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Panama, Read 3

He's back! PANAMA RED is back on top-form, adding his inimitable words of wisdom to a multitude of facets in everyday Dutch life. This week: WELCOME TO AMSTERDAM, BUFFY. It's good..

Tekst: Panama Red

Publicatiedatum: 28 mei 2001

"I love Europe. It's so...European." Overheard comment of American co-ed at Dam Square.

People here have very close realtionships with their bikes, called fietsen, god knows why. It's like saying people have very close relationships with their spouses. They love Žm, they hate Žm, whatever, but it's a really one on one kinda thing. People are absolutely in love with their bikes, as I was with my stately Maxwell, or they have an antagonistic sadomasochistic kind of thing going on; a situation where one or the other of them, rider or bike, has an intense passive-aggressive attitude toward the other. What I'm getting at here is that to the Amsterdammer the bike is one of the dysfunctional family...it's a situation that is hard to express to someone who hasn't actually had it be a way of their people. The closest I can come to is like the cowboy and his horse.

This week, because schools in the U.S. are letting out, there has been just a plethora, a shitload if you will, of American college kids having their EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE stumbling around Amsterdam... well not stumbling exactly, but not knowing when they're walking in the bike path. It's easy to understand: Europe is SO different that literally everything is foreign, so that the senses are assaulted by so much stimulus that there is not a single piece of reality from which the mind can build a construct - you psych majors or fellow members of Club Meds will understand what I'm saying, while you others can just chalk it up to a culture shock thang. But the point is they're in the way when you're tryin to cruise on your bike. The Amsterdam solution is for everybody to have a little bell on their bike, so that when the tourists are walking around going gol-lee at Amsterdam, you can kinda let them know you're coming up behind them, give Žm a little jingle-jingle on your bell...after a few brushes with death they learn to move over to their right.

A few months back, our family was hit with a typical Dutch tragedy: someone, some malicious, SMALL person, stole the bell from my daughter's bike. With the result that taking it out has become a hassle. If you don't have a bell a courteous small cough will not do the trick: you gotta be able to go jingle-jingle or the tourists will not respond in the proper Pavlovian fashion, and you'll end up braking all the time. Someone stole our bell, and though I've been meaning to get it replaced, it's just one of those small pains in the ass that you don't take care of and it just keeps on being more and more of a drag...it's a discouraging thing for a fietser in Amsterdam.

Tonight I took myself over to MaloeMelo, the hippest music bar in Amsterdam, on my daughter's bike, the one without the bell. The trip was okay, but I did have to do some fancy steering and stuff to avoid running over the Bambis and Buffies and Tylers and Travises on my way over. I really missed having the bell. But I got there early. Early enough to chain the bike in the approved figure-eight anti-junkie six-foot chain fashion to the downspout of the building. So that when I came out three hours later, my bike was buried in a sea of other bikes taking up the same limited space. Such that I had to gently of course move these other bikes to get at my own, an get it unlocked so I could be on my way.

Last digression: Bikes have long been central to Amsterdam life. Even today, the Dutch will spot a German and holler "Hey! Where's my bike?" and break up into spasms of insane laughter. This is because when the Germans occupied the Netherlands in WWII the first thing they did was confiscate the bikes. Which the Dutch never got back. And which they refuse to let the Germans up about.

During the 60's there was this group of Dutch hippie-politicos called the Provocateurs, or Provos for short, who hatched a brilliant-on-the-surface plan: they got a bunch of bikes and painted them white and then placed them at random places around the city. There were hundreds and hundreds of these bikes. The idea was that if you needed to go somewhere you'd just take a white bike and then when you got to where you were going, you'd just leave the bike there for someone else to take to where THEY were going. Like I say, brilliant. Well, it didn't take the junkies long to see the obvious. They just took the bikes and painted them a color other than white and sold them for ten bucks apiece. End of plan.

There was also another group, called the Kabouters. Kabouters are mythological(some say not) Dutch wood-elves or whatever. Carry a little tool belt around with them because they're always ready to fix stuff. Tweakers, I guess. But the Dutch love their bikes.

So after I get my daughter's bike dug out from these others and get it unlocked and put the other bikes back, I get on and I'm riding home and I realize that someone, some benevolent BIG person, or maybe a Kabouter, has, while I was in the club, installed a new bell on the handlebars, with as little explanation as when the original bell was stolen.

It is three am. I ride over the little humpback bridges through quiet streets seven hundred years old. I am blanketed in stillness. And every once in a while, to the slumbering comfort of Amsterdammers dreaming happy dreams of their bikes in the old houses on my course, I give a little jingle-jingle on my new bell.

Welcome to Amsterdam, Buffy.

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