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Published: July 10th 2008
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The Red Light District
The closest I can get without getting my camera smashed I've been here in Amsterdam nearly a week, and seeing at least twice what other typical tourists see here. I'm getting double the Dutch treat. I spoke to two young men who were from England and they asked me what I thought of the Red Light District. I said it was all rather safe and carnival like, in a seedy sort of way. They agreed, but asked how was it that I could spend a week here. I told them I had also gone to the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. "Yeh, we should have gone there," was their reply. I also said I went to The Hague and Delft. They reply "What's that?" Like I said earlier, it too bad some people only see Amsterdam for it's Red Light District, and they get the wrong idea completely.
Yesterday, the weather in the morning was good and clear so I travelled out of the city to the folk museum, Zaanse Schans. I had been there before, but the weather on my first trip was rain. I returned to get some nice photos of windmills, canals and traditional buildings. It's all so.........Dutch. There is a chocolate factory nearby that we
Zaanse Schans
Windmills - so very Dutch could smell. I spent the morning there wandering through the re-made traditional Dutch countryside. It's of course reconstructed to show what life in Holland used to be like. I got there early, just before the big tour bus groups arrived.
In the afternoon, I went on to Haarlem, a big town just west of Amsterdam. On my last visit I stayed in Haarlem and commuted in to Amsterdam. But on my first trip I never actually stopped in town long enough to look around. There is a great Gothic church in the centre of town with the largest organ you can imagine. This church escaped bombing at the end of WWII, mostly because the Allies were very careful what they bombed while liberating Holland. There was some heavy fighting at the end of the war in this part of Holland.
I also went to the Frans Halls museum, another museum full of Dutch 17th Century paintings. The main attraction are the paintings of Frans Halls, mostly group portraits of guards and guildsmen. But there were some impressive still lifes and some religious paintings removed from churches after the reformation, but at the time still considered too valuable and
impressive to be destroyed, so they hung in various houses and now in museums.
Haarlem has canals, like most of Holland. I find my way around town using the canals as navigational aids. When there are so many narrow streets some are too small to fit on the map, then a large canal is just what you need to say "I'm exactly here!" Haarlem is a smaller version of Amsterdam, fewer people, and shorter houses. The church stands above it all giving the town a grand old style European skyline. I bet the skyline doesn't look much different 100 or even 300 years ago. The streets are of course different with buses and cars, people in jeans and T-shirts speaking on their mobile phones. It's a nice town. And as I've said before, people. Make sure you get out of Amsterdam and away from the Red Light District to see more of the Netherlands.
It's all so easy getting around. Trains run to all locations frequently. Trams run nearly everywhere in town. Buses run to places trams can't. And bicycles get around in town faster than any other form of transit. In the Amsterdam History Museum there is
Zaanse Schans
Can you spot the heron? an exhibit which describes how Amsterdam had asked the help of an American civic planner to help move them into the 21st Century. He devised a plan and built models of various freeways, flyovers, super parking-lots for the citizens to get around, everywhere by car. This was immediately rejected. In a land where there are more bicycles than people, and the land is completely flat and distances are short, you don't need 150 horse power cars to get around. It seems as if this planner had completely mis-understood the Dutch lifestyle.
Although my morning was under blue skies with some cirrus clouds formations, another front did blow in and by the afternoon is was raining again. It's rained everyday while I've been here. I suppose it keeps the canals full.
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