapens the horrifying images that Wilders trots out one after another.

It’s not my place to comment on the delicate and complicated issue of Islam in the Netherlands, but the frivolity of Wilders’s film seems obvious regardless of one’s political leanings. The hatred he portrays among radical Islam is widely known, and he presents it in a way that is guaranteed to incense an obviously reactionary group. Now, provoking a reaction can be a worthy effort, especially in religious discourse, but to do so with no purpose than to rattle cages is mindless, and in Wilders’s substantially publicized case, blatantly self-serving.

I’d love to dismiss Fitna as patent nonsense and think of it no more, but the fact that Theo Van Gogh was shot dead in the streets of Amsterdam three years ago for producing a similarly controversial film fixes some disquiet in the back of my mind. And, while it’s nice to think of Dam Square as a space dedicated to simple amusement, I’m glad that when reality sets in Amsterdam can fill its center with dissenting voices.

Most of all, he loved [comic books] for the pictures and stories they contained, the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could for fifteen years, transfiguring their insecurities and delusions, their wishes and their doubts, their public educations and their sexual perversions, into something that only the most purblind of societies would have denied the status of art.

One could, if one were so inclined, read the entirety of this 600-page Pulitzer Prize-winning novel–a novel of dying families, sexual awakenings, and abandoned love, set against a backdrop of Holocaust escape and World War II–as evidence in support of this statement. Chabon, a Jewish author, brings Kavalier, a Czech Jew, to Brooklyn from Prague in 1939, just when the Nazi’s grip begins to tighten. Kavalier, with his cousin Sammy Clay, immediately sets to work creating comics, hoping to stockpile enough money to spring his family from Europe. Though Kavalier’s superheroes wallop the Nazis nondenominationally, he uses his art to relieve the burden of being utterly powerless against Hitler’s regime. Not to delve too far into term-paper material, but Chabon seems to suggest that more went into the seemingly mindless early comic books than dull male fantasy, and that the resultant works spoke to their young readers on a deeper level than implied by muscly dudes in spandex twisting Panzer canons into knots. For creators and readers alike, comics meant more than their superficialities.

Surveying the new “Superheroes and Schlemiels” exhibit at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum, it’s hard to disagree with this conclusion. The exhibit seeks to depict “a specific historical connection between comic strip art and Jewish culture,” but such claims are too modest. Nearly all of the most important figures in comic book history are present among the 37 artists in the show, and through their work one can see the entire evolution of the form.

Skimming past the first newspaper cartoonists (Rube Goldberg!), one lands before Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel’s foundational character: Superman. As a cultural icon, Superman has become so enshrined into Americana that considering his legacy feels more like studying mythology than entertainment. He is perhaps the most distilled expression of standard-issue American heroism: moral and physical superiority, plus white skin, and a Y chromosome. But he also embodies subtler aspects of American life like immigration and personal identity. It seems odd, though, to even consider Superman on this conscious level. How does one go about intellectualizing a figure that features prominently both in a philosophical Kill Bill monologue and as a step in the Soulja Boy dance? Perhaps Superman’s deep iconic entrenchment helps to explain the massive public sympathy towards Christopher Reeves (skip to 3:30). The idea of a perfect being is profoundly resonant, and it owes much of this power to the unambiguous ideology of early comic books.

From that prototype, comics began to branch out, if narrowly at first. Two more Jewish artists, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, created Batman, a darker, pragmatically human foil to Superman’s infallible dominance. Jack Kirby created Captain America and, later, teamed up with Stan Lee to devise the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man. Lee himself created Spiderman and Daredevil. Seeing this all-star lineup of early comic book artists exhibited one after another shows the underestimated dramatic range of superheroes, and speaks to the colossal imagination of their creators. Yes, these heroes all represent some kind of adolescent male wish-fulfillment, but each character works within a unique psychological niche, from Peter Parker’s insecurity to Bruce Banner’s rage to Tony Stark’s dependencies. This is not a medium full of generic cut-outs, but a multi-faceted depiction of a specific audience’s wide-ranging temperaments. Though the shared Jewish identity of the artists only rarely manifests itself in the comics themselves, one can see a kinship in their frequent collaborations.

