New Amsterdam

I just got back from New York. It was great to spend a few days in a modern, functioning, urban environment. Eating great, flavoursome food; mixing with different communities and races; receiving great service; experiencing an array of consumer choices; being allowed to drink coffee and shop - at the same time!

Somewhat surprisingly though, it felt weird not to be surrounded by Dutch people. The only time I encountered any was on the Staten Island Ferry. It's free, by the way.

Perhaps it was this sense of dislocation that drew me to an exhibition on the Lower East Side about life in New York under the original Dutch settlers? Did you know that the Dutch founded New York and that it was originally called New Amsterdam? Until the Brits kicked them out. I couldn't help wondering what life would have been like in New York if this hadn't happened and if the Dutch had remained in charge?

Visiting the exhibit led to an incredibly strong sense of deja-vu. It was like I had stepped back 400 years from present-day New York, right back to present-day Amsterdam. The rooms in the exhibit looked eerily like any doctor's surgery in contemporary Amsterdam - complete with rusty pliers and jars of pickled leeches. I could almost imagine hearing the figures in the exhibit whispering "it is not posssshiboll..."

Typical 17th century meals of potatoes and dumplings were shown. Obviously, they were not real food, but grey, lumpy copies of the real thing - again, uncannily like what's served in many of today's Amsterdam restaurants!

Stuffed dummies dressed in laughably outdated clothes were positioned around the display. As I stared into their vacuous, expressionless eyes, and waited for the dummies to move, however imperceptibly, I had to reassure myself I wasn't in a contemporary Amsterdam shop or cafe, waiting to be served.

So what if the Big Apple had, instead, become the Big Herring? How different would things be?