Amsterdam

Sarah about to head back to London,
at the station with Anita (right).

We have just dropped Sarah off at the central railway station to return to London after spending a wonderful weekend with her in Holland and it’s now 1130 and we are walking through the red light district of Amsterdam and wondering if what we are seeing is real.

There are streets full of houses with lots of little windows and in nearly every window is a girl in her underwear looking shamelessly erotic.

They are every shape and size you could wish for, (or not!)

This is quite a weird feeling, walking past this bizarre sideshow of prostitutes with Anna, Anita, and thousands of other tourists, just minutes from the railway station in downtown Amsterdam.

The air is thick with marijuana smoke, sweet and sickly, wafting out from nearly every coffee shop and people openly smoking large joints on the streets.

What a strange place this is where sex and drugs are one of the first things to leap out and grab you when you first get off the train.

The Oude Kerk, a haven amongst the brothels

It is initially hard to see the beauty in this city and it’s only when we finally stumble upon a gracious old church, almost totally surrounded by prostitutes in their little kiosks, that I realise this city is a pageant of contrasts.

In the same way that Paris has enchanting romantic architecture alongside homeless beggars on the cobbled streets, Amsterdam has sex, sleeze and drugs cheek by jowl with 16th century houses alongside the never-ending tree lined canals.

It takes some getting used to and I didn’t find one day was enough to get past the juxtaposition of sex tourism and historic Holland.

Yes we bought our piece of “Space Cake” and walked through the alley ways gawking at the sex workers along with all the other tourists, but overall, the experience was rather bewildering.

We found a lively restaurant with tables upstairs on a balcony overlooking one of the busy canals and sat in the sun to watch the activity on the surrounding tables and on the waterway below.

I ordered a ciabatta roll with beef, which came with thin slices of raw beef, which I couldn’t bring myself to eat. 

Anna generously swapped her lovely looking chicken roll for my beef one and said that it was, “almost like eating smoked salmon, quite nice really.”

On a nearby table a very urbane family was celebrating the engagement of a handsome young couple, on another, half a dozen young supermodel girls were out for lunch dressed for a Paris fashion show and outside on a bridge a couple kissed romantically.

Anita showed us around some adorable places including a secluded, tranquil area that used to house wealthy single women and the charming old university grounds where she studied music.

We sat on the steps of a cast iron footbridge over a canal, eating hand made chocolates from Puccini, while yet another young couple kissed passionately in a doorway nearby and later found a table in a sun drenched courtyard overlooking a canal while a jazz combo played softly in the background and we drank Grolsch lager and French wine.

Yes, we had a relatively fleeting experience of Amsterdam and we left on the metro to find our car in one of the free parking areas on the fringe of the city, with many images swirling in our minds like random snapshots in a travel photo album.

Two of the most memorable impressions were the pair of coots that had made their nest out of a collection of floating litter on a small platform near the side of a canal, with the male bird busily bringing twigs and any other suitable debris to the female who was sitting proudly on top of her rubbish pile keeping her eggs warm.

The other was the  swan that had also made it’s nest from floating rubbish on a wooden platform right next to all the tourist boat wharfs. 

In the middle of all this hustle and bustle, these lovely birds were just getting on with their normal life oblivious to the constant human circus of sex, drugs and romance. 

There might be a message in that for me.

And the space cake?

We had it with a cup of tea later in the day when we got back to our boat and after a couple of hours, I asked Anna if she felt anything different and she said no, and neither did I. 

So that was our experience of Amsterdam. 

Probably didn’t give it long enough to get over the initial culture shock, but enjoyed the architecture, the endless canals and their indigenous inhabitants. 

Here are some images of Amsterdam.