Amsterdam 20 Years Later: Same Tracks, Tired Windows, Stronger Weed — and the Suspicion That the Party Moved to Berlin
In 2004, Amsterdam ended for me with a daytime train to Cologne. Twenty years later, Cologne was where Amsterdam began again. I was returning along the same railway corridor to a city I remembered well enough to miss, but perhaps not well enough to trust my memory of it. That made Amsterdam 20 Years Later more than a random detour. It was a test of what the city had kept, what it had lost and how much of either existed only in my head.
My New Year trip at the end of 2024 had begun with a fairly neat idea: make a full circle around Germany, mostly by train, and eventually close the loop back in Munich. I flew from Rijeka to Munich, continued through Nuremberg, Würzburg, Frankfurt, Cologne and Wuppertal, and still had Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig ahead. Amsterdam, obviously, had no business inside that circle. From Cologne, however, it was annoyingly close. The western detour would make Berlin a rather long ride away, so Hanover entered the itinerary to divide the journey into two more civilised pieces.
It was hardly an unknown city. I had first visited at the end of July 2004, still a student, and spent four full days there. I returned in 2019 while attending a mathematics conference in nearby Leiden. That visit was brief, but it gave me the first suspicion that the Amsterdam I remembered was changing. Five years later, one night seemed about right for a third look. I had no compulsory sights left to tick off and no intention of turning twenty-four hours into some idiotic sightseeing marathon. I wanted to walk, revisit a few places and see what still felt familiar.
Twenty years earlier, getting to Amsterdam had been almost as important to me as Amsterdam itself. I was already working while studying and did not travel in the most Spartan way possible, but I watched the budget where it made sense. Trains were one of the things on which I was quite willing to spend more.
Amsterdam came after two consecutive nights on the rails. I left Rijeka on an overnight train to Munich and, instead of spending the following night in a hotel, continued overnight from Munich to Amsterdam. Two substantial journeys, two nights of accommodation effectively taken care of while travelling, and almost no useful daytime sacrificed to transport: for someone as interested in railways as I was then, the concept was close to perfect.
The Munich–Amsterdam leg was operated by CityNightLine, Deutsche Bahn’s international night-train service at the time. It offered seats, couchettes and proper sleeping compartments, as well as an excellent restaurant car. Dinner while crossing Europe was part of the journey, not merely a practical interruption to it.
I booked a berth in a proper sleeping compartment, one category below the top version with its private shower. It was hardly the cheapest option for a working student, but that was not the point. I had never flown. Trains were familiar, enjoyable and, to me, inseparable from travel itself. If I was going to spend a night crossing Europe, this was exactly how I wanted to do it.
After four days in Amsterdam, I left by daytime train for Cologne and continued overnight towards Vienna. On the morning of 29 December 2024, I boarded an ICE in Cologne for the westbound journey. The old CityNightLine was gone, as were two decades, but rail still gave the return its shape. A few months later, China would make the railway part of the destination again — this time at 300 km/h, in Business Class and with slippers.
Amsterdam Centraal is a fitting place to begin this kind of return. It is not merely a station but one of the city’s landmarks: monumental, immediately recognisable and positioned like a proper gateway to the historic centre. It also brought back one of my clearest memories from 2004.
On my first tram ride in Amsterdam, the driver sang for almost the entire journey. Not quietly to himself, but properly sang while driving, and nobody around me seemed to find it strange — as if this were an entirely normal way for public transport to operate. For someone who had only just arrived, it was an unusually effective introduction to the city.
That singing driver eventually became part of what Amsterdam meant to me. The city I remember from 2004 was colourful without appearing to work at being colourful. Drag performers, flamboyant dressers, queer nightlife figures and all sorts of eccentric characters blended into everyday street life. They did not seem to be performing a tourist-friendly version of Amsterdam. They were simply there, as natural to the city as bicycles and canals.
When I returned in 2019, I already had the impression that some of this was fading. Conference commitments gave me less time to judge than the four days I had spent exploring in 2004, but Amsterdam seemed quieter and more restrained. That same year, the missing part of the city unexpectedly reappeared in Berlin.
I was at Bar jeder Vernunft for a chanson concert by Vladimir Korneev. One of the waiters wore what was otherwise a conventional waiter’s uniform, but the shirt had been replaced by a distinctly feminine blouse, and he wore more make-up than five average women combined. Whether that made him a drag queen, I did not know and never asked. The label was less interesting than the impression that somebody had transported a piece of Amsterdam 2004 into Berlin fifteen years later.
