Menu:

 

Amsterdam: a gem of a city

Date Posted: Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Author: Christen Pears

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend,” cooed Marilyn, and who are we to argue? We’re dazzled by their brilliance and their sheer beauty. They’re synonymous with wealth and opulence, and look pretty damned good in an engagement ring.

Diamonds have always been highly prized. The Greeks believed they were slivers of stars that had fallen to earth, while the Romans wore them for personal protection, convinced they had the power to ward off evil. Other civilisations called them the tears of the gods. In reality, of course, they’re nothing more than lumps of crystallised carbon, but that doesn’t stop us wanting them.

“I’ve never hated a man enough to give him back his diamonds,” quipped the much-married Zsa Zsa Gabor.Sadly, no man of mine has ever bought me diamonds so I set off to Amsterdam with the current one in tow, in the hope that he’d come up trumps and buy me a gigantic rock.

Amsterdam has been a centre of the diamond trade since the 16th century when craftsmen, mainly Jews, fled religious persecution in Spain, Portugal and Germany to relocate in the more tolerant Netherlands. Some of the most famous diamonds have been cut here, including the Cullinan, the largest diamond in the world and now part of the Crown Jewels.

During the Second World War, more than 2,000 Jewish diamond polishers disappeared from Amsterdam, sent to Nazi concentration camps, but the trade recovered and thrives today, attracting millions of tourists and buyers from across the globe.

My quest for a diamond took place at Gassan Diamonds. Founded in 1945, it is housed in the oldest diamond factory in the city. The enormous red brick building was the largest factory of its kind when it was built in 1879 and utilised the latest steam technology. The rows of pipes that used to carry the steam are now redundant but the traditional methods of diamond production are still used.

Craftsmen sit hunched over humming polishing wheels, examining the stones with magnifying glasses. They smile good-naturedly as tourists peer over their shoulders, trying to catch a glimpse of the sparkling stones. These men are artists, each with their own signature style. Show them dozens of diamonds, and they can pick out the stones they have produced.

To the untrained eye, a rough diamond resembles a common pebble, but through cutting and polishing, its inner brilliance is revealed. This is a laborious process. Diamonds are the hardest substance found in nature and there is only one material hard enough to cut them – diamond. They can be sawn or cleaved apart along lines of weakness but it can take up to eight hours to cut through a tiny one-carat stone.

They are then polished on a lathe impregnated with diamond dust and, during the polishing process, up to 60 per cent of the material is lost. This may seem an alarming statistic but apparently, size doesn’t matter – well, not as much as you may think. 

When choosing a diamond, you have to consider the four C’s: carat, cut, colour and clarity. The amount a diamond is worth depends on all of these factors, not just how big it is.Even the smaller stones are beautiful. Unfortunately, the one that took my eye would have set me – or rather my man – back £70,000, and he seemed to think that’s excessive. I assured him that I would be just as happy with something a teeny bit smaller but still left empty handed.

I reminded myself that Holly Gollightly thought it tacky to wear diamonds before the age of 40 but somehow that was no comfort.

There is, however, much more to Amsterdam than diamonds. The Dutch city may be quieter than some of its European neighbours, a less obvious destination than Paris or Rome, but with its canals, cannabis, bicycles and famous red light district, it has plenty to offer the tourist.

It boasts a supremely laid back atmosphere, the product of the liberal counter-culture that flourished in the 60s and 70s. This is a city where scantily-clad prostitutes sit casually in windows, flicking through the newspaper while waiting for customers and no-one bats an eyelid. It’s a city where the coffee shop menu offers something far more interesting than a café latte. ‘Would you care for some cannabis, Miss? How about a space cake?’

The city grew rich on trade in the 17th century. It already had a sizeable merchant fleet, carrying grain from the Baltic into Europe, but the formation of the East India Company in 1602 took mercantilism to a new level, bringing back spices, wood and other exotic commodities from Asia, Indonesia and China. Contact with the wider world also turned Amsterdam into cultural melting pot. It is an incredibly cosmopolitan city. The mixture of languages and accents you hear just walking down the street is astounding but the good news for tourists is that almost everyone speaks English.

The centre of Amsterdam is compact, with all the major sites in walking distance of each other. Its layout is determined by a series of canals, radiating from the centre to form loops around the city. The tall, elegant houses that line them have barely changed since they were built 400 years ago, their gabled facades mirrored in the glassy green surface of the water.

The best way to see it is on one of the many canal tours. These are unashamedly tourist affairs and the commentary is lame but you get a good feel for the place. We splashed out on a dinner cruise – two hours gliding through the canal network, taking in the sights and trying to work out whether the rubbery, grey meat we were tucking into was pork or chicken. Food aside, it was a beautifully romantic way to spend an evening.

If you want to travel like a native, hire a bike. The bikes favoured by the Amsterdammers are strangely old-fashioned, the sort of thing an Oxbridge don would teeter around on, but, I was reliably informed, anything newer than a Chopper would be stolen in minutes. And beware – after four days’ close observation I still didn’t manage to work out how the traffic system works.

Many people come to Amsterdam for the art, and there is no shortage of museums and galleries. The Netherlands were, after all, the home of Rembrandt and Vermeer and Van Gogh. One of the most popular tourist attractions in the city is the Anne Frank House. Her tragic story is universally known through her diaries and although we were herded through the house with dozens of other tourists, it was still a moving experience. Seeing the pictures of film stars she had plastered on the walls of her room brought a lump to my throat.

We escaped the claustrophobia of the annexe where Anne and her family spent two years in hiding by heading to the Vondelpark, an impressive expanse of greenery to the south of the city. It’s a wonderful place to wander or just sit on the grass and watch the world go by.

You could spend hours just looking at what the locals are wearing.No trip to Amsterdam would be complete without a visit to the floating flower market, with its bewildering array of blooms and bulbs. After all, the city is even more famous for its tulips than its diamonds. In the absence of the latter, I had to make do with the former as a souvenir – nice but not quite my new best friend.

Copyright © 2006 MediaCom  ::   About Us   ::   Contact Us   ::   Privacy   ::   Home