2002 letter on our first trip:We arrived here on Friday afternoon, here being a campground at the southern border of the city. It is a 15 minute walk to the metro line which gets to Central Station in less than 20 minutes. Central Station is the hub of the city’s very good transportation system - trams, busses, the Metro and trains.

Amsterdam is quite exotic in lots of ways. There is a museum here devoted to marijuana, and stores sell it legally. There is a red light district. There are Haringhandlers, street-stands that sell herring—fat little lightly salted filets served in a little tray with chopped onions , with or without bread, to eat on the spot. Some of these also sell other kinds of fish in little trays, usually fried, and served with sauces. Houses in the city are of brown and red brick, accented with white stone, generally tall and thin, with decorated step gables literally being propped up by the houses on either side. Most have booms sticking out of the top gable with pulleys and ropes and hooks. They were used initially to haul goods up into storage attics and now probably are used to bring up furniture. The city is built mostly on sand dredged up when the many canals circling the city were dug. This soil does not provide a very firm foundation for the buildings, many of which date from the 17^th century. As a result, a row of houses often takes on the look of a bunch of drunks leaning this way or that and being held up by countervailing leaners on either side. Adding to this look is the decided forward lean that many houses have. They were built that way in order to insure that the goods being hauled up to the attic on the pulleys would not hit the front façade and perhaps break a window.

The center city is charming, very pretty and alas, also very, very dirty. Trash is all over the place. There are always amazing numbers of people on the streets, including more tourists than we have seen anywhere else. We have seen people just throw their trash down wherever they are. "Don’t litter" is a phrase that might not have been spoken or posted here ever. The canals are not quite open sewers, which is what they once were, but they are pretty still pretty dirty. Part of the problem may also be the very small trash containers on the streets which seem always to be filled to overflowing. Also, just as in Paris, people do not curb their dogs and do not pick up after them. So this queen of cities has to learn how to be a little less slovenly and to wash her face a little.