Enchantment in Amsterdam


“Do you know what means la capacidad de impressión?” Sipping my coffee, I look up at Gabriella, the sun setting brightly over the water behind her, and shake my head. She continues: “I don’t know if there is this word in English, but it is what children have. When they see something new, they have the feeling that it is wonderful.” She looks out over the water. A cargo ship is making its way through the channel behind Amsterdam Central Station, forcing the ferryboat to take a slightly longer route across the river.  “I’m not sure what the word would be, but I know exactly what you mean.” I answer her.

For the past 24 hours, Gabriella, who in a previous life was my roommate in Santiago, has been reconnecting me with the joys of Chilean Spanish. Although related – distantly – to the Spanish spoken in the rest of the world, young Chileans have creatively distorted conventional grammar, rendering it incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In return for the refresher course in Santiago slang, I have been taking Gabriela around my regular stomping grounds in Amsterdam. As we walk around the historic city center, Gabriela emits a high-pitched noise, which sounds something like: “Layla, me encanta Amsterdam!”

Although Amsterdam has always been enchanting to me as well, seeing the Rijksmuseum, the canals, the bicycles, reflected in Gabriela’s big brown eyes causes me to nearly float down the streets, feet barely touching the ground. Every time I point out some detail in a building, or make some small observation about daily life in the Netherlands, her entire face lights up in delight. When I take her to a café well-known for its apple pie, we unexpectedly stumble onto a quaint Saturday market. When we go to the museum of Amsterdam, formerly the Amsterdam Historic Museum, we coincidentally catch the Golden Age exhibition on its last day. When I tell her to jump onto the back of my bike, she holds on to the flesh of my stomach like a cat clinging for dear life, frightened at first but quickly becoming comfortable with the idea of it. There are flowers everywhere, the weather is behaving wonderfully, the people are happy and friendly – even better looking it seems.

Every time I turn around, I think of something else to show her. I want to show her absolutely everything. Suddenly, although five days had seemed like all the time in the world, we seem to be running out. When again can I expect to have such an enthusiastic audience, contagiously excited by everything I suggest we do?  When she describes the concept of capacidad de impresion to me, I realize she is brimming with this ‘capacity to be impressed’ – and I am as well, purely by being in her proximity. This is a feeling well known to former world-travelers such as myself, the feeling we lose and sorely miss when we start our ‘real life’ in one place again. But now I’ve had the opportunity to encounter this euphoric feeling without even leaving home - although Gabriella is over 10.000 kilometers away from her home. 


Sometimes it takes going abroad to realize how much you love your county; sometimes it takes a visitor to realize how much you love your city.

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