Amsterdam to Extinguish One-Third of Red Light District

by Catherine Bodry on

A chunk of one of Amsterdam’s most famous tourist draws, the red light district, will soon be transformed into housing. The 700-year-old district is a maze of alleys lined with brothels, sex shops, and “coffee shops” selling marijuana and other mind-altering substances. This darker side of Amsterdam is as much a tourist destination as Anne Frank’s house or the Van Gogh Museum. However, the city’s Mayor, Job Cohen, opines that the concentration of sex in the city center is too high.

The brothel owner got a pretty sum for his 51 windows — 25 million euros, or $35 million. Real estate must pay more than sex these days.

[via Reuters]

Amsterdam’s Handbag Museum

by Martha Edwards on

So many women out there are crazy about shoes but while I appreciate a good set of pumps, I’m more into cute handbags than shoes. If you agree with me, you might want to consider a trip to Amsterdam and a stop over at the new Amsterdam Tassen Museum, which proudly features over 3,500 bags, purses and suit cases from the last, oh, 400 years or so. Located in a sophisticated canal-side building, a visit to the museum is sure to leave you feeling not-so-chic in your wrinkled travel garb. Your backpack probably won’t feel as luxurious anymore either.

No doubt there’s bound to be some interesting ones in there. Like? How about this one, which appears to hold about 7 coins. Or this interesting leather piece from the 16th century. And there’s this one from Botswana. There’s even some for sale.

Three-Day Wait to Score Shrooms in Amsterdam? Maybe

by Justin Glow on

Looking to score ‘shrooms in Amsterdam? You may have to wait three days.

The Netherlands’ policy on drugs distinguishes different substances as hard or soft. Hard drugs, like heroin and cocaine, are illegal, and possession — even for personal use — is a crime that’s fully enforced. Soft drugs, like marijuana and mushrooms, while still technically illegal, are tolerated.

Job Cohen, Amsterdam’s mayor, is looking to make it a bit tougher to score by enacting a three-day waiting period for the purchase of psilocybin mushrooms — just like Wal-Mart does with guns. The effort stems (haha, stems… get it?) from the death of a 17-year-old French girl who jumped off a bridge while totally whacked out on shrooms, man. Buzzkill.

“Under the proposal, potential mushroom buyers would have to show identity papers when visiting one of the ‘smart shops’ where they are sold in the famously tolerant city. They would then be given a card with the date listed on it, as well as fliers with information on the mushrooms,” according to the AFP. ” Three days later, the mushrooms could be collected.”

Not a bad idea, I guess.

Across Northern Europe: A second thought on museums in Amsterdam

by Brook Silva-Braga on

You should never agree with yourself too often, at least that’s what I’m thinking today, so I’d like to mention a few museums that are worth all of our time. Some readers may remember an anti-museum post a little while ago, though more readers may have stopped reading after that one and are missing out on this mea culpa.

There are plenty of very good museums in Amsterdam, but the three I visited were Van Gogh’s, Rembrandt’s, and Anne Frank’s. Museums dedicated to one person tend to be really interesting; Picasso’s museo in Barcelona may be my favorite anywhere with work spanning from his childhood to old age.

But in Holland’s capital I first stopped into Van Gogh’s temple with work spanning seven of the ten short years he worked. In contrast to my experience with Picasso, I came away from Van Gogh’s museum with less awe rather than more. The work we always see from Van Gogh (Starry Night, the sunflowers, the self portraits) hews to a familiar and wonderful style. But a fuller sampling of his work revealed a scattershot, groping attempt to find that style. One portrait looked like a rough Rembrandt, many like so-so Seurats. But they also helped you understand the steps he took to reach his own iconic style. Most striking to me was Pietà (naar Delacroix), a painting of Mary and Jesus with a pallet so identical to Starry Night that it had to be put to canvas with the same physical paint (both were completed in 1889 but that’s as far as my scholarship goes on this one).

A couple canals away is Rembrandt’s house, where the master lived for two decades before creditors came calling. There are only a couple Rembrandt paintings here, but dozens of his etchings are on display and many are amazing. The various rooms of his multi-story house have been restored to approximate the furnishings he knew but it has a slightly sterile, fake feel. At one point a security guard started fiddling with the painting tools in the studio, underscoring that the original items are long lost. Still, the studio where most of Rembrandt’s work was created is inspiring. The light in the room has the soft, flattering quality of his portraits.

Another excellent display is at the entry, where a broken vase and other items sit just below a painting of the same items. Comparing the vase and the painting reveals the hyper-reality of the art and also the natural imperfection of the pottery which you might otherwise hold against the painter rather than the sculptor.

If you’re walking through Amsterdam and see a thick line snaking around the corner, you’re probably at Anne Frank’s House. It was after 8pm when Sabrina and I got there but the line persisted. Better a line than an over-stuffed museum.

“I feel really bad being German here,” Sabrina said. I tried to commiserate by mentioning the War Crimes Museum in Vietnam.

Still, I thought I’d make the most of her presence by using her as a translator but we were both surprised to learn the diary is written in Dutch rather than German. Anne was just four when the family moved to Amsterdam, it was another seven years before they went into hiding.

