"At this point we’re missing our tourists again. But I think there was a moment of really big joy in getting our city back."

Said the owner of an Amsterdam restaurant, quoted in "In Empty Amsterdam, Reconsidering Tourism/Before Covid-19, the city was packed with visitors. Now efforts to rein in the expected post-pandemic crowds are ramping up, but not without controversy" (NYT). 

In 2019, a record-breaking 21.7 million people visited Amsterdam, a city with a population of about 870,000.... On a typical Saturday night before the pandemic, the district, known as De Wallen, would have been heaving with young men going from bar to bar — perhaps stepping into sex shops or coffee shops or eyeing scantily clad prostitutes posing in their windows.

Several Amsterdammers interviewed for this story said that they would never consider visiting the neighborhood at such a time because of the rowdy, crowded scene. “The public space is dominated by facilities that are almost all redolent of sex, drugs and drink,” Ms. Halsema wrote of the historic city center in an official letter to the city council in July 2019....

[One proposed solution is] the relocation of sex workers to a “prostitution hotel” elsewhere in the city... Another headline-grabbing proposal... would make it illegal for visitors to buy cannabis in Amsterdam’s coffee shops, which are concentrated in the Red Light District and which have long been popular with tourists...

A tourism “monoculture” has [pushed out] residents... Businesses and services that used to cater to locals — high-quality bakeries, butcher shops, and the like — have been replaced by trinket shops, ice-cream parlors and “Nutella shops,” which serve takeaway waffles and other treats smeared in the hazelnut spread, mainly to tourists. Meanwhile, rising housing prices — due, in part, to the rise of Airbnb and other vacation rental platforms — have made the city center unaffordable for many locals.

I went to Amsterdam, solo, in 1993. I was interested in the art, and I had my pen and notebook. I never set foot in a marijuana coffee shop, and I tried to move quickly past the sleazier things, but I did stop to record some of the sleaziness:

 

The fabulous aesthetic pleasures of the historical city with its grand museums was undermined by some awful, ugly junk even back then, nearly 30 years ago, so it is hard for me to imagine what the residents are complaining about today, which is the crowds and worsening conditions of the last few years.

"It’s more necessary than ever to find the empathetic experience of meeting another person, being in another culture, to smell it, to suffer it, to put up with the hardship and the nuisances of travel, all of that matters."

The pro-travel position, aspirationally articulated by Paul Theroux, quoted in "Would the Pandemic Stop Paul Theroux From Traveling? No. Of course not" (NYT). 

Nice photo of Theroux's workspace at the link. I'm a longtime fan of that genre of photography, and I declare this example worth a click. 

I'm also a longtime participant in the debate about whether to travel, and I'm more of a con than a pro. In that light, I'll say that Theroux sets a somewhat high bar for what you're supposed to be doing in this thing called travel — "empathetic experience," "being in, "smell it," "suffer it," "put up with the hardship." It's no pleasure trip. 

Another Theroux quote at the link: "You cannot be a grumpy traveler. You will not get anywhere. You’ll be killed, you’ll be insulted, you won’t be able to travel. So you need to get along with people. I think that I’m characterized as cantankerous perhaps because if you see things the way they are, and you just describe things the way they are, you can be accused of being unkind."

"Their passion for nature cuts to the heart of what Scandinavians call friluftsliv (pronounced free-loofts-liv)."

"The expression literally translates as 'open-air living' and was popularised in the 1850s by the Norwegian playwright and poet, Henrik Ibsen, who used the term to describe the value of spending time in remote locations for spiritual and physical wellbeing.... Today, the phrase is used more broadly by Swedes, Norwegians and Danes to explain anything from lunchtime runs in the forest, to commuting by bike (or on cross-country skis when the snow falls) to joining friends at a lakeside sauna (often followed by a chilly dip in the water) or simply relaxing in a mountain hut. The concept is also linked closely to allmansrätten, the right to roam. Scandinavian countries all have similar laws which allow people to walk or camp practically anywhere, as long as they show respect for the surrounding nature, wildlife and locals....  Swedish data confirm that the amount of time young people are active outdoors has dipped slightly over the past three decades, with around 25% now spending time in the countryside or forest at least once a week, compared to 29% in the early 1980s."

From "Friluftsliv: The Nordic concept of getting outdoors" (BBC). That's a 2017 article. I got there after googling "friluftsliv," which I encountered in a new article, "One Tank Getaway: Late winter in Door County offers great food, welcome respite" (On Milwaukee).