I arrived in Amsterdam without incident, despite the snowstorm in the Northeast, and I’m powering through my jet-lag. When traveling in Europe I’ve adopted a policy of adapting to my hosts’ time schedule as quickly as possible, whether through pharmaceutical means, light therapy, or sheer determination. This doesn’t really make me any less tired or any more effective, but it helps me avoid those horribly deep daytime naps and depressing nighttime insomnia. There is nothing worse than hours of TV infomercials in a foreign language.

The hotel is part of a Japanese chain, nice enough but with very seventies’ European decor, and not in a retro kind of way, either. I enjoy the occasional night in a hotel, but there is something so disconnected about attending a large meeting in one for several days. You eat, sleep, live, work, and exercise in this odd uninteresting cloistered environment, insulated from real life. When I saw the movie Lost in Translation a few years ago, it really brought home for me that feeling of dislocation brought on by jet-lag and hotel living.

To combat both traveler’s anomie and jet lag, I always try to Get the Hell Out of the Hotel as much as possible, but here the meeting agenda is conspiring against me. This is the kind of meeting that features multiple group meals. In my industry, no one would dream of sending you halfway around the world to a meeting and then asking you to work late, but they think nothing of scheduling your meals and social events from morning to night. I realize that most people think of a group meal as a benefit, “Thank God I don’t have to eat alone!” but I actually love to eat alone. So tonight I took the tram into town, ate dinner, and then sat at a nice little bar for an hour or so with my book. It was complete bliss after a long and people-filled day. (They are nice people, but I am a crank.)

Amsterdam seems like such a young town. Head shops and marijuana cafes aside, there’s something about the scale of the city that makes it feel like it would be the perfect place to spend your twenties. The city center is lined with buildings just three or four stories high, all with large windows, even on the ground floor. Each block looks like a university quad. It’s so manageable and accessible, yet with all the bars and coffeeshops, not dull at all.

Elvis spent time here in his youth. Why didn’t I think of moving here after college? My twenties were a little later than Elvis’s twenties, but still. I could totally see myself waiting tables in a bar, reading English literature in cafes, and developing an intense and inappropriate crush on some Angry Young Man.