He was superb at his job. He moved through the room with complete authority, served flawlessly, inserted poisonous little comments at precisely the right moment and flirted with men and women with admirable impartiality. Nobody seemed particularly surprised by him, which was perhaps the most important part. If Bar jeder Vernunft had not already had him, it would have needed to invent him. Watching him, I first thought that the Amsterdam I remembered might not have disappeared at all. It might simply have moved.
In December 2024, the difference was harder to dismiss. Amsterdam remained unmistakably Amsterdam, yet the effortless eccentricity I remembered had become surprisingly difficult to find. The city felt more polished, more controlled and, rather unexpectedly, more serious. Nothing was inherently wrong with that, but the Amsterdam represented in my memory by the singing tram driver seemed to have gone quiet.
A few days later, Berlin’s S-Bahn kept repeating the argument. I saw the same sort of flamboyant, difficult-to-classify characters I had associated with Amsterdam in 2004, travelling among everybody else without attracting so much as a second glance. Amsterdam had become more controlled; Berlin still allowed strangeness to go about its daily business. The party, it seemed, had not ended. It had simply moved to Berlin.
By 10:49 in the morning, I was already inside my corner suite at Corendon Amsterdam New-West. With only one night in the city, that early check-in was unusually valuable. I had no intention of receiving such an upgrade merely to dump my bag and rush out again, so I let the train from Cologne wear off and gave the room a little time to justify itself.
A little before two, I headed towards the centre. My retrospective began on the Amstel near Nieuwe Amstelbrug: boats along the banks, narrow houses dissolving into the grey winter distance and enough water in the frame to remove any doubt about where I was. The weather was miserable, but the grey suited the city better than it had any right to.
A few minutes later, I reached Prinsengracht where Utrechtsestraat crosses the canal. The scene could almost serve as my hero image of the city: houseboats, bare winter trees and, above all, a row of bicycles chained to the bridge. There was nothing monumental about it, which was precisely the point. Show me that photograph without a caption and I would have little doubt where it was taken. Canals and bicycles were functioning as ordinary pieces of urban life and somehow creating an image that could belong nowhere else.
The city grew busier around Reguliersbreestraat and Rembrandtplein, where trams squeezed past one another through the wet streets. A little farther on, the route opened onto the Binnen-Amstel near Halvemaansbrug, with Hotel De L’Europe across the water. Within half an hour, Amsterdam had supplied almost everything that still defined it perfectly for me: water, boats, bicycles, trams and narrow façades.
Visually, very little had moved. Then I walked into De Wallen.
My first proper encounter with Amsterdam’s Red Light District in 2004 came through a guided tour, probably the safest introduction for the version of me who had just arrived. I was young, inexperienced and shy enough to be genuinely uncertain where one was supposed to look.
Our guide had no such problem. She was an older sex worker, spectacularly self-confident and so matter-of-fact about her profession that she could discuss clients, working hours, window rent and record-keeping with the tone of someone explaining office procedures.
Two older gentlemen in the group eventually decided to question her morality. They asked her directly whether she was ashamed. She barely blinked and pointed out that they had just paid a respectable sum for a tour built around the very immorality they were condemning. She then asked whether they might not want to put the same question to themselves first and raise their hands once they had found an answer. No hands appeared.
A little later, someone asked why there were virtually no men working in the famous windows. The guide’s answer was brutally economic. Rent had to be covered, prices had to remain competitive, and that required a certain number of clients each day. Female physiology made that number achievable. Male physiology meant that the numbers simply did not add up.
She then looked back at her two moral critics. Age, she observed, eventually reduces even that capacity to almost zero. In some men, declining physical firmness appears to produce a compensating rise in moral rigidity, leaving them with little better to do than question hard-working women. By then, the gentlemen had acquired roughly the colour of overripe beefsteak tomatoes. Regardless of the fact that they were paying customers, whether the self-appointed moralists felt comfortable or uncomfortable concerned her about as much as last winter’s snow.
What made the exchange memorable was not the brutality of the jokes but the sophistication with which she delivered them. She never raised her voice or let the tour become vulgar. She could dismantle someone and still sound as though she were presenting a lively sociology seminar. Then she mentioned that she held a PhD in sociology. Sex work was her side job, she was open about it and evidently needed nobody’s approval. She ruled.
I remember her more clearly than many of Amsterdam’s major sights. Some guides do more than explain a destination; they become part of the way you remember it. Much later, I met another in Madrid — Marta at the Prado, utterly different in style but equally capable of hijacking an entire visit.
