OK, not really–but I was locked in, and the cops were involved.

Monday night, I’m out biking around the north side of Amsterdam, on my way to a friend’s for a birthday party, starting around 8pm. I’m running late, but I happen to be right near a restaurant I wanted to check out. So I make a small detour over to this Aambeeldstraat on the map, only to find the “straat” is actually a big warehouse zone, right on the water.

So I bike in and scope out the restaurant. It’s closed. It looks cool, though. I take a couple of photos of the harbor, because the light is nice. Then I bike back out.

Or almost. A gate–which I hadn’t even noticed when I came in–is locked in front of me.

While I’m poking around, inspecting the realness of this gate and the true degree of its lockedness, two dudes amble up.

“Hey, the Hotel de Goudfazant–is it in there?” one asks.

“Uh, yeah. But it’s closed. And I seem to be locked in here,” I reply.

“Huh,” they say, politely wrinkling their brows with faux concern, and amble off.

I spend the next 15 minutes inspecting the perimeter: barbed wire all the way around, except for the water. I contemplate climbing up a big stack of pallets and jumping over the fence–but that only leads into another locked-looking zone. I contemplate clambering around the fence where it hits the water–but of course it’s protected with a vertical line of nasty metal spikes, just a bit farther out than the length of my arms. I wave hopefully at the security cameras. I also contemplate the teeny-tiny sign–way inside the gate–that mentions the closing time of 8pm on Mondays. And I call the number on the sign, but no one answers.

I call my party hosts.

“Happy birthday! Oh, and, see, I’m going to be a little late…”

I explain my situation, hoping they might be able to come grab me with a boat–if I were committed to swimming out, I could just jump in the harbor and go. But they’re wrapped up with the party, so they give me the non-emergency number for the police.

Guess what? It’s an 0900 number–meaning it costs 10 cents a minute to place the call! Hilarious. I guess it really cuts down on kids calling and asking the operator if his refrigerator is running.

The operator warns me that “it’s a busy time” (has a gang war erupted in Amsterdam? are 800 cats stuck in trees all over the city?), but the cops will come.

The sun starts to sink in the waaaay southwest. The wind is getting chilly. I’m wondering why I actively took those bananas out of my bag, why I wore such impractical shoes today, why I always feel compelled to get one last thing done before getting to any appointment. I take a few melancholy photos of my golden-hour prison, and look wistfully at a tugboat chugging by, just far enough away that I can’t see the pilot and mime-plead with him to rescue me.

Finally, the cops arrive, a young guy and an older woman, in a tiny, efficient car. They are amused and concerned.

“You present a bit of a problem,” the young guy says.

“Yes,” says the woman. “It’s not just you, but also your bicycle.”

I suggest I can leave my bike behind. They look stern and serious. Maybe they think it will be stolen (from behind the locked gate?), or that I am violating a Dutch code of honor. Abandoning a bike is Just Not Done. They declare that we will come out as a package.

Meanwhile, the operator has been rustling up the owner of the restaurant. After I make a bit of small talk with the cops, the operator radios in to say someone is coming over with the keys. More small talk, and then another tiny, efficient car arrives. Out jumps a man covered in plaster dust.

I apologize profusely, the gate is unlocked and the crisis is over. Time elapsed: one hour, 22 minutes.

So, once again, I nobly took a hit for guidebook research. Now I know the number to call for police help in non-life-threatening situations–though I’m not exactly sure that’s something an average tourist will need. But you can bet I’ll be expensing that 50 euro cents I spent on my own call.

I may’ve mentioned before, the Dutch never seem excited to meet me in other countries–even if, or maybe especially when, Peter or I try to speak Dutch to them. Also, they tend to barrel right into you in crowds on the tram; the Dutch word for “excuse me” is “sorry,” etymological evidence it’s a foreign concept to be considerate of people around you. And, to further perpetuate stereotypes, a lot of them are quite tall, and it feels sometimes like I can’t even see their eyes.

