Amsterdam port city - you’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy…or a more serene setting amongst interesting and tolerant people. It was a trip to sin city- the European Vegas- but also a stroll in the romantic “Venice of the North”. There are wide and beautiful canals and dark alleyways, brothels and duck ponds, museums and live sex shows, tulip bulbs being sold by the kilo right next to stores selling copious amounts of marijuana. It is the city of many faces, Janus’s capital on Earth, and the contrast never gets boring.
Before the juicy stuff, a point of clarity: the Dutch live in The Netherlands.
Holland is the westernmost region of the nation in which the city of Amsterdam resides. To add to the confusion, all three areas (NL, Holland, and Amsterdam) have individual flags. The flag of Amsterdam is “XXX” but, oddly, it has nothing to do with porno. It was originally a sign that Dutch knights from the middle of the Netherlands would chalk on their armor to identify themselves to countrymen. Nowadays it is exploited as a symbol of sex with a fortuitous historical connection.
XXX aside, this city has a lot of history as one of the major centers of maritime Europe. Since the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, Amsterdam has been a major port for global trade and a hubbub of international culture. The Dutch themselves enjoy a rich history (and hearty bank accounts) from their pioneering efforts in reforming merchant excursions during the European imperial era. The VOC (a Dutch abbreviation for the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or Dutch East India Company) was the world’s first multinational corporation and the first company to issue public stock shares. It also had authority to wage war, mint coins, draft treaties, and establish colonies under its own flag. The brilliant idea, although simple in retrospect, to share the risks of long overseas voyages made the VOC profitable as well as safe for investment. Sharing risk increased investor confidence in turn creating a demand for investment that was met with the issuance of stock. It was a failsafe endeavor, often doubling investor sums within four years, paying average dividends of 18% annually. A large part of the unwavering success was the 21 year monopoly on Asian trade which allowed the traders to charge whatever they wanted for products, like silk, that were relatively cheap and easily obtainable for the Dutch but completely foreign to other Europeans. The VOC succeeded in many areas where other trade empires could not (trading with Japan, for instance) because they took a wholly secular approach to trade. It turns out that being upfront about the intention to profit and not trying to smuggle religion in with their goods impressed the Asiatic nations and set them at ease for trade agreements. The modern result of the VOC’s influence is the Dutch East Indies and maritime metropolises like Amsterdam.
The Dam at Amstel River (Amsterdam) is organized in a series of concentric half circles that surround the central port/train station. It is built on over 1,200 separate islands interwoven by innumerable bridges. Being the cultural and financial capital of The Netherlands, it also houses some of the great European works of art, such as the largest collection of Van Gogh originals in the world.
Van Gogh was an interesting dude. He had some weird relationships, went through a few bouts of 
depression including a self-imposed stay in a nuthouse, and was part of a small group of artists who revolutionized art. His major contributions include working with lighter backgrounds, experimental color combinations, unorthodox brushstrokes (smaller and disconnected, letting the color draw the picture together rather than the line and form) all the while maintaining basic themes (rural life and portraits). Van Gogh, widely viewed as a failure in his own time, painted a lot of portraits of himself because he couldn’t afford a model. It may have been a blessing (for the art world) that Van Gogh was never rewarded with money and fame because that gave him the freedom and drive to experiment and change. It also fueled his depression which inspired him to cut his ear off, shoot himself twice in the chest, and paint some of his more powerful pieces (in no particular order):
On my visit to the museum, I felt a bit strange about enjoying art inspired by insanity and depression but overall thought it was “neat”. Details of Van Gogh’s history are rich and thoroughly analyzed by very smart people…it doesn’t interest me beyond what I already said so look it up on Wikipedia.
The architecture in Amsterdam is practicality meshed with experimental engineering resulting in a cluster of cartoonishly-proportioned toon-town buildings. 