At the heart of the early Jewish comics community lies, arguably, the medium’s most transformational figure, Will Eisner. Eisner co-founded the first American comics production studio, which employed many of the artists mentioned above. He also created The Spirit, a popular series featuring a hard-bitten masked detective. Most crucially, though, in 1978, Eisner published the first graphic novel, A Contract with God. This bleak, realistic book tells heart-breaking tales centered on a Jewish tenement community in 1930s New York. Contract deals with subjects ranging from poverty to adolescent sexuality to losing faith, and Eisner crafts even his most tragic characters with a sympathetic touch. It is precisely what one least expects from the stereotypical conception of comic books, and it represents a turning point in the medium’s history.

Many of the major underground artists that laid the groundwork for Eisner’s artistic breakthrough feature in the exhibit as well. Harvey Kurtzman founded Mad magazine in 1952, which skewed comics towards an adult audience. Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar turned the medium away from tights and muscles in the ’60s and ’70s, directing it instead down a more personal path that many independent comics follow to this day. Though somewhat lesser known, Bernard Krigstein and Al Feldstein’s 1955 comic short-story “Master Race” was a subversive and influential work, among the earliest portrayals of the reality of the Holocaust. Its raw, unfiltered illustrations of crowded gas chambers and piles of corpses came at a time when the public was generally unaware of the specific horrors faced by the victims of concentration camps.

“Master Race,” in part, inspired Art Spiegelman in the creation of Maus, the crown jewel of the exhibit and indeed of comics in general. The darkest words feel too light when describing the comic, which was serialized in the comics magazine RAW beginning in 1980, and eventually published as a complete volume in 1986. Maus is the story Spiegelman’s father’s experiences during the Holocaust, spun together with Spiegelman’s interactions with his father in the present day. It is simply a masterpiece of sorrow–the first comic to win a Pulitzer Prize and among the greatest works of modern literature. To reach Spiegelman’s display via Shuster, Siegel, Kirby, Lee, Crumb, Pekar and Eisner is to see a unique and potent medium bloom before your eyes. The underlying thread of Jewish culture makes this lineage feel even more alive with substance and growth. If the apex of comics history is Maus, the point after which anything becomes possible, it seems frivolous to dismiss its predecessors as shallow or trite. No, they are not pristine works of high art, but there has always been a purpose to comics beyond brute entertainment.

It would be negligent, though, to wallow in high-minded dissection without mentioning a fundamental trait of comics common to few other museum-worthy subjects: fun. It’s fun to visit the Superheroes and Schlemiels exhibit. The old Superman theme plays in the background, underscoring the ridiculous early strips featuring the Man of Steel (Superman to Hitler: “I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw”). Pre-production layouts of X-Men covers hang on the wall, revealing correction fluid, eraser smudges, and distinct graphic elements literally pasted on top of the illustrations before being shipped off to the printers. The Eisner section features unpublished sketches for A Contract with God, and one can even see the original Maus inserts from RAW. Better still, at the heart of the exhibit, next to two big couches, are bins full of comics. Any visitor can sit down to enjoy a tangible example of the work she has just seen in the exhibit. It is difficult to imagine a collection from any other medium that could so seamlessly blend together cultural history and religious identity in a way that is at once moving and enjoyable. Only the most purblind of visitors would suggest that these comics felt anything other than at home on the museum walls.

Since that day, I’ve been fascinated by Amsterdam’s canals. As you can see from overhead, they pervade the entire city, running through it like blood vessels. Though Amsterdam carries many visual associations–red lights, classical architecture, XXX logos, tulips, windmills–I most often see the city represented by a simple image of a bridge over a canal, the bridge standing on three half-circle arches rimmed with lights so that its reflection closes the shapes. I haven’t been to Venice, so living in place suffused with water constantly reminds me that I’m somewhere special. On long walks back to my apartment from the clubs, resting on the edge of a bridge and taking in the water and the city evokes the rare sense that modern society and nature are living and breathing together. (Of course, in this position I am also paranoid about being shoved from behind into the canal.)

