Amsterdam Part II

In my travels through Europe, I ended up in Amsterdam to film a little piece about the biking culture there as compared to the car-dominance of American cities.

While I was there I hit the town, exploring the food, beer and cafe scenes.

It’s an absolutely beautiful city, very peaceful even on the busiest of streets, with boats and ferries everywhere.

If you are ever in Amsterdam, just find yourself a café and sit for a while, do some people watching and watch the clouds roll by.

Oh and I had perhaps the best apple pie I have ever eaten while I was there.

Have you noticed the tiny stairs? The stairs in Amsterdam are very rarely big enough to fit an adult person’s foot.

There are several reasons for this: part of the reason is that the old houses built on those wooden pilons were unstable, so the government eventually took over regulation of construction, but decided to tax by the width of the structure, which led people to design and build very long and narrow buildings, leaving little room for stairs. Eventually I’m told the Dutch just became used to the steep-narrow stairs and just kept building them that way.

You will see these tiny stairs all over Amsterdam.

All in all it was an amazing trip, and stay tuned to see the scenes I shot for my documentary!

Justin is a documentarian and writer. You can follow him on instagram at @justinsmorningcoffee, where he takes a photo of his coffee every morning to show where he is in the world at that time. And @Onejwells on Twitter, where he tweets about his upcoming book on documentary film.