One of the most interesting aspects of the Netherlands, but specifically Amsterdam, was the incorporation of tourism into the country and its effects on overall Dutch society and culture. As one of the smallest countries in Europe, many of the cities are relatively close by and easy to get to from one another. Therefore, one would expect that tourism in the Netherlands would involve people seeing many historic towns, cities, and hopping from areas to areas. However, the real truth behind tourism in the Netherlands is that Amsterdam seems to be divided from the rest of the country, and that Amsterdam seems to receive most of the tourists, many of whom create an atmosphere of international cohesion and partying.

As soon as we landed in Amsterdam, I had a distinct realization. In my mind, almost all of the tourists in the country seemed to be stuck together right around Amsterdam Central, which is the main train station. From there, within a 10 mile radius, it seemed like you could find the remaining tourists who had managed to escape from the station. If you scanned the people who made up the groups of tourists, you could find that around a third of the tourists were teenagers or young adults. As I managed to discover later on, it turns out that the Netherlands, specifically Amsterdam, is like the Miami of European teenagers. Just like Miami, it’s seen as a city for their “coming of age” trip. It was their city of partying and going through all of their other temptations.  So, as soon as many of these teens turned 18, they would end up drinking, smoking, and doing all sorts in Amsterdam. Out of curiosity, I tried to look up the statistics for the ages of tourists entering the Netherlands, but I couldn’t find any real statistics that measured this quantitively. However, it seems that the majority (which is still most likely below 30-40%) of tourists entering the Netherlands in recent years have been within the age groups of 18 to 30 years old.

Although you could argue that I’m about to make a hasty generalization, I felt that this party-tourism results in a slightly decentralized Dutch society where most local residents have migrated out of Amsterdam and moved to neighboring cities where tourism was less and more calm. For example, to come across Amsterdam “locals” enjoying the city, we had to take 30-45 minute train rides and walk towards the smaller side-streets and neighborhoods. Out of 8 days, we once ran into Ajax fans at a local bar, who we thought about joining until we realized the offensive chants they were singing. Even these locals seemed to be a rare sighting, and were often pretty young in comparison to the average of in the Netherlands, which is 38 years old as of 2023. Needless to say, the city of Amsterdam felt like its own beast separate from the rest of the country, similar to New York in all honesty. All languages were spoken, you couldn’t call anyone a local, but merely an adoptee of the city. It was like the melting pot of youth, immigrants, and excited people with visions. However, their visions were of partying and freedom, more than the New York dream of making money and living the riches.

As soon as we left Amsterdam and moved to Rotterdam, there was a sudden shift in cultural vibes. Everyone we saw around the city seemed like locals, who were off to work or out with their families enjoying dinner. Almost every spoke Dutch, and they seemed to be living the regular day-to-day that of the stereotypical European family. In hindsight, there were a lot of Turkish immigrants in the city who were working, but it seemed that they had become part of the city in a different way than those in Amsterdam. Rotterdam, for being the second largest one in the country, felt like it was just a normal, medium-size city, almost like Pittsburgh. There we tourists around the city, but they were older, they seemed to be there for calmer tourism, or sometimes even beyond just purely tourism. It had the same feeling as people from other states coming to visit Pittsburgh. Even when we went to The Hague, which is one of the most historic parts of the country, there weren’t young tourists, and the city felt like it was still crowded with locals who lived there. The tourism was calm, the visitors were older in age, and the city seemed to function without conforming to the atmosphere brought by the tourists.

Through all of these experiences, I realized that Amsterdam was truly an isolated environment with a whole different lifecycle which was kept alive and pushed forward by the younger and wilder tourists, who made the city stand separate. It was truly unlike most other cities I’ve seen.