Amsterdam: A Great Place To Be Stuck

Getting deported was a nightmare.

Being held in the airport for 24 hours was pure misery. Not knowing for sure that I’d ever get back to my Istanbul life (and all my belongings) was agonizing. Involuntarily flying to a city in the middle of the night where I only knew one person was awful.

But there was one lovely thing that came out of this whole debacle besides a really killer travel story:

The place I got sent to was Amsterdam, a truly wonderful place to be stuck.

It could have been worse. They could have deported me back to the US, which would have been a nightmare. I’ve heard of people who were sent just over the border and ended up stuck in Bulgaria.

Instead, they simply sent me back to the place I’d flown in from: back to the land of tulips and windmills and bikes and canals. Back to Holland.

I ended up in Amsterdam for an extra week, and spent it wandering aimlessly about canals, eating Asian cuisine in the funky neighborhood of De Pijp, and taking lots of pictures. The first few days I was alone, spending my mornings at the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam and my afternoons distracting myself from the rumbling panic inside of me.

But my third day of Amsterdam exile was a national holiday. My friend and host Judit had a day off from work, the two of us and her boyfriend Philip decided it was a great day for some adventure!

They kindly lent me a bike and we were off, breezing through the sunny city. I quickly realized that even though I’d spent most of the week walking all over Amsterdam, there was still plenty more to discover.

For example: Begijnhof Chapel, a hidden Catholic church in a tucked-away courtyard. To continue to practice as Catholics in Protestant Amsterdam, the Beguines (as they were called) built their church in a house designed to look unremarkable from the street. People still live and worship in the complex.

There’s also a free ferry tucked away behind Amsterdam Centraal that takes you directly to a place my friends called “Hipster Island.”

Hipster Island is filled with vibrant, offbeat things: abandoned tram cars decorated with bright paint and flower gardens, giant metal pinwheels, and a beachside bar in a shipping container.

Seriously.

It’s called Pllek and we killed a few hours there drinking Belgian dubbels and watching adorable blond Dutch children run around with minimal parental supervision.

After we worked up a gentle buzz, we were off via another ferry and a quick bike ride to Westerpark for the Rollende Keukens Food Truck Festival! There were vendors of every imaginable ethnic cuisine, and the three of us sampled food for nearly five hours—from Moroccan tagine to Japanese rice cakes to mussels drenched in butter to a good old-fashioned American hamburger. Though Turkish cuisine is great, it can get monotonous and it’s not easy to find food from different cultures. This food festival was a gift.

Plus it had a Ferris Wheel…

…and fresh coconuts to drink from.

By the time we drifted home, stuffed and exhausted, I realized that I hadn’t thought about the deportation disaster all day.

Amsterdam is a lovely place to be stuck.