I would like to take a moment and return to the rhetorical question I was pondering in my initial blog entry. Is life gentler and kinder here?
It was immediately and abundantly clear to me that, indeed, it is. I was instantly overwhelmed first and foremost about one thing in particular. There is a vastly expanded public commons here. Now, I knew there would be lots of public squares and things like that, but that does not even begin to describe the general situation. Amsterdam is not a city like we think of cities in America. It's more like an "urban village". The entire city is a public space and has been built for people. Looking back and remembering Chicago, Los Angeles and other American cities, it seems to me that those places have not really been built for people, per se. People have just learned how to survive in them. Amsterdam, on the other hand, does not merely allow people to survive; it is an urban environment that functions beautifully as an infrastructure that supports, facilitates and encourages public life and living in general. It coddles humanity, generates culture and promotes full living.
Furthermore, there seems to be a gestaltian property at work when you have an entire culture oriented towards public life which occurs, in large part, outside under the sky. An overwhelming abundance of goodwill exists that is difficult to describe. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying, though, by reducing it to a false dichotomy of qualifying the people here as nicer or ruder. I've encountered both and neither is true. Rather, people here simply seem a bit more wholesome, healthy, open, real and maybe even less cynical of one another. And these qualities subsume the more ephemeral moods of rudeness and kindness.
I like it here. I feel like I´ve come home. This is my culture, these are my people.