As a result, I often bike around this city thinking Dutch people are just not happy to see me.

But last night, Peter and I were staring into someone’s apartment admiring the handsome, handsome cats that were perched on the also handsome furniture. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a friendly gesture to not put curtains in your windows, but it’s at least superficially welcoming, and it certainly makes the city a nice place to walk around at night.

So Peter and I are gawking, and maybe even pointing at the fatter cat, when an older, sharp-dressed woman down the sidewalk says, “That’s my place! Do you like it?” (I guess only tourists actually stop and look in people’s curtainless windows, so she said this in English.) So busted! We told her we’d been admiring her cats, she told us she had four of them, and we–including her friend who’d been down at the cafe with her, probably also enjoying a glass of sweet white wine–all laughed merrily. “If that’s a model for being a crazy cat lady,” I told Peter, “it’s not so bad at all.”

Bundle this episode up with the flat-out cheerful and lovely waitresses at Eetcafe Loetje, who never turned surly despite the presence of two young children, spilled milk and a broken champagne glass, and who even squirted whipped cream directly in one of our mouths. (Awk construct, but just wanted to make it clear it was someone at our table, not some regular at the joint with a long-standing whipped-cream relationship with the ladies.) Throw in all the people who’ve offered assistance to my friends (maybe having two kids helps). Mix with a smidge of incidents I can’t exactly remember now. Sure, the Netherlands is no Syria–but what ever will be, on the kindness scale?–and basically I’m feeling a bit more wanted in this city.

Guidebook research continues apace. Having friends visiting with kids has been illuminating. I realized the previous guide has plenty of recommendations of stuff to do with kids (hell, I even wrote a magazine article on the topic a few years ago), but zero recommendations for restaurants where they’ll be tolerated. Having friends visiting who don’t ride bikes has also been illuminating. I realized I’m a terrible judge of how long it takes to walk anywhere. Normal NYC walking speed does not apply, what with bumpy brick streets, crowds of stoned people to navigate around and through, and of course lots of windows to stop and peer into. And I don’t know shit about taking the tram anywhere but my house.

These are pretty obvious holes in my research that I’ve fortunately been able to correct. Ah, blessings in disguise. I think I might go reward my genius research strategies with a chocolate croissant…

OK, so there’s this running gag that I’m a CIA operative. Hilarious–unless you get me started on the idiocy of the CIA and its failure to hire Arabic speakers. Otherwise, though, it turns out double-agent entendre is almost as easy to pull off as sexual innuendo. I kind of enjoy accidentally sounding like I’m spending a month undercover here in Amsterdam, meeting some contacts, doing a little research in the Oost (where all the Muslims live–of course!).

What’s adding to the intrigue is that I actually am meeting with strangers–or one, anyway–and spending a lot of time traipsing around with her. She’s Macedonian, and if that doesn’t sound suspect in a totally imprecise way, I don’t know what does.

In fact, though, this woman is a grad student who’s writing her dissertation about the production and consumption of guidebooks. She’s following me around for a few days to see how I do my job.

Well, that’s embarrassing.

Now she knows that I “do my job” by spending an inordinate amount of time shopping for underwear at Hema. That I cannot hold onto a pen for more than a day. That I actually hate talking to strangers. That I prefer to spend at least half the day not talking to anyone. That I spend a lot of time pulling U-turns–much easier on foot than on my clunky Dutch bike, which is too tall for me to reach the ground with my feet when I stop. It would be nice if people weren’t looking at me when I have to mount and dismount. In fact, these all read suspiciously like disqualifications for my job.

Also, after I show off my totally rad notebook, which I’ve bragged about here several times before but I’ll describe again briefly in parens (behold: hand-size single-sided reprint of old guide, spiral bound with two pockets made out of manila folders, colored post-it tabs to flip between sections and an elastic band to hold it all together), there’s really not much else to tell someone about how I do my job.

