Waking up on my third day in Amsterdam I had a bit of a hangover. Not that I had indulged in anything particularly, but when it’s all around you can’t help but get some effects. So I woke up still a bit groggy and my teeth itched (I discovered that when I am… under the herbal influence… I clench my jaw – weird). BUT, I woke up in time to actually catch a breakfast downstairs. So I made myself a sandwich and had a few hard boiled eggs (LOVE the hard boiled eggs!) and headed out catch the more cultural aspects of the northern city of canals.

Culturally speaking, though, there’s a bit of rivalry between art and history. Representing art, in this corner, you have one of the top heavy-weight champeens of all time, The Big Vinnie, Vincent van

Van Gogh/Greenspon self portraits

Gogh – he’s mad, he’s bad and he’s redefining the field completely.

In the other corner, coming in at a mere 98 pounds (pure speculation on my part), the little miss with the big dreams, the scribbling fanatic from the attic – Anne Frank!

With van Gogh, you’ve got a whole museum dedicated to his professional life of ten years (yup, that’s it). Before that, he held a variety of jobs and basically lived off his brother (come to think of it, that’s what he did while he was being a painter, too). He was just about to make a big breakthrough when he ended it all. Of

Anne Frank

course, in those ten years he produced an amazing amount of work and, let’s face it, some of it is pretty good. For my taste, I like the later pieces. I’m not gonna go all cliché here and start waxing rhapsodic about Starry Night (primarily because it’s NOT in the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum –it is a brilliant piece, though) but some of those works he painted just before he died, Wheat Field with Crows, for example, are just haunting. The still-lifes are wonderful, especially when seen up-close and you can really differentiate between the subtle variations of color and shade. Honestly, you really can’t appreciate how amazing he is until you stand in front of the works themselves and see the brushstrokes and feel the intensity coming from the canvas. Still Life my ass. There is so much movement and energy going on in that two-dimensional world it’s a wonder he was able to contain it at all.

Ironically, one of the pieces I liked the most in the Van Gogh museum wasn’t by him at all, but was one of his inspirations… and of course, I didn’t write down his name or the name of the piece and I can’t find it. But it shows the Roman soldiers who crucified Christ riding away and you don’t see the crosses themselves, but only the shadows. It’s haunting.

Speaking of haunting, let’s take a look at the cultural challenger. The Frank family, led by patriarch Otto, was a nice, solid, middle class group in the heart of Amsterdam (no relation to my hostel). Otto owned a manufacturing company

The Anne Frank Huis from across the canal

situated on one of the canal streets, Prinsengracht and, oh yeah, happened to be Jewish. I’m gonna go out on a limb here (catch the subtle reference to the Anne Frank Tree?) and say, in her own way, Anne and Vinnie are pretty evenly matched, but I’m gonna give the advantage to The Scribe from the Tribe…

See, while the artwork of van Gogh is quite moving, walking through the empty loft where Anne, her parents and a few other people lived for two years hits home in a way art hanging on a wall cannot. Honestly, moving from room to room (which remain bare per a directive from Otto Frank) makes the entire ordeal more personal and moving than you can possibly imagine. For me, it was actually more powerful than Auschwitz. In Poland, it was overwhelming. It was too big to truly understand. In Amsterdam, really, you’re only concerned with one little girl and her story is devastating. So yeah, while the artwork may last longer, for immediate visceral reaction the winner, this round, is the frank Frank.

That night, my last in Holland, I decided to finally take Amsterdam at face value and actually check out the red light district and treat myself to a live sex show. When in Rome, right? Of course, my first stop was to get a shwarma for dinner. On the way, I passed a window with two girls who were offering a double bill. When I said I wanted to eat first, their response was “Fuck, then food!” Needless to say, I continued on. I ate and then headed into a theatre a couple of doors down from my hostel. I paid my money, took my seat and proceeded to watch the human equivalent of paint drying.

There was no eroticism, no sexiness, in fact, there was no enjoyment at all in the faces of the participants. This was their job and they were as bored as a cashier at Wal-mart. I probably would have left before the eight acts I had paid for (they recycle themselves every 50-60 minutes or so) were up if I hadn’t met Cate and June. They are a couple of accountants from London (although June is originally from the states) and they are both a trip and a half! We spent most of the sex show doing our version of Mystery Science Theatre. Afterwards, we found a local club, went

June and I in the rain

dancing until 4am when I dropped them off at their hotel and went home through the deserted streets of Amsterdam in the pouring rain. And there is nothing quite like Amsterdam in the rain. It is a cleansing of sorts, not that the city is dirty, but at 4:30 in the morning it is so quiet and still that the rain just enhances the feeling of serenity.

Of course, by the next morning, I was exhausted and I had to check out since I had a train to catch that night. I did a bit of touristing, though, picking up some souvenirs and visiting the Rijks (State) Museum. It’s a nice museum, but it’s undergoing renovation so you only get the highlights (and yet they charge you the same price!) What they do have is Rembrandt’s “Night Watch” and some other important Dutch works. The most interesting thing was the special collection audio by Ronald de Leeuw, former curator of the museum, talking about how he acquired the pieces and which were his favorites. That was particularly interesting to me, to get inside the mind of the man who determines what we see and how we see it.

Just a pretty picture

On my way back to the train station, I stopped at a little café and had the best apple pie I’ve ever had and then I popped my head in at the Steltman Galleries (professional home of one of my favorite modern artists, Michael Parkes). My train left on time and fifteen hours later I was back in Malmö. My time in Europe was fast approaching an end but

Steltman Galleries

there were still many more adventures to be had. In fact, one of the biggest would happen the next day when my friend Ida had told me she had a surprise for me and wanted to take me to dinner.

