The Netherparts: How low country can you go?

For Easter, I visited the Netherlands. As I get older I care less and less about manufacturing experiences out of travel, am less often alone when I travel, and am despite my deadened aesthetic sensitivities more confident with age that I am seeing a place on my terms while still somehow submitting to it. So it was with the Netherlands, and here are my notes.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam was that it is overrun with Brits, and perhaps the best way to illustrate the Dutch character is in comparison to its neighbors. If Brexit was an impulse for people who complain about too many Poles living in their midst, then perhaps Amsterdam needs a counter-gesture (Brittenuit?) to close its airports to the flights leaving every three minutes from England's airports. Or maybe they, the locals, simply don't give a Dam.

The British there travel in packs, either in groups of twenty twenty-somethings or as pleasant families; their is no other deployment visible of Brits in Amsterdam. You don't see tour buses full of retirees, or romantic couples, or thirty+ sports tourists, for example. You either get prams, or Instagram (strollers or rollers?). It is not as if the twenty-somethings you see are on their best behavior. The only favor they would appear to do the city, besides filling its coffers with cash and its canals with upchuck, is that in comparison they make the Dutch seem so poised. Placing a British twenty-something tourist in Amsterdam, all dolled up and blinged out, next to a Dutch twenty-something local is like putting a donkey next to a thoroughbred, except that the donkey speaks a language you mostly recognize, and the thoroughbred speaks ... well, more on what the Dutch speak later.