May 6, 2012

Using boats for transport in the canals of Amsterdam

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:18 am

Bright reports about an inner city shipping company that uses an actual ship in Amsterdam.

The electronic freighter of Mokum Mariteam, the magazine writes, “replaces five trucks, and is quieter and cleaner.” (The company’s estimate is more conservative: “a boat of 20 by 4.25 metres, [and a] nett volume […] of 85 cubic metres (four compact trucks)”.) The batteries can power the boat for an entire day.

The canals of Amsterdam were dug originally at least partly for transport, but that function seems to have fallen into disuse, until recently. Bright adds that German logistics company DHL (originally American) has been using a canal boat for delivering packages “for years”. (Since October 1997, Binnenvaart.nl adds.)

The text on the side of the City Supplier, ‘vracht door de gracht’, simply means ‘freight through the canal’. The word ‘Mokum’ in the company name refers to the Yiddish name for Amsterdam, Mokum (Alef), literally meaning ‘city A’.

(Photo: Mokum Mariteam)

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April 27, 2012

Weed pass kicks in 1 May, for NL residents only

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 3:41 pm

Some 19 coffee shops and several interest groups went to court to fight the government’s plan to introduce a ‘weed pass’ to prevent foreigners (actually, non-residents of the Netherlands) to buy marijuana at coffee shops and lost. The weed pass will come into force on 1 May in the southern provinces and eventually be rolled out throughout the country. The lawyers representing the coffee shops plan to appeal the decision, and even the Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard Van der Laan is opposed to the pass and wants to work out a compromise.

Besides the fact that coffee shops in big cities are major tourist attractions, they felt they were being forced to discriminate against certain clients, as a weed pass can only be obtained in the city where one resides. Collecting personal information about clients brings up a lot of privacy issues as well.

The original plan was to stop drug tourism in border regions like in Maastricht, but that doesn’t apply at all to cities like Amsterdam. Coffee shops will basically become private clubs with membership open only to Dutch residents and limited to 2,000 per shop.

Discriminating between EU citizens on the basis of where they live is apparently illegal, making coffee shop owners responsible for drug enforcement sound like a burden, and who’s to stop me for going into a coffee shop and buying joints for somebody else? I don’t see the point of this, besides the government owning a database of people who smoke marijuana. I think drug dealers will make a small fortune selling bad quality weed to tourists and I don’t see how that looks like stopping criminality.

In the mean time, the people who can’t be bothered to get a pass down south will buy their drugs up north or start growing more of their own, which is perfectly OK as long as it’s limited to a few plants.

And for the record, smoking marijuana is illegal in the Netherlands, but it is tolerated.

Here’s a famous Dutch song about ‘nederwiet’ (Dutch weed) by megastars Doe Maar:

(Links: www.coffeeshopnieuws.nl, www.nu.nl, Photo of Joint by Torben Bjørn Hansen, some rights reserved)

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April 5, 2012

Love padlock bridge spotted in Amsterdam

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 1:35 pm

In Paris, the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine is well known for its huge collection of padlocks that adorn the sides of the bridge, left by couples in love as an urban equivalent of carving your initials into a tree. And since international trends usually find their way to Amsterdam, a bridge on the Kloveniersburgwal downtown has started its own collection of love padlocks.

Unfortunately, many trends are not always adopted with the same spirit in which they came. What could be a lovely, new local tradition has already hit newspaper Metro as a tolerated public annoyance at best. “If those padlocks get in the way, we’ll take the necessary measures to remove them”, a spokesperson for the city told the paper. It wouldn’t be the first time cities around the world have threatened to remove padlocks, as they probably do damage metal, look awful in some places and clash with their surroundings in others. However, a bit like love, the cities often cave in to public opinion.

Love padlocks and wish padlocks have been around for a while, and have no definite origin. It’s probably one of those trends that started simultaneously in several countries because we’re all human after all.

UPDATE: In May 2012 all the padlocks had been removed.

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February 13, 2012

Gliding along Amsterdam’s frozen canals

Filed under: Film by Branko Collin @ 6:34 pm

Somebody called Typevideos posted this beautiful little film of the citizens of Amsterdam enjoying the frozen canals on their skates on YouTube:

See also: Dutch Winter (video).

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February 12, 2012

‘Street comber’ Krista Peeters makes one piece of art out of garbage per day

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 10:33 am

Krista Peeters calls herself the straatjutter, the ‘street comber’, and every day she makes one small art piece of stuff she finds on the street.

She keeps track of where her finds come from. The piece shown here is called ‘Why, thank you, they’re lovely! Let me get a vase…’, and was created from garbage found on 10 February 2012 on the Dapperstraat in Amsterdam: fake grass, a plastic thingamajig, 3 buttons, a lamp holder, a thumbtack, a plastic cap, half a bike light, something technical, and a bent safety pin.

According to Bright the artist is currently looking for a place where she can exhibit a year’s worth of works by March.

See also: “On the beaches of Texel only left shoes are ever found” (about the Netherlands’ beach combing culture).

