Visiting Amsterdam

I’ve been to Amsterdam twice, both times at Easter.  The first trip was on The Magic Bus, a hippie company that gave backpackers easy access to all the European capitals, including its most famous route - a 5-day non-stop to Athens.  Anyway, in 1979, it was ten quid to Amsterdam, I was at a loose end, and booked a ticket for the long weekend. 

On that particular Good Friday, there were two buses leaving for Holland, a British model more suited to prison transport and a luxurious Mercedes with well-padded, comfy seats.  Unfortunately, they put me on the Spartan one, together with two other normal people and 20 skinheads whom I sized up - perhaps unfairly - as a local chapter of the National Front.  Whoever they were they spent the journey out of London yelling racial epithets at black and brown folks, and drank the bar dry on the ferry.  Then, after we arrived in Amsterdam, they set off immediately into the central city as if they knew it like the back of their hand, while the two other normal people and I were still getting our bearings. 

These were a beautiful, gay Englishman named Andrew and an equally beautiful Italian woman named Cristiana, with whom I wound up sharing a three-person hotel room, close to the railway station.  Cristiana and I were experienced travelers, at home with figuring it out on the fly, but Andrew was on his first holiday abroad and completely over-whelmed. 

Despite the supermodel good looks, Cristiana was a self-described badass.  She claimed affiliation with the Baader-Meinhof gang, hinted at leaving England under a cloud, and was in Amsterdam to join a commune in one of its ‘kraken’ houses - kraken being the Dutch word for squatting.   This movement had grown out of a legitimate need for affordable housing, but by the ‘80s had been co-opted by the anarchists and eventually fell afoul of the riot police.  I dismissed her as a poseur, and Andrew, a junior banker, responded with an amused ‘Should we call Interpol?’ but in a whispered conversation while she was in the toilet, we decided to give her a wide berth.  Nevertheless, we went out to eat as a threesome, and followed Cristiana to a café near the Melkweg where she and Andrew bought hashish. And there, she wished us well and ditched us. 

Andrew had already admitted that he’d planned this getaway with a new lover, who’d subsequently dumped him.  But, having bragged about it to friends and colleagues, he felt he had no choice but to crawl around below eye level in his flat all weekend, or go by himself.   My situation was similar: lonely and bored and making the best of it. 

And making the best of it in Amsterdam started with a visit to the Red Light District, which is the city’s leading attraction.  I have a lot of feelings on a lot of subjects but prostitution is not high on my list, and I was as keen as the next person to gawp at the ladies sitting in their windows, and explore the sex shops.  I came of age in an era where no one had access to pornography and here I was, a 28-year-old, left-wing feminist, seeing it for the first time on a socially sanctioned walking tour, no less. 

However, there is no polite way for one woman to scrutinize another woman’s nakedness.  You’re just taking up space that could be better occupied by a man with money, and you can’t help but come across as superior and judgmental.  So I compromised by joining large groups of oglers as naïve and sheepish as myself, and stealing surreptitious glances. Besides, everywhere we went we ran into the British skinheads, parting the crowds like a Panzer division invading Russia, and now yelling sexual epithets.  The sex shops were also disappointing: full of tittering tourists, none of us game enough to carry something to the counter and actually buy it, let alone put it on our Barclay card. 

We finished the night in a café, where Andrew could legally smoke his hash.  Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, drugs make me paranoid, and alcohol makes my face red, so, outside of a busy couple of years in my early twenties, I’ve never had much interest in either.  I was tempted by hash’s availability in Amsterdam, even thought ‘What the hell!’  but it wasn’t a priority and I was short of funds.  A stroke of luck as it turned out because, after one joint, Andrew was shitfaced; tripping his brains out on the edge of a canal, unable to speak and, worse, unable to walk. 

