Our first video report. It’s got a few glitches as we are trying to get used to a new medium. Enjoy.
Today Sail Amsterdam 2010 started with the traditional parade of tall ships. Led by the clipper Stad Amsterdam, 30 tall ships and a lot of small boats entered IJ harbour, which is wedged between Java Island and Piet Heinkade.
Sail Amsterdam was first organised in 1975 and has since been held every five years. The festivities will continue for the next three days, and include live music and theatre. On Friday a parade of barely floating home-built boats will be held in the canals of Amsterdam, the so-called Pieremachocheltocht. Most of the tall ships can be visited for free between 10 am and 4 pm.
This year’s event drew criticism from ship owners, who feel they have to pay the organisers too much money. They think it is wrong that so much of the proceeds of an event that is heavily sponsored by the government disappear in the pockets of a nebulous agency, Sail Arrangementen. The latter replied in newspaper De Pers that they do not understand what all the hoopla is about, as the ships’ owners still sell a lot of tickets.
Filed under: Photography by Branko Collin @ 8:00 am
Meet Amsterdam.
Perhaps all cities have photobloggers, but if that is the case, I seem to have missed them. However, the documentary photographers of Amsterdam pop up on my radar all the time. These men—always men?—aim to bring you at least one portrait of the city a day, slowly recording its history in extreme close-up.
Thomas Schlijper is perhaps their leader. A professional photographer, he nevertheless seems to find plenty of time for photographs taken just for fun. Shown here a fountain on Frederiksplein at dusk, and somebody else trying to capture the moment.
Marien van Os wants to become a better photographer, so he practises by publishing (at least) one photo a day at 1pictureaday.com. In this photo a heron stalks a fisherman on the Amstel river, waiting till the right moment.
This photo is by René Louman who often just leans out of his window to take a picture. I approve of this, because it would be a shame to waste a good window. Louman likes people. I don’t know exactly where this photo of a waitress wrestling a huge parasol was taken, but with all the fresh brick in Louman’s photos, I would guess the Oostelijk Havengebied (Eastern Harbour).
A friend over at Time Out magazine said that the Amsterdam Tourism and Congress Bureau (ATCB) was “digging their own gay grave” as they pulled the cover of the magazine sold in their tourist shops (VVV) because it portrays two men kissing. According to Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool, the ATCB had a problem with this illustration.
The ATCB explains that the VVV ‘took out’ the cover as per their monthly agreement with the magazine because it was ‘too edgy’ and ‘not suitable for tourists’. Time Out doesn’t have a problem with the decision because it does not affect them financially or otherwise, but many people including the media see it as a highly questionable, possibly anti-gay decision.
It’s too bad some people think the 1.5 million tourists that come to Amsterdam for things like drugs, prostitutes and the gay scene would all of a sudden have problems with gay men. Let the tourists think for themselves, statistically 10% of them are gay too.
The appointment fits right into the city government’s fantasies of turning the city into Anton Pieck‘s wet dream. A group critical of—and therefore silenced by—the municipality, pointed to the damning example of staid Bruges in Belgium earlier.
Publicist Rogier van Kralingen told Radio Netherlands: “People don’t visit Amsterdam just because it gives them a flavour of the past, but because it has a strong spirit of freedom. The city has an open-hearted, liberal feel to it. If a city wants to create a good environment for its residents and international businesses – which, let’s face it, will have to provide most of our income – you need to maintain a healthy balance between tourism, recreation and people’s freedom to do what they want.”
An entire year after having been commissioned by the City of Amsterdam, a wall graffiti with annexed garden downtown on the Prinsengracht by The London Police apparently has to be painted over, as it doesn’t ‘embellish’ the area of downtown Amsterdam it is in. Nonsense!
Seasoned Amsterdam residents know that this bit of nannyism is bureaucrat code for ‘we’re still trying to get Amsterdam on the Unesco list and this probably won’t help’.
Why was it put up in the first place? Why take one year to devalue something you’ve ordered? Who complained about it? Does it have something to do with Amsterdam’s new, slightly more conservative mayor Eberhard van der Laan? Was someone bored at work?
Funny, Miami, New York, Munich and other big cities around the world have no problems with their London Police wall graffiti at all.
As I write this, some 500,000 people are currently not at work and partying with the Dutch football team back from South Africa at the Museumplein in Amsterdam almost like they actually won the World Cup. The team first took a boat tour through Amsterdam’s canals and I can see them drinking beer and dancing to our beloved techno-trance music on telly.
Why bother when your team has lost? Because getting that far in the World Cup feels like a win. Because it was planned in case we won, and hey, people want to party. Because it’s summer and nobody really wants to be working.
Because the newly elected goverment can’t agree on a coaltion formation, meaning we have no government at the moment and therefore, not too much news.
Here’s what it looked like in 1988 when the Dutch won the European Cup:
IBM just published a survey they did called the Commuter Pain Index, which measured how bad traffic actually is in major cities around the globe. Lo and behold, it’s not as bad in the Netherlands as we thought. It always sucks to be in traffic, but hey, the Netherlands has not yet heard of flexible working hours – I kid you not.