(Photo of Friday’s art work by Krista Peeters)

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February 9, 2012

Café ‘accused’ of playing gangsta rap to stay closed

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 3:59 pm

Last December, hiphop café De Duivel in Amsterdam had a shoot out where two people were wounded. Four suspects were arrested and the reasons for the violence were not confirmed, but I’m sure it’s all sorted by now.

Daniel Eeuwens, owner of the café, who just sent round a long explanation about how he is trying to reopen his café, is being stonewalled by the local police, although he’s been in talks with the city for weeks. The café was asked to come up with a serious plan to avoid any kind of future incidents, and so the café lawyered up and wrote a serious plan that the cops are now blocking.

The owner is particularly worried about what the cops are saying about his patrons, which is why he sent the letter round. The cops accused the café of sometimes playing gangsta rap and that attracts ‘a specific crowd’, which is code for ‘criminal-like people of the non white persuasion’. But come on, blaming a café for playing a song or two of gangsta rap, as if nobody else does that anywhere else, is not a reason to close a place down, it’s an excuse and a racist one at that.

I know for a fact that De Duivel played anything from old Ice-T tracks to the Jeugd van Tegenwoordig and had a mixed bag of visitors, mostly locals of different age groups, none of which ever made me feel like I was in the wrong place. People were very much chilling and swaying to all the low BPM music and singing along to the Dutch stuff.

Granted, I don’t really want to hang out in places that have shoot outs, but hey, there was a shoot out in front of my door last November, a lower middle class mixed neighbourhood, and I didn’t hear the police making any racist remarks about the neighbourhood.

Here’s some old Osdorp Posse with ‘Where is the cop’.

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December 12, 2011

Brabant accent the sexiest

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:45 am

Members of dating website Parship have voted the Brabant accent the sexiest, the site reported last month.

The Southern accents (Noord-Brabant and Limburg) are both characterized by ‘soft’ gs (both voiced and unvoiced) that are produced by pronouncing the g more forward in the mouth.

The accents from Limburg and Amsterdam ended second and third in the poll, with men preferring the former and women the latter. The Amsterdam accent is characterized amongst other by a tongue tip r and the devoicing of initial consonants: “de zon in the zee zien zakken” (to see the sun sink into the sea) becomes “de son in de see sien sakke”.

A sample of both the soft and the hard g can be heard in the suddenly prescient and salacious 2010 carnival hit song by Jos van Oss (Oss being a place in Brabant) Ik heb een zachte G, maar ook een harde L (I have a soft G, but also a hard D), in which the male singer sports a Southern G and the female singers have a hard G.

(Photo by Ali Nishan, some rights reserved)

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December 8, 2011

Aggressive partners get free hotel stay in Amsterdam

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:48 am

Men (or women technically, although statistically men) who beat their wives and kids get a free hotel stay in Amsterdam thanks to the law of the temporary restraining order. (The English and French translations are a sloppy read, I bet the rest is too.)

Last year Amsterdam spent about 66,000 euro on the hotels and cab rides of aggressive partners, but Amsterdam wants to put a stop to it. Municipalities are not obliged to pay for these expensive stays by law, but it did make it easier to remove someone from their home for the 10 days of the restraining order.

Remember, this is a country where just last year a national government advert suggested battered women just talk it out with their aggressive partners and where in 2010, it was the only member country whose domestic violence phone help lines were not free to call.

In a time of serious cost cutting, other big cities will probably follow suit. I don’t see why we should provide anything to abusers but psychological help.

(Link: www.telegraaf.nl)

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December 5, 2011

Bollards transformed into road-side stools by Jihyun David

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 9:25 am

The streets of Amsterdam are lined with steel bollards called Amsterdammertjes, Little Amsterdammers. They are there to deter people from parking on the sidewalk, and the city is thinking of taking them out. We have got other ways to deter people from parking, they say, and they mean they have ways of ticketing people using electronics so that parking becomes something the affluent can use to force the less well-off from the pavement.

The designers of Jihyun David thought of another use of the bollards, and have covered several (for the time being) with bicycle seats, and a metal ring that makes it easier to rest your feet. You can find them at the bridge between Keizersgracht and Leliegracht.

(Link: Popup City. Photo: Jihyun David)

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November 8, 2011

My name is Cohen at Jewish Historical Museum

Filed under: History,Photography by Orangemaster @ 12:46 pm
annefrankstatue1.jpg

Starting on 25 November 2011, Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum will feature the exhibition ‘Mijn naam is Cohen’ (‘My name is Cohen’), a series of portraits made by Amsterdam photographer Daniel Cohen with texts by unrelated Editor-in-Chief of magazine Vrij Nederland, Mischa Cohen.

They got together and found 25 people with the same last name, but of different generations, backgrounds, gender, views, Jewish and non-Jewish. Former mayor and politician Job Cohen is mentioned as is journalist Jisca Cohen thanks in part to whom I got to meet Daniel Cohen (unrelated to each other) and found out about his project first hand. I also know he plays a good game of football.

The quick and dirty version is that Amsterdam (aka Mokum, its Jewish name still very much in use by everyone) had lots of Jews and today for Holocaust reasons has very few.

(The picture of Anne Frank, the most ‘popular’ Jewish figure of Amsterdam who was German and not Dutch.)

(Link: www.jhm.nl)

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