Our Amsterdam guide also showed us what the district looked like when it was actually working. The obvious window streets contained plenty of theatre: looking, attracting attention, flirting and negotiating. In narrower side streets, things became more physical. Women leaned towards potential customers, grabbed crotches, pinched nipples and made passive observation difficult. I received some of that practical demonstration myself. For someone who began the tour unsure where it was acceptable to look, De Wallen quickly simplified matters: every direction felt equally inappropriate.
That was the Red Light District I remembered: direct, unapologetic and almost aggressively alive. I walked back in twenty years older, considerably less shy and with enough travel behind me to assume that Amsterdam would struggle to surprise me. It did — mainly by doing almost nothing.
The windows were still there, but much of the old performance had vanished. Some of the women looked barely interested in passing pedestrians. Occasionally, the entire sales technique amounted to pressing a piece of paper against the glass with a minimum price for fifteen minutes. In 2004, women had practically attached themselves to potential customers in the side streets. Now some could barely be bothered to lift the tariff sheet.
Cannabis was another matter, and not only in De Wallen. Weed had certainly been part of Amsterdam in 2004, but I do not remember the city itself smelling of it. Now the smell seemed to be everywhere. At times I could have closed my eyes and struggled to decide whether I was in Amsterdam, back in Times Square—which had smelled much the same when I visited—or somewhere darker and less respectable than either. It was a strange reversal: sex had once been impossible to ignore while cannabis stayed where one expected it; now the windows had gone quiet while weed announced the city before I even saw it.
One familiar survivor was the Moulin Rouge Amsterdam sign. With the district around it so subdued, it looked less like an advertisement than an artefact from the city I remembered.
A few streets later, I stopped outside a piercing shop and studied the window slightly longer than a man with no intention of buying anything reasonably should. A salesman came out to meet me. For a moment, it felt like De Wallen in 2004: I had lingered in front of a display, and somebody had come outside to make sure passive observation did not remain passive. He invited me in and began showing me what was new.
He started gently enough. An ear, perhaps a nostril — suggestions that still belonged to a world I understood. Then he moved on to nipple piercings and assured me that they would look exceptionally good on me. I started grinning, which he interpreted not as alarm but as permission to continue.
When we reached the genital section of the catalogue, all I can say is that I suddenly began to experience phantom pain. With some items from the latest collection, it became so intense that even he must have realised he was now operating in a market where there was not even a theoretical chance of making a sale.
He did not retreat far anatomically. Instead, he produced the hit of the season: something with an impressively exotic name that, more importantly, did not look like a medieval instrument of torture — a guiche piercing. Visually, it was simply a ring placed through the perineum, between the scrotum and the anus. Its principal benefit, he explained, was stimulation with every step. He described this with exactly the same calm professionalism another salesman might use to explain why a red tie was precisely what my wardrobe had been missing. By then I was laughing again; he remained entirely professional.
I have nothing against piercings. Some of them are genuinely beautiful, and I admired both his knowledge and the absolute seriousness with which he was expanding my options. I simply did not see myself becoming a customer. Unless general anaesthesia becomes part of the standard package, I remain approximately ninety-five per cent certain that I shall continue admiring piercings exclusively on other people. The remaining five per cent is presumably why good salesmen exist.
In 2004, women in the side streets had made passive observation impossible. Twenty years later, the most determined attempt to pull me through a doorway came not from a sex worker but from a piercing salesman. De Wallen had not entirely forgotten how to work a window. It had simply changed the merchandise.
Dam Square was reassuringly familiar. The Royal Palace still dominated one side, crowds continued to flow across the square, and most of the scene looked remarkably resistant to twenty years of change.
On Rokin, Mark Manders’ Two Immovable Heads stopped me for the second time. Five years after my 2019 visit, that enormous damaged-looking face got me again. It also reminded me of Igor Mitoraj’s monumental fragmented figures in Pisa and Agrigento. The artists are different, but my eye clearly connects them: oversized human forms, classical echoes, missing pieces and the strange feeling that something contemporary has just been excavated from an ancient civilisation. Some people collect sunsets. I appear to have developed a weakness for giant damaged heads.
Oude Turfmarkt required less introspection. I stopped for the tall, narrow, slightly irregular houses pressed together along the water — unmistakably Amsterdam. At the Singel, the Bloemenmarkt supplied tulips, although late December was never going to reproduce the abundance of my summer visit in 2004. A few were enough. Whatever else had changed, the city had kept its visual grammar. By then I had been walking for hours, and dinner, a spa and my supposedly second-choice suite were becoming increasingly attractive.