The first most striking thing about the Frank house is how big it is. Most Amsterdamers would be happy to have an apartment as big as the secret annex. Most Amsterdamers, of course, don’t share their flat with seven others without leaving for five years. When we’re talking about experiences as horrific as the Franks we’re apt to think of it as an unmitigated hell, but the relative spaciousness of the annex is maybe an example of our narrow conception of hell (and/or the way its been presented to us in film and story). Regardless, it didn’t have to be small to be awful.

It was a pleasant, wet night in Amsterdam when they closed the museum on us. Sabrina sat on the back of her bike and I peddled hard up the little canal inclines, proud to keep the bike upright with someone on the back. I flew to Copenhagen the next morning and I’m no Tony Bennett so I took my heart with me. But the airline must have been more sentimental, cause they left my bag in Amsterdam.

###

Previously on Across Northern Europe:

  1. Shining a Light on Iceland
  2. Lonely Love on Iceland
  3. Iceland Gone Wild
  4. A Trip to the Airport
  5. Why Bother Going to Berlin?
  6. A Perishable Feast
  7. Globians Film Festival
  8. The Elusive Dutch Drivers License
  9. Terror in Berlin
  10. Authentic Belgian Beer
  11. Two to a bed in Bruges
  12. A Coda to Travel Love in Amsterdam

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.

Across Northern Europe: A Coda to Travel Love in Amsterdam

by Brook Silva-Braga on

Sometimes I walk to the southeastern corner of Central Park and watch the tour buses respire tourists. I walk by slowly and try to pick up an accent or language. For a while I thought of stopping and offering to show them the city, to take them for a drink or walk through the park. But I never did.

One nice thing about New York is that there are always plenty of travelers to watch and I like watching them more than I like looking through my own photographs because they are living something current and exciting and photos only remind me I was doing that at some other time but not now.

If there is one honest to goodness reason not to go on a long trip it is because coming home is so impossible. A married friend of mine e-mailed me while I was away saying how much he still misses that time in his life – now fifteen years in the past – when he went traveling in Asia. At film festivals, after the Q&A, someone always comes up to tell me about the trip they took two years or two decades ago and still think about always.

I’ve sometimes compared travel to a dangerous drug, which makes you feel high in a new and fabulous way and then becomes necessary just to feel normal. And I think that’s true.

But just now I’m thinking that high is more like a first love.

First, with love, you find yourself with a certain kind of new-found freedom. In high school or maybe university you start to become your own person and its flush with possibility and uncertainty and innocence. And then you meet someone who makes you feel high in a new and fabulous way.

When it ends, if you’re lucky, you’ve learned something about finding the right person but certainly you’ve lost the innocence of caring so much so quickly so blindly.

Isn’t that how it felt on your first week out alone? Wasn’t it like a new kind of freedom? And wasn’t it filled in by making connections to people that were much stronger and faster than they had any right to be?

If you are unlucky, when the newness has warn off, you’re left looking at pictures. You are too jaded or scared or cynical or bored to make new pictures that mean anything.

“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the suffering of being unable to love.”

I have no idea where I’m going with this.

But its worth reminding myself that I’m in the apartment of the girl who filled up my innocence when I left home more than two years ago. The thing about love when you’re traveling is that you can always blame the road for the split. You don’t have to learn what’s wrong with being together, because itineraries split you up before you find out. So its like the magic of that first love in high school, but without the kick-in-the-gut first break-up. What a dangerous little thing.

“It’s really good to see you,” I said when we touched glasses tonight, my last in Amsterdam.

“Is it different seeing me in my real life instead of the other times when I was traveling?” she asked.

“It’s very much the same but its very different too.”

“I think its very different,” she said.

“Yes, but you are the same person.” And that hung in the air.

What I meant is that in the bar in Amsterdam with the warm red light and the white, leather benches I saw the same face I met at the World Bar in Sydney 31 months ago. I heard the same voice inflecting the same way.

At most museums and some monuments they have benches in just the perfect place. You have a very good view and can rest your legs. You don’t wait in line to sit on them, of course. You maybe mill around hoping someone will get up. Or you stand there looking at the paintings while someone else sits. And when someone gets up the bench is immediately filled.

There are certain people like this too, who when they become available will always be made unavailable by the next passerby. The passerby might truly love the view or only know that it is a good seat and they should take it. But if you ever fall in love with such a bench and then leave it to go to Asia and Europe and South America you can be certain if you drop in for a few days it will not be empty. And if you’re very unlucky that won’t even hurt because all those places will have made you almost unable to love seeing new things or unable to do other things. You’ll only be reminded that something current and exiting is in a 31-month-old picture.

That’s not hell, it’s Amsterdam.

###

Previously on Across Northern Europe:

  1. Shining a Light on Iceland
  2. Lonely Love on Iceland
  3. Iceland Gone Wild
  4. A Trip to the Airport
  5. Why Bother Going to Berlin?
  6. A Perishable Feast
  7. Globians Film Festival
  8. The Elusive Dutch Drivers License
  9. Terror in Berlin
  10. Authentic Belgian Beer
  11. Two to a bed in Bruges

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.