Overnight trains leave a lot to be desired. In this instance, I got on board at 7pm and wasn’t going to get off again until 10 the next morning. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing except when you’re in a train compartment with five other people and your legs are intertwined it gets hard to sleep. Add in the fact that people are constantly leaving the train and the sun is coming up and someone forgot to draw the blinds and really, not the best night’s sleep.

On the plus side, though, I did meet a nice guy named Ricardo who bought me an ice cream when we hit the Amsterdam Central

Ice cream friends

Station. He and I had been talking about writing at dinner the night before and then he told me about this special ice cream which sounded like the Dutch version of Coldstone. And it was good, too. But then, after ice cream, we said good –bye, I hoisted my pack and made my way through the Red Light District to my hostel, conveniently called The Heart of Amsterdam, and checked in.

The cool thing about this place is that all of the rooms are named after movies. I was assigned The Wall. Too bad really, since I was hoping for The Godfather, but you take what you can get, right? They have these lockers in the rooms which are electronic, with magnetic keys. They seem to be pretty secure so I throw my big and little bags in and then decide to go exploring. I found out about a free walking tour which was leaving from Dam Square later that afternoon so I head out.

Dam Square is the big central square in town, bordered by the city hall building on one side and a very phallic like sculpture on the other. In between is a huge open area where street performers, living statues and hot dog vendors all fleece tourists out of

The monument in Dam Square

hard earned Euro. I wandered around a little bit while waiting for the tour to start. Branching off from the

The sign makes the scene

square were a bunch of streets all filled with souvenir shops and fast food restaurants. The main road which divides the square leads directly from the Train Station and goes right past Madame Tussauds (which had one of the longest lines I’d see there).

Finally the tour started and the guide was a guy named John from the States. It seems like a number of the tour guides I saw in foreign countries were native English speakers, which I guess would be a great job for an ex-pat. We got a little bit of history while standing around the sculpture and then started walking in earnest. We saw a piece of art which was imbedded in the ground (completely anonymous, too – no one knows where

Sculpture in the ground

it came from, who did it or what it means). We wandered through the red light district, which has been around as long as the city itself. It started as an economic thing. Since Amsterdam is a port city, sailors would come to town and need a place to spend their money. Girls seemed a good option so they started regulating it. Of course, just to make sure both sides of the coin came back to the local economy, they built a church right across the street. Those poor sailors got it coming

John leading the tour

and going (to hell)!

And then there’s the famous “coffee shops,” places where you can buy marijuana in a variety of qualities and quantities. Do be perfectly clear… buying, selling, smoking or growing pot is still illegal the police just choose to look the other way. See, Amsterdam prides itself on its liberalism and general acceptance of everyone and everything - but they are also practical. Looking the other way on pot lets them focus on keeping the harder things off the streets. We could learn a lot from these people. Of course, the ultimate irony is that in the current, politically

No smoking... tobacco

correct, healthy atmosphere tobacco is not allowed in the coffee houses but pot is! Odd, I know.

Anyway, on my tour, I met Iwola, a recent transplant who was working her way across Europe from Poland a month at a time. She’s a photographer and we ended up meeting up later that night for dinner and book shopping. Since she’d been a town a few days longer than I, she knew the really cool places. We found this little side alley where a guy had a bunch of carts set up with all sorts of books in all sort of languages. I picked up a couple of old scifi pulps and a text on the supernatural in fiction and we spent WAY too much time looking at the photos in old kids travel books trying to determine the dates (cars and clothes were good, but not always the most accurate, indicators – we got really geeky when we started discussing the quality of color saturation in the printing).

I made it back to “The Heart” just as dusk was falling. Thankfully, I booked into a place where they didn’t care about smoking (yes, of all the places I stayed, Amsterdam hostels had to specify their drug policies) so I ended up not having to buy anything. I got some great contact highs sitting in my bed and typing. Much mellower than the days when I actually did the stuff myself

me and Cassie

(which was twenty years ago, so the statute of limitations has dropped off). I did meet Cassie though. She was in my room (gotta love mixed dorms) and we made plans to go out the next day.

I didn’t get up early enough that next day to actually enjoy the hostel provided breakfast but when I did get up, Cassie and I hit the ground running… er… peddling. See, in Amsterdam, biking is the way to go and there

Invisible Man sculpture

are plenty of places around to rent bikes. However, it took us a while to find one since neither of wanted to ask for directions right off (we knew where we were going) and by the time we realized how lost we were, it was more of a challenge to actually just find the place. I explained how I normally would ask but now it was a point of pride. I told her “I’m the gayest straight man you’ll ever meet” to which she replied “That’s good, ‘cuz I’m the straightest gay girl you’ll ever know!”

We finally did (and the guy gave us a great deal) and we headed out to SEE Amsterdam. We rode through parks and by canals,

Bike tricks

almost got hit by cars and even got lost once or twice. Of course, getting lost is the best way to really see a place. You get into the back alleys and out of the way spots. It’s one of the reasons I

A couple of dicks...

like to just wander. You don’t really get a chance to actually experience a city until you get off the main roads and tourist centers. So we did. We also hit Amsterdam’s Erotic Museum and she bought me a space cake (pot laden pastry – which, I must say really didn’t affect me at all).

That night was more of the same, but the next day… that’s when we discovered the REAL Amsterdam.