Up in the morning and a hotel breakfast sitting near the tv murmuring news from the U.S. through assorted CNN talking heads. Whatever happened to Ashley Banfield? She had the total “hot librarian” thing going with the glasses and the blunt cut hair. Oh well. And now that Wolf Blitzer has shaved his beard I don’t know who is who anymore on CNN.

I decided to ignore the tube, and think about where I had come to on this trip. It took no time at all to asses Amsterdam as a paradox; an ancient city whose denizens are cutting edge modern, progressive and forward leaning. Youth is celebrated, encouraged, to some extent tolerated, And always accepted. So is old age, and people from other cultures, and the LGBT community. Everyone is accepted here. People from all over Europe come here to live, and work and become part of Dutch society. Just as in Paris, a persons skin color is not the key criteria for how they are judged. It seems that the substance of a person is what interests folks around here, not the appearance.

Once fortified I was out on the street exploring. After seeing the red light tour group the night before I figured a tour of the city would be just the thing. Wandered back to the train station and found this total Tourist double tour bus deal that sparked a regular run so you can jump off and see a particular sight and then catch the next bus to continue. I bought my ticket on the bus from this very festive and flamboyant Spanish guy named Leo. He sported a beautifully knotted silk tie that kinda looked like Monets water lilies. (The knot was so tiny and so tight that it had to be silk.) His tour guide vest looked like it had been tailored as it fit him rather well. You might say that Leo was one dapper little guy. He welcomed me aboard and handed me a set of earbuds to hear the tour and a small map of Amsterdam, “just in case”. It looked better than the place Mat I had been using so I was already ahead of the game, or so I thought.

I found a seat on the top deck. My fellow travelers looked to be from near and far, there were several couples who looked to be from the Middle East, the women wearing hijabs made from handsome fabrics of muted blue grey. There was a ruddy faced couple, both blonde and bespectacled and wearing matching Manchester United sweatshirts. The largest group must have been from Spain, as they were all chatting animatedly in Spanish, and their mode of dress suggested that they just weren’t from any of the Americas. I plugged in my earbuds at the panel adjacent to my seat and dialed to the English version of the tour. Sure enough what I hear is a smoky voiced English woman advising us that we could hop on or off the bus any time but to keep our seat belts fastened all the same. Her vocal tone and SQ (smokiness quotient) were identical to that of the Air France announcement woman, and the Louvre tour guide. As I fastened my seatbelt (seat belts on a bus…cool) I began to wonder if there was one, multilingual woman out there with a corner on all this voice over work

The bus pulled out of Amsterdam Central station with a smoky voiced promise that we were about to see “the wonders of Amsterdam”. We went by the Royal Palace and in a few minutes things started to slip. We stopped at a traffic light a d sat for a long time. I kept expecting my new girlfriend to murmur To me through the earbuds about how the Netherlands had once been a world trade capital, or perhaps drop a few pithy facts about the peasants of Medieval Brabant. But no, she was silent and we continued to sit. The traffic light went red, then green, then red again and still we sat. Kudos to the Dutch on this moment, nobody honked their horn, everyone waited patiently, except for the hundreds and hundreds Dutch citizens who just barreled On by on their bikes. Everybody rides a bike in Amsterdam. The city is flat, and predates the invention I’d the automobile, so there is almost no place to park, so it is all about bicycles. And make no mistake about it, the Dutch love their bikes, and I think they like giving the finger to the oil barons. With that gesture of petro contempt comes a feeling of entitlement, which is to say that, if a fellow citizen on foot stumbles into the bike lane, they feel entitled to run him down.
“”Suddenly, from somewhere On the first deck cat three very loud metallic sounds like,
THUNK,
THUNK,
THUNK,
And the big red double-decker lurched forward. The tour was back on track…until the next time we stopped, and to get going again required six THUNKS. We held steady at six thunks per stop for several stops. When six thunks no longer sufficed Leo came up from the lower deck and announced, in English, Spanish, Dutch and two other languages I did not recognize,
“Ladies and gentlemen we are having technical difficulties with the bus, we will make you more updated in a few moments.” Leo went back below and the sexy English tour voice told us that our next official stop would put use very near the Van Gogh museum. I reckoned we were only 8 thunks away from something I really wanted to see. Actually it took us 10 thunks and as a big bunch of us bolted from the limping tour bus I heard one of the Spaniards say something that included the words “ratons” and “Titanic”. Even the ladies in their Hijabs laughed at that one.