Ever since moving to Amsterdam more than five years ago I’ve wanted to run the Dam tot Damloop, which is a 10-mile (16.09 km) race from the center of Amsterdam to the center of Zaandam. This year I was invited to participate to raise money to the Blijf Groep, which is an Amsterdam organization that has been successfully campaigning against domestic violence for nearly 40 years.
Category: Amsterdam
An English church in Amsterdam with a Scottish minister
When Alex Salmond (you know who) was a young MP at Westminister in the 1980s, he had on his office wall a Radical Scotland front page quoting the veteran nationalist Tom Nairn that Scotland would not be free until the last Church of Scotland minister had been strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post. That’s according to today’s Guardian newspaper and I can see that you’re wondering what this has to do with Amsterdam on Scotland’s day of destiny. Quite a lot in fact – but please let me explain.
Now that’s a gamble
For many years the real winner in the Netherlands when it came to gambling was the state. In a good year the casinos under the National Foundation for the Exploitation of Casino Games (Holland Casino) generate around € 270 million to the Dutch treasury. However, for some time now Holland Casino and its fourteen state casinos have been running with a loss, which last year ended on € 22 million – a new all time low. The official reason for this is a decline in customers, but I suppose it could also be that the customers do not lose enough (or win too much), or that having a monopoly there’s no real motivation to generate a sellable product. I wonder if a lucrative business gone sour has anything to do with the Dutch governments decision to liberalize gambling in 2015 and to sell Holland Casino in 2017?