(Friday, Sept. 25) Amsterdam, of course, shouldn’t be here, since it lies below sea level. But like Venice, Italy, enterprising Dutch drove millions of wooden (and later steel) pilings down through the mud and underlying peat layers into more “solid” ground and created a place to live. Space was, and is, at a premium, and property taxes were (at least historically) based in part on the width of buildings. As a result, you find many tall, skinny houses and commercial structures built alongside the canals; entry steps and interior stairways are often quite steep, with very narrow steps, almost like the “ladders” that serve as stairs on ships.
A sixty square meter (about 600 square foot) apartment is considered to be relatively spacious. Our hotel room, curiously enough, is quite large by European standards (probably double the size of the one we had in Munich), and it has a large bathroom (maybe three times as large as the one in our London hotel) with a full-sized tub/shower. On the other hand, the “WC” in some of the cafes we’ve eaten in, and which are in older buildings along the canals, are so small you almost have to stand on the edge of the toilet seat, drop your drawers, and their parachute down on to the seat, or leave to door open to undress enough to “do your business”, close the door, then open it again to get redressed. I thought that Amsterdamers were skinny because they either ride bikes or walk everywhere, but now I see that if you were obese, you’d have to leave town and go to Paris to use the toilette.
