Now we mustn't be naive. Amsterdam is lovely with charming canals and quaint brick architecture, but it's also the home of legalized prostitution and marijuana sales. What's crazy is that you could roam the streets for several days and actually think a pair of barefooted jugglers was the most exotic thing you'd stumbled upon. That's assuming, of course, that you managed to miss a certain section of town known for a more scandalous approach to entertainment.
One minute you are winding along watching some people in a raft and then...
WHAMMO!! Psychedelic drugs and magic mushrooms are for sale before your very eyes.
The other thing on display can be seen posing in a window wearing next-to-nothing while casually giving a group of overeager bachelors the middle finger. That's for real. You can literally go window shopping for sex on a street that is half a block away from a gorgeous old church. You can read about it all you want in preparation, but stumbling on a woman adjusting the string of her undies in real life while you are casually strolling down the street is a new kind of experience.
No wonder they post little blue signs suggesting that young children be escorted by an adult.
We learned that in Amsterdam, there is a difference between a café and a coffee shop. Up until this trip, I just thought "café" was a snazzier, French-er way to describe a place where I plan to ingest caffeine. This is not the case in Amsterdam. Cafés are where you drink coffee while reading a book, and coffee shops (or coffee houses) are where you smoke marijuana. Big difference.
They aren't discrete either. But I guess they really don't need to be considering everything is legal.
We didn't spend too much time in the Red Light District, just enough to say we had seen it. We did a little investigating in some of the less-sketchy shops. This one sold a cheerful combination of art, drugs, candles, incense, and various books on holistic medicine, meditation, and other such topics. The shop had an open sitting area with cozy benches and a view of the water where you could sit and enjoy whatever drug you fancied that day. The whole thing was a bit surreal. It was all very casual and a bit of a perspective shift compared to the more conservative US attitude I was accustomed to. It's an interesting experience to find yourself in a place where all the usual taboos no longer apply.
