Blogging location: Ruminating on memories in the good ol' flat... and ignoring my coursework... a little. Also sporting spectacles... There's a story to this for Lisbon. But that's later.
The canals in this city are gorgeous. The Dutch houses are also really quaint and the staircases are rather treacherous because of how small and tall they are (imagine only being able to fit half your foot on each step). The Dutch are supposedly some of the tallest people in the world, so houses have high ceilings, making the staircases even longer, steeper and more scary to climb.
Unfortunately, Amsterdam does have it's reputation (I will get to this soon). The city centre seems to lack even the tacky traditional culture. Everywhere I looked, the restaurants and stores all were themed with some other culture (for Australia, I guess they couldn't think of anything or couldn't sell vegemite to the local community, so they just have ice cream shops called "Australia"). I rarely saw anything Dutch! It was so different from the other places I'd been before. We had to rummage through the city to find local markets that sold cheese to get our Dutch on. Anyways, enough of globalisation...
Cheese
Cheese, glorious cheese.
My favourite souvenir from this entire trip has actually been from Amsterdam and it is the spade-shaped tool you see in the photo above... a cheese slicer! It says "Holland" on it, so that justified me buying it. That and we needed it for lunch because we went downtown on one of those cheese booths at a street market and we had nothing to eat it with. We bought two types of cheese, one spiced with cumin and another with various herbs such as parsley and oregano (hey, we're in Amsterdam, so that might not have been all the "herbs" put into the cheese... but I didn't feel funny afterwards, which is a good sign).
How was the cheese, you ask? Delicious! Europe in general has amazing cheese, and I'm a huge fan, so I figured I'd try cheese everywhere I could. The cumin cheese was half way in between a cheddar and brie texture, so more difficult to slice, but just as delicious as the herb-cheese.
The Redlight District
It was what I thought it would be. The street was just like the others with street lamps, but the rest of the night was illuminated by fluorescent glows of a seeping red, neon green, tacky purple and electric blue. We popped over on a Sunday night, which was relatively empty, but we did see the prostitutes sitting in the windows (I had seen an art exhibit earlier this year in London where a couple remade the Redlight District out of mannequins). Most of them were texting on their Blackberries. A few were gyrating and doing their thing, but for the most part, Sunday night wasn't a busy one for anybody. What hit me was actually looking into the eyes of these women: they're real people. I know this is obvious, but remove yourself from the computer monitor and go there yourself to get a grasp of the reality. Are eyes not the window to the soul?
These women selling themselves are just like me and just like you. They have families-- they didn't just pop out of the ground. They have friends-- they weren't made in a factory. They're people-- they go grocery shopping and pay bills just like everybody else. If you saw one of these girls in a convenience store, having no idea of her job, and she asked you for the time, you would tell her it was a quarter-to and not think anything else. These women have histories before and after you've spotted them in their windows, regardless of how quickly you look away. What separates us from them is how they see themselves and their bodies.
I actually had the opportunity-- whether this is a good or bad one is your decision-- to see a man stop at a window to watch the lady in the window beckon him forward, contemplate for a while, and then march straight into one of those buildings. My stomach twisted itself and jerked a bit. Something about the way he strode through that door seemed very inhuman. If you had seen him walk into a library that way, it would have made you wonder what sort of books he had in mind. A lot about this wasn't right and I didn't just feel that way because of my conscious. The aura was all wrong. Somewhere along the line something went wrong in the way we humans have decided the acceptable level of respect with which to treat each other and ourselves.
On another note, more sites!
We went and saw the Van Gogh Museum the morning after our evening peruse around the town and it was fantastic even though there wasn't a student discount... Highly recommend it.
"... to paint 'what I am not yet able to, in order to learn how to do it'" - Van Gogh
We also ventured to the Anne Frank House (not her actual house, but the house that she and her family hid in during the Holocaust). While the house has been preserved extremely well, Otto Frank, Anne's father requested that the rooms be left empty of any original furniture. Some of the photos that Anne pasted to her bedroom walls are still there and the height markings that her mother made of her and her sister are there as well. Unfortunately, photos could not be taken inside the museum.
Well, anyways, that's about all I have time for at the moment. I'm leaving for Poland early tomorrow, so I have to catch some shut eye. I will probably add more to this entry, but I just wanted to post something for you to read. ;)
Thanks for the continued prayers!
Toodles!
RxW
