Bridges and Broodjes

I woke up later than usual, and Zach suggested we ride up towards the city to try out a café he was interested in. I’m always up for baked goods!

But first, Yoshi needed snacks:

Zach said he had a favorite bike route for the first couple of miles, and then we’d just wing it. I followed his lead.

Along the way we passed many people, and none of them reacted to the recumbent. Overall I’d noticed a strange lack of curiosity in the Dutch about this bicycle, even though it was obviously very rare. In all my riding so far in this bike-obsessed nation I hadn’t seen a single other recumbent, long or short or tricycle-shaped.

While Zach and I waited at a corner, one child – maybe about eight years old – stared and pointed at the recumbent and said “Woaa!” Eureka!

I was so surprised I told Zach. “Amazing!” I said. “One single child has not had all the desire to publicly express curiosity squeezed out of them!”

Zach: “Sometimes, one is enough.”

We laughed and cycled on.

Ten minutes later as we were crossing a bridge, I saw a guy sitting on his recumbent tricycle. Another milestone! There is at least one other recumbent rider in this city!

Soon we reached Layers Bakery & Deli.

The menu was nicely eccentric, and everything we got was brain-meltingly good.

Zach and I ate and chatted. I fawned over the pastries. I was expecting food to be good in the Netherlands but this bakery raised the bar.

“Do you think all the ingredients are local?” I asked.

Zach nodded. “Of course. The Netherlands grows a lot of food. A lot. The country is actually one of the largest exporters of food in the world. It’s like, third after the entire US and China or something.”

“What, really?” I said. “This little place?”

“I know; it’s kind of hard to believe. But the internet doesn’t lie, am I right?” He laughed.

Later in the evening I couldn’t help digging into this, and Zach was right. The Netherlands is a massive exporter of food, especially dairy products. One might be inclined to say “so what?” because if the country is relatively small, it must have a relatively small population to feed, leaving more production available for export. In the USA for example there are some massively productive states, but they feed the population in the less productive ones, driving down the international export numbers. But what’s amazing is, the Netherlands is actually massively productive in absolute numbers, not just relative consumption.

To get some perspective on this as an American, I dug up some recent statistics comparing the Netherlands to what we Americans consider a super-productive dairy-focused (and similarly flat) state, Wisconsin.

What does all this mean?  Even though The Netherlands is only one quarter of the land area of Wisconsin, it produces 2/3 as much cheese and butter, the same amount of milk for drinking, and 5 times more eggs.  That’s astonishing. And this is the dairy industry; the numbers for farming are even better.

(How this compares to exports is a little complicated, because both The Netherlands and Wisconsin export most of their local production, while at the same time they import some of the same products from elsewhere for their local consumption.)

What’s their secret?  Well, aside from the inherent advantages of very fertile and farmable land, they are highly organized about it.  Check out this report from 2023, “Dutch Dairy In Figures“…

While we ate, I got more detail about Zach’s decision to move to the Netherlands, effectively cutting ties with the USA. It was the kind of move that many of our friends were talking about – even dreaming about – but Zach and Michael had actually done it. There were some common motivations we all shared, mostly these:

• Being fed up with so-called “conservative” values infecting politics and culture.
• Distaste for America’s completely automobile-focused way of living.
• An impending sense of economic and even social collapse.

Before moving, Zach had lived in Portland for decades and that city was experiencing a sharp decline in quality of life. A lot of things he loved about the culture had been stomped down by changes in the cost of living, as local people who contributed to the vibrant nature of the city were priced out by newcomers speculating on real-estate, who then competed madly for jobs that would pay their mortgages, failed to find them, and were also forced to leave. The widening economic disparity cranked up the drug and homelessness problem to shocking levels and Portland’s very tolerant, well-meaning attitude towards encampments and open-air drug markets on public land in the middle of urban spaces made the problem hugely visible but did not actually do anything to address the causes, because that would have required much more money – and social cohesion – than the taxpayers wanted to spare.

This sort of thing has been happening to urban centers all over the USA. Tax revenue is getting hollowed out by the rise in remote work post-COVID, and is declining further as low-income white-collar jobs are being dissolved by AI software like the steel hull of a boat rusting in the sea. Many cities can’t cope and don’t know what to even try. Me and my friends are the lucky ones: Our skills are still mostly in demand, and we’re mobile enough to try living somewhere else.

So I asked Zach: Was it working for him?

“Well,” he said, “to be honest, we really should have done more research on living expenses before we moved, because the Netherlands has one of the highest costs of living in the world. But we were just so burned out, and tired of Portland. We had to try something else. And if this doesn’t work out, we’ve still done something important: We proved it’s possible. The bureaucracy is kind of insane, but we got here, and if we want to try living somewhere completely different a year from now, we know we can make that happen.”

It made me thoughtful. Would I ever want to leave the USA entirely? If not forever, then for a couple of years?

We finished up our snacks and Zach boxed a few things for Michael. He rode south, and I rode north to explore more of Amsterdam.

I hung out next to a cool ceramic store for a while. So many fun things to point the camera at!

Lots of menus had a “broodje” section. Every time I saw the word I thought of my Mom, wandering around here 55 years ago, pointing at things.

I blundered into the tulip market and spent a while sneaking photographs.

Like my brief visit here years ago, I was enchanted by the way the canals were integrated with the rest of the transport system in the city. I think the most amusing variation I saw was an old barge being used as floating storage space for parked bicycles.

The open square near the city center looked the same, though this time there was no grim reaper posing for photographs with the tourists.

I didn’t really have a social connection to the city, and if I was choosing a place to live I think I would want something with more parks and hills, but as a visitor I couldn’t get enough of the architecture. The crammed-together nature of the buildings, like old books on a shelf, was a feast for the eyes.

Aah, the train station. I would soon be going in here, to catch a train headed into Germany. I scoped the place out.

Eventually my jet-lag caught me again, and I headed for the safety of the apartment. Zach and Michael welcomed me.

Zach and I got to talking about music, then video games. After dinner we fired up a game on the Switch and played it together on the television. That turned into a four-hour gaming marathon and we were up very late. Just like old times!