I am in love with Amsterdam. I know I say this about almost every place I’ve been to (I am a phile for new places and I can not lie), but this one is different. I keep coming back to Amsterdam. And Amsterdam keeps letting me in
My tribe is here. The mismatched Indonesians. The artists. The people who left home and built a warmer, weirder version of it somewhere colder. I can be an artist here. Nobody asks what my real job is. I can eat all the Indonesian food (the one refund colonialism ever gave: Indo food on every other street). I can cook Indonesian food with Indonesian ingredients I got from an Indonesian niche supermarket, and the smell of my sambal would offend precisely no one.
We can live in one of those apartments by the canal, with its cosy lighting and tall windows, inviting my mismatched friends over until the neighbours learn our names.
The culture here vibes with me to my core. Not unlike Melbourne, but also not like Melbourne. I don’t know how to explain further without upsetting one of my two corners of the world.
In this Amsterdam life, my dining table has an oversized, low-hanging lamp. The wine is always there, half opened, because someone always came by the night before. And from Amsterdam, I would hop trains to different parts of Europe in the name of Research. Paris for lunch. Brussels, because it was on the way.
All of it is deductible, in the currency of stories where I share with the wider world.
None of this is real yet. But I keep coming back, and Amsterdam keeps leaving the light on. That has to mean something, right? For me, for now, that means I am in love with Amsterdam.
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