Dam Square had also placed W Amsterdam almost directly in my line of sight. The hotel had pulled me back repeatedly while I was planning the trip. The old W Istanbul had shown me what made the brand interesting — bold, excessive enough to be fun and capable of becoming part of the destination rather than merely a bed inside it. With the Royal Palace almost outside the door, W Amsterdam looked fully capable of competing with the city for a few hours.
I came close to booking it. Then its rate jumped while Corendon Amsterdam New-West, a Tribute Portfolio Hotel, dropped to around €130. Mathematics took over.
Corendon was supposed to be the consolation prize, and the compromise was location. Tram 2 stopped only a few minutes away, but Museumplein was still around fourteen minutes by tram and Dam Square roughly twenty-three. New-West was hardly exile, yet on a visit this short every journey into the centre reminded me what I had surrendered by not booking W. The corner suite and its view had already begun dismantling the argument.
Back at the hotel, dinner at Mondi continued the process. Padrón peppers were an automatic choice — I have very little resistance when they appear on a menu — followed by an excellent steak with chimichurri and something distinctly Caribbean on the side that has since escaped my memory. No matter; I remember the important part. The food was excellent, even the drink was covered by my elite welcome gift, and Corendon was making the idea of moving my loyalty elsewhere increasingly theoretical.
The spa completed the argument. After dinner, I went for a swim and somehow had the entire pool to myself. Following several days of trains, hotels and long walks through different cities, an empty pool and nowhere else I needed to be were more attractive than forcing myself back into central Amsterdam merely because the city was waiting outside on a Sunday night.
In 2004, I would probably have considered spending an evening in my hotel while the city waited outside a minor criminal offence. This time I was several cities into a long railway loop, with most of it still ahead. I had walked enough, eaten well and found a comfortable bed making an increasingly persuasive argument. Amsterdam had shifted some of its attention from sex to weed; I had shifted mine from staying out late to finding an excellent mattress. For that night, the mattress won.
W remained unfinished business rather than a regret. Corendon was not the hotel I had wanted while planning the trip; by Sunday evening, it was exactly the hotel I needed.
The next morning began without urgency. One of my favourite parts of returning to a city is revisiting the neighbourhood where I once stayed. Old travel memories attach themselves to surprisingly ordinary things: a route back to the hotel, a street corner, the park crossed in the evening. People tell me I have the memory of an elephant, and they are probably not entirely wrong. I also seem incapable of returning somewhere without wondering what the intervening years have done to the place — and, less comfortably, what they have done to me.
That was why I returned to Museumplein, my Amsterdam neighbourhood during those four days in 2004. Somewhere nearby was the small budget hotel where I had stayed. Unfortunately, the elephant had dropped that particular file. I had forgotten its name and could identify the building only with a certain probability. One façade looked plausible, but after twenty years I was not going to manufacture certainty merely to make the story neater.
The neighbourhood required no such reconstruction. The Rijksmuseum remained its great anchor, with Vondelpark nearby. One ridiculous memory returned there. Before travelling to Amsterdam in 2004, I had read about the Dutch habit of eating herring from street stalls, and my brain had somehow connected this culinary horror with Vondelpark. I remember looking for a stall and feeling simultaneously curious and relieved when none appeared. The mythical Vondelpark herring was still avoiding me; perhaps I had simply filed two very Dutch things under the same heading.
I had already visited the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum and, rather surprisingly, the Diamond Museum during my first stay. Repeating the same programme to prove that the buildings remained there held little appeal. That left the Stedelijk Museum, and here my memory played an interesting trick.
I vaguely remembered that the museum had not existed on Museumplein in 2004. Technically, that was nonsense: the Stedelijk is much older. But its main building was closed for renovation during my first visit, and the expanded museum visible today did not open until 2012. My memory was wrong about the institution and right about my experience of the place. I had spent the morning searching for the Amsterdam I remembered; now I could finally add something new to it.
I entered the Stedelijk without preparation and photographed only the works that made me stop. In retrospect, that turned out to be a surprisingly effective curatorial method.
Piet Mondrian’s Composition No. IV, with Red, Blue and Yellow and Marlow Moss’s Composition in Red, Black and White initially appeared to belong to the same visual universe. Mondrian’s grids and primary colours have escaped art history and colonised mugs, notebooks, furniture and fashion. Seeing an original is oddly satisfying because, for a moment, all that merchandise disappears and one is looking at the source again. Moss took that geometric language somewhere less familiar, using interrupted and doubled lines to give apparent stillness a quiet movement of its own.
Then came Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale, Attesa, which may be my favourite lesson in how modern art works. At first glance, it is almost offensively simple: a white canvas with one perfectly straight black line. As a mathematician, I naturally felt qualified to comment: give me a ruler and five minutes.
