I first made the railway journey from Copenhagen to Amsterdam in 1974. Given my ridiculously good memory powers, it has been a source of concern to me for some time that I can remember very little about that journey. A final jog of the memory the other day persuaded me that it was the overnight train, but why take a train journey if you cannot see anything? I tried repeating the same journey in the daytime in 2001, and found myself stuck overnight in a 2-star hotel in Osnabrück (well, I have known a lot worse), as I could not get a connecting train.
So - the Netherlands. First comment, as a colleague politely reminded me when I was working in Uithoorn in 1997, "Amsterdam is not the Netherlands, only its capital". When you have worked in places like Eindhoven and Nijmegen, that is easily confirmed. The mistrust between provinces and capital city I should know only too well, coming as I do from the North of England originally (and finding a polite word for London and Londoners is still not too easy).
Second comment - unlike the countries previously examined, I have actually lived in the Netherlands. Nine years, spread over three separate stays, eight and a half of those years in Amsterdam (so maybe I was not, according to my former colleague, actually in the Netherlands at all (!)), and six months in Maarssen.
Anyway after Denmark, which was difficult to stereotype, we come to a country which is notoriously given to clichés. Windmills, canals, cheese, bulb-fields .... and drugs and prostitution (particularly the Walletjes - the Amsterdam Red Lights District (ARLD)).
Well tourists will come in every so often to check out the windmills, the canals, the bulb-fields, and the manufacture and sales of the cheese. Meanwhile if you want misconceptions, check out the drugs and prostitution side of things.
First point on drugs. Partaking of soft drugs like cannabis is not "legal"! Such substances are "decriminalised". It makes not a ha'porth of difference in the long-term, but it is well worth noting that the Dutch police do once in a while seize large cargoes of imported marijuana - check out the events with former Dutch Godfather of crime, Klaas Bruinsma.
Second point on drugs - smoking them on the street is, in fact, illegal. You have to be in a registered coffee shop to partake. Gradually the laws on this are being tightened. A few years ago they made one attempt at this, particularly trying to prevent foreigners coming to country to try out what was available. Now a second attempt is being made to restrict the amount available to local people.
Third point on drugs - heroin, cocaine, crack, ecstasy are all banned, the police will prosecute anyone trying to sell them, and will close down any establishment where these items are sold.
Conclusion on drugs - it is not quite as liberal or laissez-faire as you imagined!
Harking back to the police closing establishment brings us neatly on to the subject of prostitution.
This is another area that was not "legal", but "decriminalised" for years. It is always a shock for many people visiting the country to discover that in fact legalised brothels exist in the country since only 2002 or 2003 (the exact date escapes me - but, yes, it is that recent).
The Dutch police apparently have the right to close down establishments which are connected with organised crime. It is fascinating that in a country with so much respect for science and logic, that it took the authorities so long to link the worlds of organised crime and prostitution together!
For years more or less anything was allowed. The upmarket brothel "Yab Yum", frequented by the aforementioned Klaas Bruinsma and his cohorts, was finally closed in 2008 due to its links with the criminal underworld - all well and good, but remember that Bruinsma was shot to death outside the Amsterdam Hilton in 1991!
Meanwhile the wonderful myth about all girls working willingly without obligation on the ARLD (no trafficking here, nudge, nudge, wink, wink) was maintained for a very long time. If all of the girls working there had been Dutch, then you might possibly have been able to accept that logic.
As it is the last estimated figure that I saw for this was 43%. The rest (from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, South-East Asia, Eastern Europe, even Israel) just happened to be there as they had heard that they could happily practise their trade there, and came all that way as business would be so good, and they could make plenty of the proverbial brass (OK, to digress here, I read one story in the local press in the North-West of England in the 1980s of a local English girl who ran away to Amsterdam to do that "job" for that very reason! Probably the exception that proves the rule though).
This though is plausible? Really?
A documentary that I saw on the BBC in the 1990s, covering the activities of a gang from Rotterdam in the Dominican Republic, suggested otherwise.
Amsterdam's former crusading mayor, Job Cohen, finally decided that the relationship between the ARLD and organised crime had to be broken. As a result in the past few years, a large number of "windows" in the ARLD no longer offer ladies of the night, but rather designer jewellery and clothing to interested passers-by!
This takes some believing, and I personally think that potential purchasers would really prefer more salubrious neighbourhoods for their shopping expeditions, but that is how events are panning out in the Walletjes, even after the departure of Meneer Cohen for a more significant place in Dutch politics.
The Netherlands is changing. Its longstanding political liberalism is giving way to a greater degree of pragmatism, maybe forced upon it by an ageing population and a low birthrate. It is facing tensions that it avoided for years with its immigrant community, and the rise of so-called populist politicians like Geert Wilders is also serving to fan the flames. Some of the clichés still work, but times are definitely changing.
Given my fond memories of the time that I spent living there, and some of the amazing people with whom I worked, I hope that the changes do not prove too painful, and that it can maintain in these difficult times its traditional attitudes and values.
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