On the surface, the canals seem to be of little utility in the average Amsterdammer’s everyday life. Indeed, their only apparent economic contribution is that they enable the ever-popular canal tours, on which foreigners too lazy or stoned to bike can experience the city’s unique charm. I can understand why the Italians might build a major city on canals only because they make the city beautiful, but such an aesthetic declaration seems out of character for the Dutch, who pride themselves on pragmatism.

It turns out that canals’ original raison-d’être couldn’t be more utilitarian. Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level (the name ain’t for nothing), the 13th century Dutch needed a way to stay afloat (i.e., not drown). So, they built their city on a series of dykes and dams that pushed against the water and afforded outlets for the sea to vent its fury. The famous central horseshoe of canals was built, as the city expanded during the 16th century, for defensive and shipping purposes. Naturally, the canals have been made obsolete by obscenely complex dam technology, and by the fact that, if someone wants to wage war against the Dutch, moats are no longer considered a state-of-the-art protective measure.

There are some inhabitants of Amsterdam who might argue against the idea that the canals have outlived their usefulness. These people live in the 1,500 or so houseboats docked along the edges of the canals. One such boat has been converted into the Houseboat Museum, where, for €3, anyone may sample a few minutes of life on the water. The boat is small, but a short person would likely find it livable (a sub-optimal situation considering that the Dutch are the tallest people on Earth). A pamphlet inside the museum suggests that, while buying a boat is slightly cheaper than a house, a prospective houseboatsman must also consider the annual mooring fee of €500. Sadly, an old boat is a buyer’s only option because there are no vacant moorings left in Amsterdam. From a houseboat real estate listing inside the museum, I learned that a 625 square-foot houseboat costs €185,000, about $280,000. I don’t even want to know how much non-boat houses cost here.

Housing prices are one of many parallels to draw between Amsterdam and Manhattan–or as it was known when the Dutch settled there in the 17th century–New Amsterdam. To understand the rationale behind the canals, it helps to look at a different page from the Big Apple’s playbook: Central Park. According to a property-appraisal firm, the real estate value of the park is $528 billion, yet no one living in Manhattan would dream of giving the land over to developers. The park is simply worth more than the money. Similarly, Amsterdam could fill in its canals, reclaiming valuable land in and around the over-crowded city center. This almost seems more palatable than building on Central Park because what recreation the canals do offer is minimal and limited by season. But to strip out the canals, however impractical they may be, would be to neuter the city’s spirit. For its entire history, Amsterdam has balanced on the knife’s edge separating land from water; it can exist in no other state.

Besides, while researching this article I discovered a major function of the canals that I had overlooked. In the first room of the Amsterdam Historical Museum, displayed overhead in plexiglass case is a twisted, rusty bicycle. A display describes the object:

This bicycle surfaced while the canals were being dredged. It must have remained underwater for a considerable length of time considering that mussels have attached themselves to the metal frame. Use of the canals as a public dumping ground persists. This becomes particularly apparent during a hard freeze when discarded mattresses and wrecked bicycles remain lying on the ice or when the canals are dredged to stimulate flow.

Though disappointed by this mundane explanation to a previously fascinating mystery, I was satisfied to know that the Dutch will find utility in even the most vestigial and ornamental elements of their aqueous city.

I traveled to this house of sin out of pure desperation. With no article in hand the night of my deadline, I felt that a casino just outside Amsterdam’s busiest nightlife district would be a surefire hit. I figured it would be wall-to-wall with drunken foreigners, stoners glazing over in front of whirring slot machines. I could easily land some killer material just by sitting down at a poker table and taking in the scene.

