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All my suspicions have been confirmed. That is - I love Amsterdam. As Ferris says, "It is sooooo choice. I highly recommend picking one up." I am cheating on Paris with Amsterdam.
I came here on a long weekend with another intern - the lovely, intelligent and very interesting Melissa Lindsey. We took the bus from Paris Thursday night and stayed in a Christian hostel in the red light district (yes, you read that correctly). Appropriately for us BYU girls, it did not have co-ed dorms. Fine with me, by all means. Boys, especially traveling boys, are extra smelly. Friday we (probably dangerously and to the great irritation of patient locals) took our rented bikes to explore the city, riding the wrong way on bike paths and stopping without warning on our way to the Rijksmuseum. My main purpose was to see the Vermeers, but I also enjoyed some of the other small-scale dutch paintings, the Mondrians and the Delftware. Also, they have a lot of Napoleon's belongings, including pistols he probably used during the disastrous battle of Waterloo. One thing I really liked about Rijksmuseum was the graphic unity of the whole place - whether old or new. The uniforms, the recessed-lighting signs to guide you, the atypical items available at the gift shop, the color scheme.
Amsterdam in general is really an arty kind of city, though markedly less obsessed with every item of daily life being made into a piece of fine art as in France. There are lots of art galleries with really bizarre to interesting pieces, a lot of it heavily influenced by street art. And there are LOTS of vintage shops and stores with one-of-a-kind or handmade items. In France, the fashion industry is so powerful and the top-down mentality where the big fashion houses lead the way is even present among young designers. I personally find French fashion both intriguing and a bit too high-pressure for me. The vibe in Amsterdam suited me better in that department. It's more off-beat and comfortable. In France, my favorite store is Cos, which I'm told is owned by Zara (I also love Zara). They have very simple, quirky stuff in solid colors - black, white, red, yellow, green and blue. Because I basically dress in lego colors! It's kind of like Mr. Rogers meets 60s-imagined space age. And I love almost everything in that store. But I like to wear stuff like that just by itself. Aside from a huge collection of scarves, I'm a bit too low maintenance to accessorize really well (though I started wearing lipstick recently!) and I like to wear the same stuff over and over without much variation. I don't like being super trendy and I don't like frilly. So I'm pretty sure style-wise Amsterdam is a better fit for me.
But I am going back to France tomorrow with a determination to dedicate my last month in Paris to getting much better at French, enriching my vocabulary, and seeing a bunch of things I haven't really taken the time to see yet, like the Musée D'Orsay and the Louvre... I know. I haven't been to the Louvre. More on that in another post. Enfin, I just have to ask myself as M. Sprenger always counsels me, "Qui me séduit?" The answer is at the moment, Amsterdam.
