Amsterdam, the hell - Amsterdam, the heaven

The last months there's been several news articles claiming that Amsterdam has a tourist problem: there are too many of them and they are now searching how to become less successful.

Indeed I hate the city center of Amsterdam because of

  • It's hords of people, mostly tourists filling every corner, making it very hard/impossible to progress anywhere without bumping into people. According to the news, they become a security issue.
    The fact that there's also big groups of tourists on bike tours, while they clearly don't know how to ride a bike properly, definitely not in the busy center traffic is very unsafe too.
  • The sweet piss smell of cannabis that seems to be omnipresent in the tourist sites. If your city center hotel room needs to publish warnings in the rooms that you can't blow in the room, there's an issue. 
  • The abundance of crappy tourist stores selling endless "AMSTERDAM" toques, plastic clogs, marihuana T-shirt prints and fake tulips, ...The many cheese stores that only sell bolls of Gouda type of cheeses as if that's the most innovative cheese range you can have (and tourists that block the door taking pictures)...
  • Horeca that is limited to mediocre Argentinian steak houses, Italians or endless low budget snackbars with bad service and limited unimaginative menu choices
  • Tourist trap musea like "The Amsterdam horror museum", the Sex Museum, ...
  • Endless lines for qualitative museums like the Anne Frank House, the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, ...
  • Foreigners on the trams not understanding/listening to the instructions of the drivers to move forward and make place for the other people that want to get on
  • Lack of payable parking
  • Not much green space in the city center


Yet is is and remains a gorgeous city with
  • The high beauty of the grachten in all seasons if you manage to get out of the most popular busy streets
  • Beautiful buildings
  • A great variaty of world class museums like the Rijksmuseum, the Hermitage Amsterdam, The Van Gogh Musuem, Stedelijk Museum, the Rembrandthuis, Holocaustmuseum,...
  • The more residential area's of Oud-Zuid that have real culinary gems. 
  • Walkable distances
  • Good public transport (=> so park on the outside of the city and use the public transport to get in the city center)
  • New fun development across het Ij (with free ferry rides)
  • Markets
  • Attractive parks outside of the main grachten (Vondelpark, Westerpark)




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