Walking into the casino, I was greeted with a much different reality. For one thing, I had to buy a ticket just to enter, like I was at a museum or an amusement park. When I approached the turnstile, the ticket-taker informed me that checking my coat was mandatory. As I surveyed the floors, I saw a sedated rendition of Vegas’s ostentatious glam: the lights flashed less brightly, the slot machines clanged more softly, and the decor felt subdued, almost urbane. The poker room, which I felt would be full of American tourists obsessed with the latest Texas Hold ‘Em craze, was actually packed to the gills with serious, sober Dutch card players. The instructions for playing were complex and written entirely in Dutch. This fact, on top of the 40 euro minimum buy-in, kept me away from the table, as I imagine it would for most casual English-speaking players.

I could barely believe my eyes. Does this place know how much money it’s leaving on the table? Charging three euros to get in the door only dilutes the stream of potential gamblers, and gambling, I think it should be obvious, is where the house makes the bulk of its profits. Why do you think Vegas casinos give out free drinks and comp rooms? The muted atmosphere is another money-loser. Vegas deliberately cultivates an air of exuberance that encourages people (drunk off free booze) to throw their money away. The Holland Casino had no such vitality.

It dawned on me that these steps were all deliberate parts of a larger scheme. This place wants to keep the riffraff out. If they let any drunk^[2] yahoo through the door, the place would be crawling with sleaze. I also realized that I was easily the youngest and most casually dressed person in the entire casino. In fact, there were many well-dressed middle-aged and older patrons in attendance. Gambling in Amsterdam, it seems, is not the debaucher’s past-time that it is in the States. In fact, it seems more akin to the fabled “Sport of Kings” days from the racetrack’s distant past. ^[3]

What this all boils down to is that the Holland Casino is willing to turn away easy money in order to foster a more pleasant gambling experience. If they opened the floodgates to the legion of idiot foreign tourists, the casino would be committing legalized robbery. Money would pour in hand-over-fist. But the casino’s managers, apparently following some socialist maxim, would rather operate a nice casino than a ridiculously profitable casino. Imagine an American company–and not just any American company, but a casino, the insignia of capitalist greed–ignoring barrels and barrels of easy money. In America, such a business would be a laughingstock; in Amsterdam, it’s a three-story giant in the busiest part of the city.

1. In this context, by “devised” I mean “invented based on no knowledge.”

2. and likely jacket-wearing.

3. I should note that, though ostensibly sophisticated, the table games section of the casino featured neither craps nor baccarat, which offer the best odds against the house outside of card-counting at a blackjack table.

(A note to those who doubt my sincerity vis-a-vis drugs: I assure you that marijuana is not any less common at an American liberal arts college than it is in Amsterdam. A student does not need to travel across a fucking ocean to get it.)

Obviously there was more to my reasoning than wanting to ride a bike around. It seemed to me that a society structured around the concept of cheap, human-powered individual transportation had figured something out. It was as if Amsterdam had a resonant frequency, tuned to the sound of pedaling, that hummed throughout its every citizen’s way of life. After riding around the city every day for a couple of weeks, I think I’ve come closer to pinpointing what makes this sound so enlivening.

I purchased my bicycle, as Consumer Reports generally advises, on the basis of a meaningless coincidence. I walked into a shop called Used Products, one of Amsterdam’s wonderfully literal businesses aimed at English-speaking tourists, and told the nearest employee that I was looking to spend less than 100 euros on a bicycle. Without moving or thinking, he shrugged towards the nearest bike.

“This one’s nice,” he said. I studied its rusty, charmingly retro finish while he elaborated his pitch. The rear tire was new, but it was equipped with an inadequate disc brake system. But I wasn’t listening. I’d just noticed the bike’s name: the Gazelle. Serendipity! That’s the same as my beloved Adidas sneakers! And, to put it over the top, the bike kind of matches the shoes.

I walked out the door with my glamourous Gazelle and a hefty chain lock for a grand total of 85 euros. Well, glamourous might not be the best word here. Aside from the aforementioned rust, the bike is at least 30 years old; the brakes are dangerously anemic; it won’t shift down while pedaling, the light generator, which draws power from the front wheel, is pathetic; the rear wheel lock fucking suc… you get the point. It’s not the best bike ever constructed.

