Bizarre Sights

Now that I'm safely back in Armidale, thoughts have turned to some of the more bizarre sights thrown up by Amsterdam (or Dutch?) life.

My colleague Neil and I were looking for a quiet cup of coffee when we blundered into a gay coffee house and beat a hasty retreat! Then we found another establishment next to the flower market alongside a canal. We ordered our drinks and sat a bench fronting the street. There in front of us, amidst masses of very large bulbs, were two sizes of cannabis starter kits. Despite looking at them for half an hour, there were no purchasers. However, the experience gave added meaning to a sight we saw two nights earlier in another cafe: a sign said "No tobacco smoking" in such a way to legitimise other forms of smoking.

Cycling is a mass activity, but it's done in such a way - often with great panache - that our domestic experiences are pale in comparison. We all have to wear cycle helmets in Australia (or else!), but we didn't see one helmet among tens of thousands of cyclists we saw on the streets of Amsterdam. Why, then, the disparity in laws? Like car drivers, Australian cyclists are not allowed to take mobile phone calls or text message while on the move, but every third Dutch cyclist seemed to be having fun with their phones. Why are we wowsers in this regard? We saw enough examples of cycling behaviour to give our police a heart attack. Imagine a young woman in high heels (and no helmet) text messaging with both hands as she rode along bolt upright! I might become a cycle liberationist and campaign, via civil disobedience, for similar rights to the Dutch rather than our mamby pamby approach to cycle regulation.

And then there are all those red lights! Lots of them all over the facades of some buildings. It was late at night when four of us saw one example on the other side of a canal. Some wanted to go for a closer look, but others (who had presumably sampled the wares) urged us to forget it. So we walked on in the gathering gloom, but I could swear that scantily clad women were standing motionless in the windows.

On another occasion, we blundered into a demo: something about the mistreatment of women in Somalia or somewhere like it. There was a massive din as some loud-mouth student blared through a microphone some rhythmic chant and his supporters screamed their head off. There were no fuzz anywhere in sight, a frequent occurrence in the city as a whole which has a high degree of tolerance to just about anything.

Am I showing my age and growing intolerance? Or do you think Amsterdam is my (or your) kind of place?

AS