Good & Green Guide Amsterdam
A timely new guide to Amsterdam highlights environmentally sound and people-friendly resources.
Amsterdam, eco-town
Being an environmentally aware, fair-trade supportive resident of (or visitor to) Amsterdam has just gotten easier. The Green & Good Guide Amsterdam, published November 2009, offers some five hundred listings that are "good for us and green for our environment". These include fair trade shops, farmers' markets, yoga studios, aid organisations, vegetarian restaurants, eco-fashion shops, green hotels, and more. The guide includes a map of Amsterdam on the inside covers and various indexes to make it easier to find one's way around the book - and the city.
The author and compiler of the guidebook, Harold Verhagen, writes in the introduction the idea came to him during a trip to London with his family whilst trying to visit some vegetarian/organic restaurants and yoga studios. "This is our way of enjoying a city and at the same time taking of our health, other people, and the environment." The regular city guides lists four or five 'veggie' places, Verhagen continues, "but you have to search for them in a long list of restaurants; strange, since London is packed with organic and 'veggie' places." They can be trendy and modern, he says, and it is great fun to visit them. "The problem is that you cannot find all these places in the regular travel or city guides. In fact, yoga studies are not listed in any of these guides - you have to Google them, write everything down, and then try to find their locations on the map."
Two months later Verhagen had the same experience in Paris.
More than just tourist info
These experiences led him to develop the kind of guide that he would want to have for Amsterdam, a city that he knows well. Verhagen observes that green guides exist for New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but that those guides don't list aid organisations, fair trade shops, or yoga studios. By filling these gaps in the Amsterdam guide, he asserts it is the first of its kind for any city in the world.
While the hotel listings might be primarily of interest to visitors, there are also sections of the Good & Green Guide Amsterdam more relevant to people living in the city. As such, the guide has an extensive restaurant section but also sections devoted to second-hand furniture and financial institutions. For many of the entries, Verhagen displays a rating system based on various criteria, described in full in an appendix.
Take five
As a taste of the kind of things the Good and Green Guide Amsterdam has to offer, here are five selections from its pages:
Kinderkookcafé: Vondelpark 6b (Overtoom 325) (Oud-West) - A café for children where they can learn to cook, serve, make menus, and wash up afterwards. Mostly vegetarian. Also yoga for kids.
Bicyle Hotel Amsterdam: Van Ostadestraat 123, (Oud-Zuid) - A cosy hotel in De Pijp, environmentally-friendly management, paper and bottle recycling, solar power. Rents bicycles to its guests.
Brouwerij het IJ: Funenkade 7 (Zeeburg) - A beer brewery which brews organic beer. Housed in a monumental windmill, it has its own café annex tasting facility.
Electric taxi stand: Prince Hendrixplantsoen in front of the Victoria Hotel (Centrum) - Three electric Tuk-tuks, two electric clean cabs, and an electric MotorCab have a stand in front of the Victoria Hotel. Suitable for quick, clean rides in the city centre.
Fair Trade Shop Amsterdam: Heiligeweg 45 (Centrum) - Selling authentic and mostly handmade products created by craftspeople in developing countries. All merchandise is certified under fair trade criteria.
Click to order the Good & Green Guide Amsterdam, €19,95.
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