The thing is, none of the legions of bikes in this city are much better. (Apocryphal statistic: there are more bikes in Amsterdam than people.) In fact, having any gears at all is considered a luxury. This is the first aspect of why I love the bicycle culture in Amsterdam and, more to the point, why I love Amsterdam because of its bicycle culture. Your bike is not a coveted and sacred object. It’s not a status symbol. It is, God bless it, a bike. The hip kids never buzz by on glistening wheels, lawyers never pass on imported frames with lacquered handlebars, and young graphic designers do not leap from overpasses in tight shorts and aerodynamic headgear. Everyone rides the same essentially crummy cruiser-style bikes because they’re cheap and they work. Even in bike-friendly communities stateside, enthusiasts become obsessed with the meaningless minutia of cycling equipment. Here, where the bicycle is simply a transportation mode–not an exercise device or an environmentalist statement–pragmatism rules.

Also, because transit is so dependent upon the bike, the entire city is designed to accommodate it. As a thought experiment, I decided one lazy Sunday to ride as far I could go before I lost the bike path. (Hat tip to Jeff for making me reconsider Eluvium’s Copia, an album I’d previously dismissed because its creator nearly crushed my and Kevin’s skulls with volume at a concert. It’s actually a beautiful record, perfect riding music.)

I ended up riding to the beach, to land’s end. I crossed two major bridges, a vast stretch of bafflingly empty land, and a developing town that may not have been Amsterdam anymore, and the whole way, I never left an official bike path. From my admittedly limited experience, it seems that anywhere a person could want to go in or around Amsterdam, she could get there on a bike. The city is completely flat, and even the notoriously dense city center is rife with bike lanes.

I can barely wrap my head around how obvious it is to consistently provide bikers with their own space on every major road. Drivers hate cyclists in other major cities because they compete for the same space on the road, a conflict in which everyone loses. Clearly not every city is as perfect a match for the bike as Amsterdam, but I decline to accept that Americans would shun such an efficient means of transportation if it was more convenient and less dangerous.

Finally, to slather some icing on the cake, the bike is also the fastest way to get around Amsterdam. Any time I’m involved in a group of bikers meeting a group of bus-riders, the bikers inevitably end up waiting around at our destination. But biking isn’t just faster than waiting for public transport, it’s also faster than a car.

Any car.

As I pull into the Athenaeum Bookstore on my Gazelle, I spot the back of a gleaming, piano-black Maserati. Desperately hoping it’s the flabbergastingly gorgeous new Gran Turismo, I hurry over to take a look. Before I can get out front though, the car takes off. I put aside my thirst for the latest New Yorker and engage pursuit. The Maz winds a disjointed path through deserted side-streets, never encountering traffic, but I stay close. I charge over speed bumps while the Maz must be especially wary of scraping its low nose. Though I occasionally breach speed-etiquette considerations, I stay on target, even after what feels like a few good minutes of hunting. The Maz is finally forced to wait to turn onto a main road, and I creep past.

It’s just the Coupe. Fuck.

At least I answered what, to me, had been until that point a burning question: Yes, in Amsterdam, it’s better to own a bike than a Maserati.

The clerk, positioned about two inches to my left as I enter, is enormously friendly, courteous, and helpful. Certainly, her service is an improvement over what I received in Idaho. She even escorts me to my room, curiously numbered 303, the same as my area code in Colorado (okay, it’s kind of a lame coincidence). She opens the door simply by holding the plastic card against the handle enclosure and waiting for a beep. After some experimentation, I learn that the card can trigger the lock through the leather credit card slot in my wallet. I feel totally rad every time I open my door like an FBI Agent on TV.

The room itself is the size of an average refrigerator box. A desk stacked with kindergartenesque cubbies juts out from the far wall, immediately adjacent to the restroom. A small LCD TV hangs from a high corner, perched above the room’s only chair, which is presumably not positioned at the desk because such an arrangement would impede access to the bathroom. Though initially unsettling, I quickly become comfortable in 303’s limited space. I only need room enough for myself and a couple of bags anyways.

