Back to Amsterdam
I made the mistake of telling my students I was going to Amsterdam for the weekend. “Ooooohhhhh”, they all shouted. They know — or think they know — what goes on there. “Come on, guys, there’s other stuff in Amsterdam!” I told them. And this during a lesson that started with a listening task about Vincent van Gogh. I pointed to his picture in the textbook. “As a matter of fact, I’m going to visit the van Gogh museum,” I said, not even sure if there is a van Gogh museum. “And what are you gonna do before that?” someone called out from the back, which set everyone off again. One student asked if I could bring him back some “cakes”. Another asked if I was planning on visiting the red light district. A solid no to both questions; I didn’t want to give them any ideas even though the reality lies somewhere between what the students think and what I tell them. They don’t know much about me but they know I’m not going to the Netherlands to look at windmills.
I did make it to the red light district, in fact. But it was 5pm and things were a long way off being in full swing. Most of the prostitutes were on their phones. A few promoters and groups of British tourists were out by the canal trying to get the vibe going but most people were just passing through to say they’d passed through.
We also passed by the humanities faculty of the University of Amsterdam. I started a master’s degree there in comparative literature, but dropped out after a week. My first class was a minor in renaissance esotericism; as an ice-breaker the professor told us to introduce ourselves to our partners and tell them our star sign, moon sign and rising sign. The whole class began chatting excitedly and I, wondering what the hell a rising sign was, started to think that this might not be my thing.
To make it worse, I couldn’t find a flat that was either bigger than 8m2 or less than €900 a month. I ended up moving in with some friends in Maastricht, where I’d spent five years as an undergrad, and arranging to commute to Amsterdam for the two days a week I had classes. The whole thing felt off — wrong time, wrong course, wrong frame of mind. I’d spent the summer teaching ESL and decided I preferred being at the front of the class to the back. The problem then was that Dutch people speak damn-near flawless English. An ESL teacher looking to make a living there is faced with a frighteningly shallow pool of potential clients. I went back to washing dishes to pay the rent and became depressed that my life had stalled again. That was the mindset in which I left the Netherlands and, perhaps in a small way, part of the reason I didn’t go back for almost four years. And even though it didn’t feel quite like going “home”, as I’d expected it to feel, I won’t leave it so long before the next time.
