Markus and Brian's Excellent European Adventure

The City of Hospitality

Hey there peoples,

This is officially my first post to our little website and it has been quite the first couple of days to kick off our trip. Amsterdam is a winding city, filled with locals and tourists alike who all seem to be looking for the same thing, drugs or sex. Maybe both. Probably both. It's getting to these desired objectives which can be tricky since the bicycles and cars alike drive around as if they're the only ones on the road, making the pedestrian the lowest form of life on the transportation food chain. This makes the shopping streets here in Amsterdam which are paved with intricate coblestone designs and allow no vehicles, a very welcoming addition to the city.

When not looking for sex and/or drugs, there are some other things to do. There's a bunch of museums, which we only had time to visit one of on this short stay. We were going to visit the Anne Frank house, but it was overun with school children when we attempted, forcing us to postpone that visit until we come back. Oh I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Markus. I don't care about the museums. I want to hear about the sex and drugs!". Well, alrighty then. Here we go.

THE RED LIGHT DISTRICT (rated NC-17 due to sex content)

When we went looking for the red light district, we didn't know quite what to expect. It's one of those things you've pictured a few times after some descriptions from "previous customers", and what I had pictured was some seedy looking back alleys with big neon lights and pimps calling out to people yelling that inside their estblishment was the, "best damn pootang this city has to offa." What we found instead was not far removed from the shopping streets mentioned previously, except that the merchandise in the windows were human, scantily clad and trying to not look as if they were about to die of boredome. Every lady has her own little boothe, surrounded by lights, and the booths seemed to be clustered in groups of 6 with 3 windows on top of the others. The lights surrounding these ladies are very bright and are used, as far as I can tell, so that the line between the ugly and beautifull hookers gets blurred a little. Making eye contact with these girls is dangerous because if they think you're interested at all, they begin to bang on the windows and start motioning with seductive body language. I think they even have the ability to open their little booth-like windows and can start to follow you making you feel just a little awkward.

Anyways, as far as drugs go, you can pretty much walk into every third store and find weed in smoking or pastry form. This means that anyone looking to get high can do so in about 2 minutes flat, unless they're already high, in which case people just wander around with a mixture of confusion, mirth, then confusion again.

Well, I have to sign off now. I'm sure that I'll get better at this writting thing again as time passes. Being in Computer Science has the drawback of leaving you with puny and pathetic english language skills, but if you ask me to encode this message using the Huffman procedure, that I can do. God I'm useless.

Take it easy everyone,

Markus

Posted by Markus at May 21, 2003 12:14 PM