How do I know whether I want to include a shop? Well, it just looks cool. How do I know whether I’ll include a bar? If it’s cool, I suppose. The only revelation I had on further questioning was that a bar with multicolor glass votive holders (rather than clear ones) is tacky, and will not even be investigated. I didn’t know I had this prejudice, but there you go. You have to draw the line somewhere–much the same way I will never even enter a hotel in Mexico that’s painted baby-shit brown. It helps narrow the immense field just a little.

I also realized I need to recalibrate my restaurant radar (ooops! Someone has that trademarked, and I’m not supposed to use the phrase–well, I took the caps off, so that had better damn well cover it) for Amsterdam. A few years ago, I realized that I had to adjust my image of restaurants in Mexico, when an Italian place where the waiters wore togas actually turned out to be good.

Here in Amsterdam, my aperture for restaurants is currently too wide. I’m a sucker for a place with candles on the table.

But guess what? Every restaurant in Amsterdam has candles on the table! It’s actually a huge part of restaurant reviews when a place doesn’t have them.

So obviously I need to build up some critical calluses. Last night, I got a little tough love from a budget restaurant that looked great–all historic outside, all whitewashed and airy inside, little tealights on the table, a menu that had basic Dutch stuff and a little Greek and Asian-what-have-you.

But I’d forgotten about Dutch service! In fact, my restaurant experiences here have never been all that bad, and I dismiss most comments about bad service as bougie American whining. It was sort of a bad sign that we had to light our candle ourselves. And then my Macedonian fellow-agent and I had perhaps one of the most miserable servers in the whole Western Hemisphere, who sent great daggers of irritation from her eyes (when she could be bothered to look at us), and actually said “No, you’ve had enough” when we asked for another glass of water. Now that’s comedy!

It’s also a gen-u-ine cultural experience, and the place is wholeheartedly going in the guidebook. Fine, whatever, with a warning about the service. But the place made me feel like I was in a different country, and I appreciated that every bit as much as my 8.50 euro three-course set menu, the main dish of which involved two big round scoops of mashed potatoes-and-veg and a big round meatball. Soothing and nourishing, those orbs of food.

I’ve got one more day of information-sharing with the Macedonian, and then it’s on to solo investigation. [Leer.]

Arrived in Amsterdam today for the last guidebook gig in a while–I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Or I could if I weren’t so exhausted. I am too old to still be flying economy, especially in a seat that doesn’t recline all the way because it’s mashed against a pointless section divider.

I’ll spare you the litany of other small travel indignities I suffered, but I will mention they involved having to depart from a different airport (JFK, not convenient LGA), on a different airline (without the comfy seats my “status” entitles me to), and with the world’s longest layover in Frankfurt, with a departure at the world’s farthest gate…oh, but wait, no, they changed to the gate to one on the complete other end of the terminal! So even though I had five hours to kill (and killed part of them in the McCafe, what will be McD’s totally failed attempt to compete with Starbucks, at least based on witnessed inefficiency at a single outlet–lady! Gimme that stupid whipped-cream can, so at least I can do whippets while you’re taking _so_damn_long_ with my coffee!), I still had to run for my flight.

Oops. Whined anyway. Done. I swear.

I was so shattered when I arrived in Amsterdam that I derived zero joy from being in Europe. Normally, my heart thrills to the tiny odd details–Dutch accents! Goofy public art! The dividers in the bathroom stalls go all the way down to the floor…and up to the ceiling! And what nice, utilitarian rolls of toilet paper!–but today I just sneered, groused, grumbled.

It’s so stupid and clean here, I thought, on my endless walk to the baggage claim. So organized, blah blah blah. Except for that clusterfuck at the McCafe. They think they’ve got it together, but they don’t. And why is everyone so damn tall?

Only now, after a nap, do I realize: My attitude, I think, comes from having spent an awful lot of time in Mexico recently.