Other aspects of the Chic & Basic’s accommodations are more unusual. For example, the room’s only light source is a giant, back-lit vinyl portrait of an attractive young couple. Also, on the television, between a Dutch news station and a music video network, is a channel that constantly loops hardcore pornography. I think I understand the implication, but the bedding situation complicates my comprehension of the C&B’s target audience. The room’s floors are hardwood, and what appears to be a full bed is actually two twins pushed together. Now, this seems like the classic ‘50s consummation configuration, but traditionally the beds were not supported by well-oiled coasters. Even my nocturnal adjustments are enough to push the beds apart, so I imagine that a more vigorous activity (maybe your kids are jumping on the beds) would send the mattresses careening across the small room. In the more litigious United States, I imagine that Chic & Basic corporate would face legal challenges from amorous travelers who, shall we say, slipped through the crack.

You might wish that I had photographed the Chic & Basic, and I also wish that. This omission was caused-–and I won’t mince words–-by my own stupidity. Wanting immediately to charge my laptop, so I could sequester myself online after arriving in an exciting European city, I bought an American-to-European power converter from a souvenir shop in the heart of tourist Amsterdam. Do not do this. It took me until my MacBook was nearly out of power to realize that, in spite of an optimistic charge indicator on my power adapter, the computer was not actually receiving electricity from the outlet. After my battery had gone, preventing me from unloading my camera’s full memory card and delaying the production of this article, I made a series of even stupider decisions.

I will defend my first action as perfectly rational.

“My cheap power converter,” I thought, “is garbage. I just need to find a more professional converting solution and I’ll be back on the web in no time.”

Remembering an Apple logo hanging outside a store near the train station, I made my way to the “Mac Specialist.” There, I purchased a small, inexpensive European plug that I could easily attach to my laptop’s power adapter. This remarkably efficient and sensible fix did not work. I should have, in retrospect, taken the computer in for repair at this juncture in the story.

I did not.

My next step, after some brief research on the hotel’s coveted public computer, was to investigate the matter of power transformers. After buying and returning a low-wattage unit from a seedy mom and pop electronics shop a few blocks from the C&B, I finally made it to my room with a dense beige brick from a Soviet manufacturer. Festooned with incomprehensible plugs, outlets, and switches, the unit hummed gently when I plugged it into a wall socket. I then plugged my laptop into the transformer, but again, the Mac wouldn’t charge. Flummoxed, I unplugged the computer and flipped a voltage switch on the transformer. The hum escalated to a static buzz until something popped and a single white-hot spark shot from the end of the brick. As I scrambled to unplug the transformer, the room filled with a ripe sulfuric odor. At this point, I really should have given up.

I did not.

Fueled by dementedly irrational denial, I decided to test every outlet in my room. At one point, I noticed that the charge light on my power adapter stayed lit even after I disconnected it from the computer. Just as I reached this crucial realization, something else popped, and my room went dark. The clerk, a helpful man this time, had no trouble resetting the breaker, which restored my power, and I felt that I had successfully pinpointed the root of my power troubles. I returned to the Mac Specialist, adapter in hand, and asked an employee if I could buy a European MacBook adapter. He explained to me that American and European adapters share the same internal technology, so a new adapter couldn’t help me. I described my power outage to him, after which he asked to see my problem adapter.

“I don’t have my computer with me,” I told him.

“I have,” he said, gesturing with a smirk to the wall full of Macs behind me. It was a very clever line.

The second he plugged in my adapter a row of computers shut down, the lights went out, and an alarm sounded. The shrill beeping persisted, waning slowly as he sold me a new power adapter. I told him to throw the old one out.

Since my room at the C&B was the one closest to the lobby, the whole hotel probably heard me cursing when the new adapter didn’t work either.