Except Fontana had not drawn a line. He had cut the canvas, turning an apparent mark into actual space behind the painting. What first looks like complete nonsense becomes an elegant question about whether a painting must remain a flat surface. Then one discovers what works from the series sell for, and the joke acquires another layer. That is modern art in concentrated form for me: apparent stupidity, followed by an idea, followed by a masterpiece, followed by someone paying an indecent amount to own the cut.
Picasso and Kazimir Malevich supplied a private test I did not know I was taking. I photographed one work by each simply because they stopped me; only later did I discover that both had been selected for the museum’s Essentials Tour. Perhaps I had paid more attention in art history than I remembered, or perhaps decades of mathematics had secretly developed an artistic instinct. Further research could only damage the conclusion, so I accepted this as evidence of my excellent taste.
Then Miriam Cahn changed the tone completely. I happened to visit while her exhibition Reading Dust was on, confronting war, displacement, power, gender and sexual violence through deliberately distorted and vulnerable bodies. Some works were not merely difficult in the polite language of museum labels. They were genuinely unpleasant to look at.
My first response was close to disgust, and then I realised that this was probably the point. Art does not always need to be beautiful, technically dazzling or pleasant enough to hang above a sofa. Sometimes its job is to make us uncomfortable, force us to look at what we would rather avoid and leave us thinking differently from when we entered.
There was a strange Amsterdam symmetry in that. The previous day, I had been wondering where the unapologetic bodily and sexual dimension of the city I remembered had gone. De Wallen had become tired and oddly restrained. Now confrontation with bodies, sex and taboo had returned in a completely different form, inside one of Amsterdam’s temples of culture. Cahn’s subject matter was infinitely darker — violence and vulnerability rather than entertainment — but the capacity to shock remained. Amsterdam might have stopped trying quite so hard in the street; the Stedelijk clearly had not.
Leaving the museum, I was in no hurry to return to New-West. I started walking without turning the afternoon into another itinerary. The major sights had stopped demanding attention. What interested me more was the city between them: another canal, an unfamiliar street, a building that made me stop for no obvious reason, or a corner that triggered a memory I could not quite place.
That is one of the pleasures of returning somewhere rather than discovering it for the first time. Every hour no longer needs to justify itself. Memory also makes the walk unreliable in interesting ways. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time wondering whether I genuinely recognise a particular street or whether twenty years have given my brain enough time to manufacture a convincing fake. Either way, walking remains the best way to find out.
Across three visits, I had used Amsterdam’s trams repeatedly but never its metro, so I deliberately chose it for the journey back towards the hotel. It was not a better route. I simply wanted to try the bloody thing once.
Around Amsterdam RAI, the experiment delivered one of the most distinctive architectural images of the trip. The nhow Amsterdam RAI hotel, designed by OMA, consists of three enormous triangular volumes stacked and rotated above one another. It looks structurally unreasonable, as though someone piled up three glass blocks, shifted each sideways and left gravity to sort out the details.
I liked it because it had almost nothing to do with the Amsterdam I had been photographing. No canals, bicycles or narrow seventeenth-century houses; this was the sharper, contemporary city around RAI and Zuidas. Amsterdam had no obligation to remain frozen in the version I remembered from 2004.
The metro itself was less revelatory, and Tram 2 remained more convenient for Corendon. Still, the experiment gave me the nhow photograph and removed Amsterdam’s metro from the list of things I had never tried. That was enough. I returned to New-West, collected my luggage and checked out.
Back at Amsterdam Centraal, I still had some time before my train. It was not enough for another excursion but too much to spend staring at a departure board. A barber inside the station solved the problem. My beard had survived several German cities and one Dutch detour, and it could use some attention before New Year. The people inside were exceptionally friendly, so I sat down and let somebody restore a little order. The spa and the beard trim had given the detour an unexpected secondary theme: personal maintenance.
Freshly trimmed, I stepped outside for one final look at Amsterdam Centraal after dark. Illuminated, the station becomes even more theatrical: part railway terminus, part city monument.
My train was not an ICE but a classic locomotive-hauled Intercity continuing towards Hanover and Berlin. I rather liked that. Amsterdam was sending me back into Germany aboard something from an older railway Europe — locomotive in front, conventional coaches behind and no particular need to pretend it was the future.
Cologne had brought me back; Amsterdam was now sending me onward with some memories confirmed and others thoroughly disturbed. Before heading forward to Hanover and Berlin, I was going to travel a little way back into the past.
Amsterdam was not quite where I had left it. Neither was I.
