There is a specific kind of website that only makes sense in a country like this one: a site that tells you, hour by hour, which terraces the sun is actually hitting. Sunsipper is one, and there are others, and the existence of the entire genre tells you everything about how seriously this is taken.
I am firmly on the sun side of the argument. Shade is for people with a plan for the rest of the day.
Where we actually end up
Despite all the research, we almost always end up at the same place. Nate, which we still call Brug34 and probably always will, because it sits on a bridge and gets guaranteed sun. It also has the full set: canal on one side, boats going past, a road, and a steady supply of people to watch doing things you would not do yourself.
That is the actual specification for a good terrace, and it has nothing to do with the drinks list. You want sun, you want water, and you want traffic of some kind, ideally several kinds at once. A terrace with a beautiful view and nobody walking through it is a waiting room.
What gezelligheid is not
I have stopped fighting this word and now use it constantly, which I take as a sign of something. The English translation offered is always “cosy”, and cosy is wrong, or at least badly incomplete. Cosy describes a room. This describes a situation.
A brown bar in November with the right three people in it is gezellig. A sunny terrace in July with a bottle of wine that has just arrived is also gezellig, and those two things share no physical properties whatsoever. What they have in common is that nobody is trying to get anywhere, and the thing you are doing is the thing you came to do.
So it is not comfort. It is the absence of the next appointment. You cannot buy it, you cannot schedule it reliably, and it evaporates the moment one person checks the time.
Boats
We never do a boat on Koningsdag or for Pride, which I have written about elsewhere, and this leads people to think I am against boats. I am not. We recommend a boat to everybody who visits, and every so often we hire one and give somebody our own tour.
The reason is slightly embarrassing. From the water you see a great many parts of the city that we simply do not go to any more, because we are not tourists here and our lives have contracted into a set of routes. An hour on a boat is the most efficient way I know of being reminded that I live somewhere quite remarkable and have stopped looking at it.
The etiquette question has an obvious answer that I do not fully believe. Yes, the rental boats full of people who have never steered anything are a menace. But the worst behaviour on the canals is not incompetence, it is entitlement, and entitlement is not a tourist trait. It comes with a good sound system and someone who knows exactly what they are doing.
The pub garden comparison
British pub gardens and Dutch terraces look like the same institution and are not. A pub garden is somewhere you go to drink, and the sitting is a facility provided to help with that. A terrace is somewhere you go to sit, and the drink is the rent you pay for the chair.
You can see it in the glassware. The beers here are small, deliberately, because the unit of the afternoon is not the pint, it is the hour. Nobody is pacing themselves against a pint. You order another small one when the conversation reaches a natural gap, and four hours later you have had a perfectly reasonable amount and are still making sense.
The other difference is supply. A sunny beer garden in London is a rumour. When the weather turns there are about eleven of them for nine million people, and every one is three deep at the bar with a queue for a toilet designed in 1904. Here, the entire city is set up on the assumption that people will want to sit outside, so when the sun arrives there is somewhere to put everybody. It is not that the Dutch enjoy sunshine more than the British do. It is that they planned for it, which is a very Dutch way to enjoy anything.
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