The houses in Amsterdam are constructed up and back rather than width-ways. There are two major reasons for this unique styling. First, space is extremely limited and valuable since most of the city is built on land reclaimed from the ocean through countless fierce struggles at the levees. Second, there was a width tax but not a square footage tax so building narrow pencil thin houses became the obvious loophole around paying high taxes. One extreme example is a house about eight feet across, forty feet deep, and six stories tall (imagine living in a giant slice of bread). One consequence of this style of architecture became immediately apparent to me (keep in mind I have moved a lot of furniture): how in the hell are you going to get a couch up there? The answer, as it turns out, is that you build a hook on the top of the building, throw a rope around it, and use the pully-rig to move goods and furniture into these narrow floors through the gigantic, wall-sized windows. But wait, the fine tuning of this procedure is a bit more complicated: imagine pulling a lacquered armoire made from premium Indian Mahogany up the side of a brick building; it would scratch the pulp out of it. The Dutch solution (get this): BUILD OUR HOUSES SO THEY LEAN FOWARD! Never mind building hooks on arms that reach out in front of the house, lets intentionally make the entire city lopsided so that we live our daily lives teetering stories above volatile waters and narrow streets. The final notable point in this conundrum is that the houses are all built on unstable soil and shifting silts so many of them lean unpredictably anyways in addition to their engineered crookedness. Now we have tall, leaning, pencil thin houses with hooks on the ceiling that are built on quicksand with giant windows…I wonder if pot was legal before or after the architects drafted this scheme.
That brings us to our next point: marijuana is legal, as well as any other “natural” or unrefined drugs (i.e. hashish, psychedelic mushrooms, peyote) and can be 
purchased in numerous "coffee shops" throughout the central port district. Cocaine, heroin, LSD, methamphetamines, barbiturates, and any other synthetic drugs are technically still criminal to use or possess in any quantity. But, when you give a mouse a cookie…it is going to want a glass of milk. In this case, when you give a bunch of people weed, they are going to sling crack on the street corners. No joke. There are more crack dealers than pigeons in certain areas of the city. Remarkable though, the police and the underworld have found a symbiosis of sorts; the dealers and thugs stay in a certain region, the red-light district, and the police stay out. The rest of the city is relatively clean and safe, save for a few wanders and vagrants, whereas the central port is a hive of thieves and criminals.
So enough about the architecture and depressed redheads: this is Amsterdam. People are high on drugs all over the place, wandering like the living dead from “coffee shop” to “coffee shop” to buy their substances of choice and then to other designated buildings to smoke and relax. The evenings burst to life in a neon volcano of porno and prostitution. Girls line the streets on all sides, standing behind large
pane glass, luring passerby with an arsenal of disturbing and enticing techniques (go see for yourself…I’m blushing just thinking about it)
One has the constant excitement of playing with fire when wandering the red-light district. Unfortunately, when playing with fire there are inevitable burns. I was mugged by two crack dealers at semi- gun point (there was a gun involved, I just wasn’t at the point of it).
Near the end of my stay the novelty of full immersion in the forbidden had worn off exposing an underbelly of desperation and sadness. I wanted Sting to come along and bust out into an all acoustic version of Roxanne, singing his soul out that, despite its legality, “you don’t have to turn on the red light!”
The paper thin façade associated with the drug trade is laughable. I suppose that pretending not to see it is a helpful tool for tolerating it; the police and locals merely look the other way and pretend that the “coffee shops” are actually selling Starbucks. This is part of the Dutch attitude: if it makes money, we’ll tolerate it. I have dove deep into liberal-capitalism, and it was a bit murky at the bottom. However, for all the drug freedoms and scandal in the city center the local people seem to live extraordinarily healthy and active lifestyles. There are more bicycles than people, tons of young and old on rollerblades, joggers aplenty, and generally beautiful and healthy looking folks everywhere. The parks are very well kept, equipped with modern fitness equipment, and are numerous. The grocery stores have the healthiest and widest selection of foods I have seen in Europe. It was a pleasant week and a wonderful chance for me to absorb a wholly different social vibration from that of Eastern Europe.
Picasa has a new web album. There are no pictures of me (aside from one of my feet) because I was suffering from a severe case of red eye. However, there is a picture of a giant windmill (yay)!
Hope all is well. It may be over a month until the next posting, but stay tuned; it’s going to be a big one…
Thomas
SPEAR CHUCKERS OF ZIMBABWE!
