Unattractive

This weekend, Elaine and I had a few days in Amsterdam. We did several of the things that tourists to Amsterdam are supposed to do - sample the beers, sample the cheese, be amazed by the variety of tulips they grow, buy some cheese and tulips, go to the van Gough museum, visit Anne Frank's house, experience the trams and the bicycles and so forth. To explain - while we used the trams, we didn't try biking in the city, however, I can still say that bikes were a central part of our trip. They are everywhere! It is impossible to walk on the pavements at some points because of the volume of bikes parked up and crossing the road is a dangerous exercise, not because of cars, trams or lorries but because of the cyclists! Man, they take no prisoners! That said, it was nice to see a capital city where so many bikes are in use as each one represents a car journey saved. Especially cute were the bikes that appear to have a large box or small coffin projecting from the front. These represent one way to ferry small children around. Other ways (apart from the traditional child seat behind the adult rider) include a small seat on the crossbar ahead of the adult rider or a small child seat attached to the handlebars. Brilliant! Women riding side saddle on the parcel rack of bikes also reminded me of India where women passengers on scooters often ride side-saddle, looking serene as the driver weaves between huge lorries and overflowing buses.

What we didn't do in Amsterdam, however, was sample the hospitality of 'coffeeshops' or visit the Red Light District. Okay, the second half of that statement is not entirely true, but I'll get to that later. In terms of coffeeshops, these are pretty mainstream establishments now. Guidebooks will list the 'best', arranged, I suspect, in order of tourist-friendliness/least scary rather than in terms of the quality of the comestibles they sell. We had two a stone's throw from our hotel and, whilst neither was listed in the guidebooks we had, they didn't look scary places at all and seemed to be populated by a mix of young(-ish) locals and tourists. Looking at them in comparison to the myriad bars in the city, I got the feeling that I would rather meet someone who had spent a few hours in a coffeeshop rather than someone who had been drinking strong beers for the same amount of time. We had a few dicks staying in the room opposite ours who had been sampling the beer (definitely and in quantity) and (possibly) the weed available. Their drunken singing and swearing at the tops of their voices at one in the morning wasn't great but, hey ho: it's a party town, right? We saw several stag parties (no hen parties) presumably there to get as messed up as possible before visiting the Red Light District.

Ah, the Red Light District. Amsterdam makes no bones about the area: it is a bona fide tourist attraction as it is clearly marked on all the city maps alongside the Museum District for example. We hadn't intended to go there but, on the final day and wanting to kill some time, we decided to go to the Old Church which happens to border the Red Light District. Making our way there, we went through an area that was obviously the epicentre of the 'party' side of the city: bar after bar, the aroma of stale beer and hordes of people wandering the street. As much as I am not a fan of 'tacky', give me touristy, garish tat anytime over the seediness that we encountered as we moved closer to the Old Church. When we finally reached it, we found it was closed and the best we could manage was to walk around and look at the exterior. In street-level, floor-to-ceiling windows of buildings opposite the church, women in stockings and suspenders stood distractedly looking into the distance or openly bored, playing with mobile phones. All were women of colour - Thai, Philipino or Indonesian possibly. I heard one woman shouting to a colleague inside the building and she spoke in a language that was not Dutch. We found ourselves wondering what sort of man would come here, to a place that is the antithesis of 'sexy' to indulge in an act that, given the circumstances, would border on abuse. We got out as soon as possible.

Amsterdam offers tourists the opportunity to indulge in two activities that, in most other capital cities, are conducted away from the gaze of the public eye, let alone the eyes of the authorities. However, one - smoking cannabis - has been made less sleazy, more open to all-comers. It retains its hippy connections in brightly painted coffeeshops and it feels, frankly, blearily happy and non-threatening. The other - prostitution - remains seedy, an implied violence almost tangible, the very 'openness' only serving to somehow emphasise the dirty reality at the centre of the trade: it's about power and money and the abuse of women at the bottom of the pile. There is no way that you can dress it up and make it an attraction.