Without making light of dangerous temperatures across the rest of Europe, today in Amsterdam, where it reached 100°F, the biggest problem is finding space to jump off the local bridge.
To deal with today’s heat most shops just closed and everyone found enough shade and, for sure, enough shoreline to grill and drink and swim. The dull bedlam of city as beach.
This is, after all, a city dug out of marsh. Water all around and water in the streets too, the solution to too much heat is as close as where other kids play in traffic.
Admittedly, when I first came to Amsterdam, falling in a canal was considered maximally unpleasant, a kind of frat boy right of passage. You did not want to swim in the black water and whatever was floating in it.
At the time I joked that if, somehow, the canals could be made translucent and Bahama-esque, so clear you could see to the bottom, the whole place would lose its appeal, become no more than a royal-person’s backyard, not a real “city.”
Back then real estate was affordable and fewer stores were London based too.
With less boat traffic, more flushing of the water, and major attempts to clean up the canals over the last decade, though, swimming in lots of places is now moderately safe.
Thus, while canals filled with mermaid fountains, or actual mermaids, are but a worrisome decade of rich people away, for the moment everyone is surviving.
Tomorrow the temperature will drop twenty degrees and it will be back to the normal summer glories here.