My dad use to have to travel from the South shore of Montréal to the island of Montréal. That meant taking a tunnel or one of the many bridges. My dad left to go to work around 6 am with light traffic to get to work at 7 am, work his 8 hours and head home on an almost empty road. By working those hours, he didn’t spend his last working years in traffic. And Montréal has less traffic than Amsterdam. Coincidence?
On a list of 20 major cities around the globe, Amsterdam, with its congested A10 ring road, comes in quietly at 13.
Here’s the list:
1. Beijing
2. Mexico City
3. Johannesburg
4. Moscow (I’ve seen this in 35 degree weather, it’s insane)
5. New Delhi
6. Sao Paolo
7. Milan
8. Buenos Aires
9. Madrid
10. London (scary but calm enough)
11. Paris (1 km took 1.5 hours last Christmas)
12. Toronto (nasty, all those 4-5 lane highways)
13. Amsterdam (it feels worse than it is)
14. Los Angeles
15. Berlin (not that bad, but that was once)
16. Montreal (avoid the Lafontaine Tunnel!)
17. New York (avoid the Holland Tunnel!)
18. Houston
19. Melbourne
20. Stockholm
That was only one game, of course, but it seemed to bring into focus what I had been observing at the Ajax youth academy, as well as learning about American soccer. How the US develops its most promising young players is not just different from what the Netherlands and most elite soccer nations do — on fundamental levels, it is diametrically opposed.
Americans like to put together teams, even at Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the US struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type. Americans tend to think of Europeans as collectivists and themselves as individualists. But in sports, it is the opposite. The Europeans build up the assets of individual players. Americans underdevelop the individual, although most of the volunteers who coach at the youngest level would not be cognizant of that.
A very interesting read, even though (or perhaps because of) the author at times keeps a lot of distance from what he essentially describes as something close to modern slavery.
(Photo by Patrick de Laive, some rights reserved. Shown here are Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart in national garb. Both players rose through the ranks of the Ajax youth academy to become world stars. Link: Eamelje.net.)
Public service employees in the Netherlands face aggression and violence on the streets more and more often. Onlookers unfortunately do not intervene often enough when they encounter a situation like this. A live interactive billboard in Amsterdam and Rotterdam is used to place people in a similar situation witch confronts them with their inactivity.
This huge billboard has been placed on the Rembrandtplein in Amsterdam recently, an area with many bars and cafés that are busy and very populated. According to many media reports, there has been an increase of violence against public service employees such as tram and bus drivers, but also, as shown in the film, paramedics.
I think it’s safe to say that many people do not know what to do when they are confronted with violence besides calling the emergency number 112 and/or running away. Intervening physically or verbally will get you hurt, as there have been enough stabbings and deaths related to trying to stop violence. It’s also much easier to snap a picture with your mobile phone, but no one wants to get caught doing that if their flash goes off.
Yes, it is sad that people have been known to do nothing, but again, although I have intervened and called 112, I wouldn’t do it either if I were to get beaten for it.
Queen’s Day in Amsterdam’s West and Old South districts was not too crowded and full of excellent finds on the outdoor market. I thought people were a tad friendlier than usually, it could be this crisis is bringing us a bit closer, who knows. It was also nice to run into friends as well, some selling, some buying and some joining us for food and drinks.
Although it was a bit rainy during the day and cold (10 degrees when the day before was 20), the sun finally popped out and 24oranges went out to enjoy the day and prepare our annual Queen’s Day photo report. First, the lady at the bakery pointed out that the Dutch eclair-like cakes as well as her ‘tompouces’ here above were made by hand.
The city’s major park, Vondelpark, is traditionally overrun by children selling and buying as well as playing music for coins and doing tricks and the likes. And after years of watching hordes wear those inflatable crowns, I finally walked by the people on the street of the lottery company who hands these things out and scored me one too.
Although quickly pointed out as a traditional Dutch game, sjoelbak is apparently of British origin, but the Dutch have their own take on it.
There were people selling all kinds of stuff: the usual houselhold knickknacks, darkroom equipment, clothes, records, books, you name it. And that’s still not the best part. At the end of the day, people place a lot of unsold items on the kerb for rubbish and then it’s free digging time, which can even be better than the stuff you bought during the day.
We saved some LPs and books from destruction this year and we noticed that so much was properly cleaned up, due to the city’s street cleaners’ strike. Maybe that has do to the classier neighbourhoods we were in as well.
In this last picture of women checking out handbags, you can play spot the 24oranges blogger.
Amsterdam’s city hall scored a major victory in the War on Fun today when 
That was only one game, of course, but it seemed to bring into focus what I had been observing at the Ajax youth academy, as well as learning about American soccer. How the US develops its most promising young players is not just different from what the Netherlands and most elite soccer nations do — on fundamental levels, it is diametrically opposed.