I finally broke down and brought the laptop into the repair division of the Mac Specialist, who happily overcharged me to repair a fried input board. In the end, this ordeal cost me around 300 euros, roughly the equivalent of a yacht down payment in America. The moral of the story: do not buy a power convertor from the same store that sells a shirt of Scooby-Doo smoking a joint.

I drink a lot of coffee on road trips.

It was the fourth day of a fairly epic road trip from Tacoma to Denver, and my goal for the day was to drive from Yuba City, California to Ely, Nevada. Why would I choose to drive across Nevada? Well, I like my landscapes the same way I like my music: desolate and sad. In other words, yes, I tacked an extra 600 miles onto my trip just so I could drive across the frozen desert and listen to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And it was worth it.

I was traveling along U.S. Route 50, “the Loneliest Highway in America,” for a stretch of 120 miles without a single building or sign of human life.

After a few hours without having seen a human being and without cell phone reception, I thought that it would be nice to get pulled over just for the human company. In retrospect, this was a bad idea.

A Ford truck passed me, doing 90 or so. I had my cruise set at 75, and the speed limit was 70. Sure enough, a highway patrolman passed by in the oncoming lane. After passing me and the Ford, he turned around and passed me to pull over the truck ahead of me. But just as I was uttering a statement of relief, the officer ran out into the middle of the highway and signaled for me to pull over.

For a split second, I honestly considered turning around before realizing that it had been hours since I had seen a turn-off. I nestled in behind the patrol car and waited for him to write a ticket for the car in front of me before dealing with me.

Then a second car arrived; the patrolman had called for backup. It felt like my stomach was doing a floor gymnastics routine. To be sandwiched between two police officers in the absolute middle of nowhere was terrifying, primarily because I didn’t have a driver’s license.

The first cop approached my car, hand on his gun.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked.

“No,” I responded, legitimately confused why he would pull me over for doing five above in the middle of desert.

“You were doing 73. That’s three above the speed limit, but I just wanted to make sure you don’t have anything illegal and have a valid driver’s license,” he said.

“Well, I think it is lost somewhere in my car,” I said, “but I do have my college ID.”

He told me to look around my car for my driver’s license, which I did not find. At this point, the officer put two and two together. I was a youth with moppy hair, an unkempt beard, and a messy car–in other words, a marijuana addict. After my fruitless search, he asked me a few questions:

• “Have you been smoking marijuana?” I replied no.
• “Do you have marijuana with you?” I replied no.
• “Do you smoke marijuana?” I replied by telling him that I am a complete teetotaler. My attempt at humor was ill received.

After this series of questions, he waited for his partner to come back. They both circled my car, looking for evidence of marijuana, of which they found none. What they did find was that I have a lot more stuffed animals than a twenty-year old man should have.

The second police officer decided that he would improvise with my constitutional rights a little bit.

He said, “So since you don’t have anything illegal in the car, it’s okay that we’re gonna’ search the car.”

He didn’t phrase this as a question, but there was nothing illegal about his statement, since it could be construed as a question.

I paused, unsure how to respond. I knew the ball was in my court, primarily because there was nothing illegal in the car. But still, the libertarian deep inside of me wanted to win this one on principle.

I said, “I thought you needed probable cause to search a car.”

“This has nothing to do with probable cause. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you won’t mind that we’re going to search your car. So I’m just asking you what you would say if we told you we were going to search your car.”

There was another extended awkward pause. “I would probably say that you can’t search my car.”

He walked away and waited with his partner while they ran my name through the computer. Finally, one of the two said, “Screw this, it’s too cold. Let’s cut him loose.”

So, they cut me loose, and proceeded to follow me for an additional 50 miles until I got to the next town. As soon as the police officer stopped tailing me, I pulled over and vomited from how nervous the whole ordeal had made me.

I learned a couple lessons from this tale that I can pass on:

1. Nevada sucks. Any state that legalizes brothels in an attempt to increase tourism has to be a terrible place.
2. Some cops are slippery, and like to dance like Fred Astaire around our constitutional rights. Be careful.