Rerekuka's Travel Journal: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Amsterdam was much like Haarlem, only bigger and busier, with art museums, canals, wonderful pastries, lots of bikes (the Dutch ride bikes everywhere and are in great shape in general), rich history, and lax attitudes regarding some drugs and sex.

We walked through the famed Red Light District, where the sex workers, not unlike mannequins, appear in red-framed window displays. The womens' demeanor (men have tried unsuccessfully to get in on this gig) ranged from vacant and bored to sternly businesslike as they answered men's questions and conducted business. According to Lonely Planet, the average encounter lasts about 20 minutes and costs about $60 USD. Didn't look like much of a party to me. The Dutch aren't all that excited about it either, comprising only 2% of the business. Brits are number one, at 40%. Who keeps track of all this? Since prostitution is legal and taxes are paid, I guess someone is keeping records.

We also toured the Van Gogh museum, well done with sections of his art devoted to different phases of his lifetime. There was also an exhibit of Max Beckman's paintings done during his exile from Germany in Amsterdam during World War II.

We toured the Anne Frank House, where Anne Frank wrote her famous diary while hiding from the Nazis with her family in a secret annex above her father's shop. It was heartrending to stand in the rooms where the family had hid, and to see their possessions, pictures, and the notes and diary Anne kept. She wanted to be a journalist and for her experience and account to mean something, so she was true to her passion and wrote and wrote and wrote a book that has been published all over the world and translated into over a hundred languages. She is one of the most important journalists of our time, with a message as important today as when she wrote it.

The museum also contained an evocative interactive exhibit called Free2choose, which polls museum goers on morality conundrums such as what is right when freedom of speech conflicts with freedom to worship or rights of privacy. The audience votes on each situation and is given a breakdown on how the group and all participants voted. This was especially topical given the recent assasination of Theo Van Gogh (Vincent's grand nephew) by Islamic extremists over a movie he made about abuses of Muslim women, and the death threats against the cartoonists and paper who published the cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

For more info about Anne Frank and the museum, see
http://www.annefrank.org/content.asp?pid=1&lid=1&setlanguage=2

Amsterdam Scenes