Dear Old Amsterdam - Thursday

A highway in the Netherlands - 10ishAM

Zooming down the freeway, a freeway like many others I've seen before...looking out the window at factories, houses, apartment buildings, like loads I've seen before. Sure, the odd canal and river pops up, and there's a triangular nature to the houses, but it's all variations on a theme, all seen before....
Wait, I know where....Legoland! That's where I've seen it all - being an avid builder in my kiddie days, suddenly recalling that this is the place where those plastic little bricks (killer if stepped on the wrong way in the dark) come from...
This travelling on your own thing, there's still a bit of a knack to it for me...spending all that money and time on oneself is a little unsettling somehow...just gotta get in the right frame of mind for it and I'll be okay....
Still feels unusual, staring off at the horizon, to have your view interrupted by things like a telecommunications tower, windmill, or block of flats, and not the childhood-programmed golden wheatfields and grazing pastures streching off to beyond....come on Mike, this is Western Europe, not the South West Slopes!
Aussies have no troubles travelling across this continent. The Europeans I speak to are boggle-eyed when I tell them about eight-hour drives from Melbourne to Canberra, or the time I caught the twelve hour overnight train from Melbs to Sydney (let alone the day and a half it takes to get back to Oz) and how us Great South Landers take all that for granted.
As we hurtle along the long, straight, grey freeway towards the city, the peripheral vision is caught by some flocks of birds passing overhead in the soft blue sky...naturally perfect delta wings, their effortless flight path at right angles to our own, the surprising expanse between us lending a striking visual effect. A bookworm friend of mine once paraphrased a Jose Luis Borges passage that talked about animals being immortal, as they have no sense of their own mortality. These small herds of black specks in the sky are confident at least in their purpose, their sense of direction....
Listening to Mos'Def, 'Black on Both Sides' again, MC'ing from the heart about his home town of Brooklyn....indeed, as we pass the 'Hotel Breukerleun' (or some such spelling)...it's all related....and yet through the dialogue about how at home he feels across the East River, the phrase springs up, "It's not where you're from, it's where you're at"...
So I stepped off the bus at Centraal, and do you know what the very first thing I smelt was? There wasn't even a coffeeshop nearby! To be expected I suppose. After a couple of errands I set off in earnest into the heart of town. It all goes in circles with the canals (the primary navigation reference among the locals), but with the streets it's all up down left right as well, making it the perfect town for a wandering tourist. Once I got past all the lame shops and stuff that the traveller is instantly presented with in any major city, the winding lanes turned on their charm.
And so it was quite inadvertently that I wandered into the infamous Red Light District. I later learnt that the Dutch have a proud defiance in leaving the curtains open in their windows, for passers-by to view directly inside their shops and homes. And in this part of town, the working girls were there, mostly naked, sitting, posing, standing in their neon-red-framed windows, for all the world to see...anything you want, keep walking around and you'll find it! Being Thursday lunchtime and all, it was a bit quiet in the hood...a large black woman peels an orange...an Asian woman sits in a chair and chats on the mobile phone...but on occasion you would see some guy in front, usually older, white-haired, go knock on a door to see what he could get for whatever was in his wallet....
I pass a larger window and one is warding off a potential customer with a look of consternation. She is small and thin with long white hair, and all of a sudden I feel sorry for her, for this whole situation...instantly followed at wonderment as to why I should only feel this for her in particular, and not for all of them...
I cross a bridge and a guy in a big jacket carrying a plastic bag suddenly switches a look over his shoulder, darts off down a laneway...DJ clued me up to this breed, to be found especially in this town...."It's like they've taken a bad acid trip in 1985 and haven't done much with their lives since"...an accurate observation, and I start to notice more and more sketchy characters as I stride along the streets...
Moving back into the main part of town, I made my way down through Dam into Rokin, picking up a tourist map, and eventually ended up in the Van Gogh Museum, a pleasant way to kill a couple of hours. A text beckoned me outside to meet up with Lucky, my connection in town. Lucky's an old friend from BC (the Bush Capital), great trombone player, and we've done our time in a couple of bands together. We repair to the nearest bar, catch up, have a laugh, and then he's off again. I keep wandering, ending up at a five-euro pizza place near Leidseplein, tipsy enough by now to ensure that I have an excellent time dining by myself, watching the restaurant cat (?) sitting at the bar with the other punters...
And so I find myself returning to the Red Light District, strangely fascinated, and it's business as usual...more windows are open (whoever's got the contract on neon-red in this town is on a goldmine!). Less old men this time, more packs of three and four guys, shaved heads, jackets and jeans....and straight couples ducking in and out of video stores, arms linked, pointing and giggling...
Passing the windows, I catch some winks, glances, poses, grins, and I grin politely in return....in a neighbourhood teeming with sexual attraction, how does a working girl ensnare her prey simply off a pose, a look?
Another BC mate, L, told me once of his adventures in Thailand, how the girls know what kind of person you are as soon as they see you. And so, in a moment of self-centredness, I am wondering, through that brief moment of the walk-past, in a glance exchanged between total strangers in an extraordinary situation, what these girls would perhaps make of me....
I walk by a row of half a dozen smaller booths, and in that split second, one laughs at me and taps on the window to draw my attention. Chuckling to myself, I am suddenly quite tired of the whole experience, and turn my stride towards the next meeting spot.
I hook up with Lucky in a cosy pub just down from his gig, across from a cute little canal bridge lit up by fairy lights. A day's walking with two bags has me beat, and so we down a couple of pints and then tram off into the suburbs...