Amsterdam, The Netherlands

I have so much to say about Amsterdam, I could probably populate an entire website on this one subject alone!

My first visit to the city was in 1972. I spent a month or so there in '76, as the guest of my Dutch friends Albert and Janny Boonstra, and met Lydia Boeken, who I married in '77. Lydia and I had an apartment in the Wibautstraat and lived there — her in medical school and me working for Excerpta Medica — from '79 to '82, when we divorced. I visited the city repeatedly between '82 and '91, when I moved back to the US, and spent a week there during the summer of 2000 and another week after my Italian semester in '01.

A lot of my favorite Amsterdam memories involve eating and drinking: bami goreng at any of the city's 400+ Chinese-Indonesian restaurants, a haring from a street vendor, patats from a snack bar, a broodje half om at Broodje van Kootje. There's also a lot of wonderful sightseeing to be done in what the locals affectionately call Mokum: the van Gogh Museum, "Barney's Beanery" in the Stedelijk Museum, Onze Lieve Heer op Zolder in the red-light district, the Vondel Park, the brown cafés and terrasjes of the Leidscheplein — and my favorite spot in Amsterdam, the Begijnhof (which you see in the photo at left).

My one and only novel, Dutch T(h)reat, is set in A'dam, most of it inside the Begijnhof, and I've also used the city as the setting for two short stories, "Ga Je Mee?" and "The Milky Way."

If you're ever going to Holland, email me, and I'll send you a Word document full of sightseeing and dining tips. You'll thank me.

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