View: Amsterdam, Berlin,Oh, to hear these two cities talk

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

How do you remember a person you never actually knew? I have this distinct memory of a near-naked guy dressed in nothing but a golden tanga, sun-clad, impeccable haircut, nearly running me over while exiting the business school I once attended in the 1990s. Amsterdam was a different place then. In my early 20s, hailing from a decidedly provincial and rural background, the city was where hedonism and freedom were celebrated.

It was Amsterdam's unique selling point, and perhaps from an outsider's perspective, it still is. Strikingly, pushing us city folks across the brink of the new millennium, Berlin slowly overtook Amsterdam in our imagination as the place to be. There, one could still party hard.

Amidst the debris of Cold War relics and in the shady context of a bankrupt city, Berlin offered the kind of intemperance that we felt Amsterdam had forgotten about. Back to the guy in golden tanga, his well-defined buttocks receding in the horizon, me off to the metro to catch my train home, back to the village, a bicycle ride of about two kilometres waiting for me once I had reached the station home. Henri Pronker, I never knew his name, but it is now all-over Dutch media, passed away at 66.

It now appears an unfortunate fall did him in, followed by a diagnosis of cancer and then becoming terminally ill. He once told a local Dutch newspaper that he liked to think of himself as a mystery, a flash of a skating man that everyone can make their own minds up about. 'I belong to the living street furniture of Amsterdam.