Initially it was funny and, to be fair, he’d smoked very little of it.  But it was 1 am. the café was closing and the staff propped him against a trash can while they locked up and left us to it.  Passers-by came and went, nobody offered to help, and we didn’t ask.  I considered calling an ambulance but worried about the consequences.  Yes, hash and marijuana were tolerated, but perhaps only if you kept a low profile.  So, given that I might wind up getting him busted in a foreign city, not to mention paying for an ambulance, I decided to forego a medical intervention and deal with it myself.

By a process of elimination, we settled for him clinging to my shoulders from behind, hurling one leg at a time forward in a facsimile of walking, during which the sheer weight of him sometimes pushed me to my knees on the cobblestones.  We moved from stoop to tree, lamp post to bollard, watched by dozens of tourists some of whom expressed concern, but most of whom just laughed.  Then up two ladder-like staircases on his butt to our hotel room, where he lay on his side on the bed, in a stupor for almost 12 hours.

The next morning I went to breakfast without him and ate my way through the full Dutch version: cold cuts, cheese, a boiled egg, coffee and a variety of breads.  Over a second cup of coffee I got talking to the landlord, a guy in his late forties who’d inherited the place from his parents and was finding it hard going.  He told me that he and his wife were raising their 12-year-old son in a cesspool, and indicated out the window.  I was shocked.  I thought the city was beautiful, and he agreed.  ‘But there are no children,’ he said.  ‘No children and no old people.  Only degenerates.’  I nodded guiltily, wondering if he’d seen Andrew and me return the previous evening; heard him butt-climbing the stairs. 

Happily, my plans for Saturday were wholesome enough to pass muster: the Van Gogh museum and the Magere Brug (Skinny Bridge) made famous in Britain by the 70’s TV show ‘Van der Valk’.  I invited Andrew to join me but he didn’t feel up to it.  I didn’t argue.  He’d crashed and was down for the count, the cumulative effect of a broken heart and being hungover. 

I took a tram to the Van Gogh Museum, but it was closed.  This struck me as so unlikely I hovered nearby waiting for an employee to rush up apologizing profusely, until someone finally told me it was closed for renovation.  Pissed off, I took another tram out to the bridge, which was kind of boring, checked in with Andrew, and caught a local train to Haarlem, which was lovely.  While there, I had my picture taken at Corrie ten Boom’s house. Corrie and her sister Betsy were heroes of the Dutch Resistance who were deported to Ravensbruck for sheltering Jews, and I’d recently read her autobiography.   

When I returned to the hotel, Cristiana was there to pick up her rucksack, and tell us she’d found a bed in one of the Kraken communes.  She didn’t offer any money towards the room rent but Andrew bought me dinner as a thank you for helping him.  He chose an expensive restaurant and insisted we both had cocktails.  And, at the bar we ran into a group of Brits, men and women in town for a work conference, who were on their way out to a porno movie.  It was all the encouragement we needed, and we went with them.

Kicking down the porn barrier was exciting on some levels, but also very awkward.  Two elderly women laughed uproariously through the whole film.  They even moved to get a better view.  But our group sat in grim-faced silence, not moving a muscle.  I fully intended to pass it off as a lark, and spent much of the movie rehearsing this explanation in my head.  I was curious.  I’d seen it.  No big deal.  And perhaps the rest of them felt the same.  Over drinks later, we talked weather, politics, and future plans but no one said a word about the film.

Sunday, we visited the Anne Frank House, walked for miles crisscrossing the city to see everything the travel brochures suggested, and ate at McDonalds.  And, coming home via the Red Light District, we stepped off the sidewalk to avoid a lone skinhead, masturbating in front of the adult movie theater we’d been in the night before. 

I left on Monday.  Andrew had booked a 5-day ticket and kept the hotel room.  But we’d checked all the sightseeing boxes the previous day and he had nothing else to do but finish his hash or flush it down the toilet. I urged him to go to Haarlem or Delft, and we joked about windmill and tulip tours, but I think it likely he just lay on his bed and watched TV. Five decades on I still have my photos of him, but I never saw him again. 

