Travel Ugly*--The Red Light District and The Holocaust

[kat0ninetales]

01/30/12

Day three in Amsterdam. I've officially done the tourist thing and consumed too much of everything. I am changed by my travels in the following ways:

1. I can walk into a bar and order a local beer I know I'll like--La Chouffe. I'm fairly certain its logo is an anthropomorphized garden gnome. This feels fitting.

2. I can confidently use Euro

Comments

[cynthia_french]

I also found Dublin to be way more culturally diverse than I thought it would be. There were so many Asians...and Eastern Europeans, and everyone was carrying a briefcase and cell phone and wearing suits. I only saw one person wearing shorts, and it was June, and she was obviously a tourist.

I enjoyed my visit to the Anne Frank house. It was both completely different and exactly the same as I thought it would be.

If you find the Pink Floyd inspired Wall Cafe, know that I spent a whole afternoon downstairs in the pool room with 6 friends laughing over the fact that even though we hadn't smoked anything yet that day, we had smoked so much that week that we could exhale and see remnants of smoke in the lamp above the pool table.

I found the live sex show I attended (because the 4 boys we were with did NOT want us girls to attend) to be more bizarro world than the red light district. Also, the guy who rant the hostile where we stayed wrote notes on our map about the red light district, things like "really old ladies," so it is kind of mapped out like a grocery store (or at least it was then). In one alley, an obviously American college-aged guy was coming out of one of the rooms, and my (drunk) friend Jessica leaned way over as close to him as she could and said loudly, but not in a yell, "Walk of Shame Buddy, Walk of Shame," and got louder and pointed at him as he tried to make his neck and head disappear into his collar, walking quickly away from us in the opposite direction.

[kat0ninetales]

I have more to say about the Anne Frank house, but I agree. Both exactly what I expected and not at all.

And I have a write up about the live sex show experience. To come!

I did not find the Pink Floyd cafe, I don't think. My favorite was the (aptly-named) 420 cafe. Almost Cheers-like.