Dad In Dutch

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

Dear Brittany and Ben:

I think you each would enjoy Amsterdam. For when we come here as a family next year, I am rehearsing my dad jokes. Don’t tell mom or you will get me in Dutch. Are you laughing?

As you keep insisting, no one enjoys my dad jokes more than me. A few of my friends—in my opinion the less discerning ones—claim that no one enjoys them at all.

A few evenings ago, I attended Europe's most acoustically perfect symphony concert hall, the Concertgebouw. There’s not a bad seat in the house. You might think that is neither ear nor there, but every orchestral note was clear, clean, pristine.

Following local custom, crisscrossing the city’s cobblestoned streets, I’ve eaten a lot of ‘walking food.’ Pickled herring from a street stand on the Plaza Spui is—hard to imagine—sweet. Like a sweet and sour taste. Flemish fries slathered with mayonnaise from Vlaams Friteshuis Vleminck are to die for. Gobbling and cobbling.

I’m housed at the Pulitzer Hotel. Tomorrow morning, sitting street-level at a window table, I will overeat (again) at the hotel’s bountiful breakfast buffet. In a city with more bicycles than cars, people-watching means bicycle-watching. Maybe, we can rent bikes for touring the city.

In the soft sunlight of this morning, today I ambled along a few of Amsterdam’s 62 miles of canals, 90 islands and 1500 bridges. If Athens instills a reverence for Western democracy and the Serengeti imbues a respect for Nature, then The Netherlands inspires optimism. What else is there to say about a people who built their nation below sea level?

After nightfall, I strolled the city’s famously legal—and safe—red light district. Women entrepreneurs in lingerie flimsier than Trump’s Big Lie display themselves behind red neon-lit picture windows. Blue-lit windows are for ‘women’ not born biologically female. For me—an lover of neon signage—the flashy, luminescent neon was sexier than the female flesh on offer.

The preponderance of women are independent, tax-paying small businesses. They enforce their own health and safety rules, set their own hours, negotiate rates to their liking and resent being called victims. I don’t judge, but someone needs to report to the Dutch consumer fraud bureau that the red-light district does not sell red lights.

Passing one dark entryway, a male voice from the shadows hissed, “Coke, mister?” I’ve watched enough crime dramas to know enough to reply, “No thanks, I’m a Pepsi man.”

An order of rijsttafel (rice table) at Moeders is my favorite meal in Amsterdam. Oddly, a wooden table crowded with ramekins over-portioned with stews, sausages and local specialties has everything, but rice. A poem:

A rice-less ‘rice table’

risibly ridiculous,

remarkable, radiant,

rich and rare.

Love, Dad 

Click here for more short stories set in The Netherlands.