At the bus terminal I demanded a seat on the Mercedes Benz bus only to find the skinheads, including the masturbator, there before me.  This time I sat with a Dutch woman named Anneke, who was making her annual trip to the Charing Cross Road to buy English language murder mystery novels.  We talked all the way to London and, in between shopping jaunts, she slept on my sofa and introduced me to the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

15 years later I made a second visit to Amsterdam.  By then I was living in Germany with my husband and small son, it was Easter 1994, we were at a loose end and we drove in from Frankfurt.  We opted to stay at The Grand, which cost hundreds a night even in the nineties, because my husband was driving a collector’s item Mustang and it was the only place that had private parking.  Private valet parking.  This meant we couldn’t afford to do anything but sleep and eat breakfast, but the car was safe. 

As soon as we’d settled into our room, however, we left to stretch our legs in the Red Light District which, incongruously, abutted our super ritzy hotel.  In daylight, its seediness was on full display and by 1994 the illusion that the women were operating autonomously was rapidly eroding.  Today, in 2026, it’s estimated that many, if not most, of the women involved have been sex trafficked, and the city is seeking to close the district completely.  But even 30 years ago it was obvious it was no more than a ‘cheap holiday in other people's misery’ as the Sex Pistols so aptly put it.  Not to mention the impropriety of pushing a baby from window to window.  So, I left my husband to it and went back to the hotel.

That apart, it was freezing.  My first Easter in Amsterdam had been cardigan weather but this was almost Arctic.  So cold, that on Saturday we took a canal cruise in a covered boat and then a tram to the Van Gogh museum.  There we were again disappointed.  The building was open, but the essential collection was on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and we decided to use the entrance fee for a decent dinner instead.

Whenever we travel, my husband and I try always to eat in at least one Indian restaurant and Amsterdam was no exception.  There we lucked into the best meal of our lives.  So good, we returned the following evening for a repeat.  Wikipedia tells me that the majority of Indians in the Netherlands are of Indo-Surinamese origins so what we ate may have been a South American variation.   Nevertheless, it became the yardstick by which we now judge all Indian food, and we speak of it with awe. 

We checked out of the The Grand on Sunday after a fabulous breakfast, reclaimed our car and drove around as much as the city allowed, to avoid the bone-chilling wind.  Eventually we wound up at the Anne Frank House and, carrying the baby, did the tour, which was life changing.  For, woken from a deep sleep in a warm car, our son launched into a screaming fit that lasted over half an hour.  The staff used it as a teaching moment.  In the same situation, they said, we would’ve been arrested day one.  In fact, years later, my husband was still telling people, ‘Somewhere you don’t want to be with our kid: the Anne Frank House, 1944.’  But it was sobering in a way that has stuck with both of us.  The impossibility of keeping small children quiet in times of great danger, but also the full horror of being powerless to save them.

All in all, the second getaway was a bit of a bust.  Amsterdam’s left-wing feel was a happy break from Germany’s conservatism, but any vacation with a baby is only as good as the baby’s mood, and we were thrilled when he slept through our Indian meals, leaving us to eat in peace.   Another stumbling block was the weather; so wretchedly cold we ran from shop to shop and didn’t do half the things we wanted to.

But mostly, we were too old for Amsterdam.  The hotel owner from my first trip was right: it’s not a family town and many of the locals now support closing the Red Light District.  And yet its planned replacement - a 5-storey mega brothel in the suburbs - is unpopular with everyone.  I mean who wants to raise their kids next to a mega-brothel?

Not that I should have a say.  I’m not Dutch, I don’t have to live there, let alone work there. Plus, I’ve been to the Red Light District twice, and had a good time.  But if the statistics on sex trafficking are correct – visiting parts of Amsterdam is holidaying in other people’s misery, and freeing up the rental space for families is worth considering.