Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
with a cry of pain as I reached the far end of Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. There, where once a fine gabled
house must have stood, squatted a new Holiday Inn, a building so ugly, so characterless, so
squat,
that it
stopped me in my tracks, left me standing agog. Everything about it was cheap and unimaginative - the
cardboard-box shape, the shit-brown bricks, the empty, staring windows, the acrylic canopy over the
entrance, the green plastic signs, the wall-mounted video cameras peering at every passer-by. It looked like
a parking ramp. Not the tiniest effort had been made to give it any distinction.
It would have been painful enough out by an airport, but this was in the heart of one of the great cities of
Europe on a street otherwise lined with handsome, patrician houses. How could an architect walk through
such a city and allow himself to design a building of such utter indistinction? How could the city authorities
let him? How could anyone sleep in it? I found myself turning dumbstruck to people passing on the sidewalk
as if to say 'Do you see this building here?', but they all just hunched past, quite unmoved by its existence. I
just don't understand the world.
Evening came. A light rain began to fall. Pulling my collar round my ears, I walked to the dark streets of
the red-light district and squinted through rain-spattered glasses at the goods on offer. The red-light district
had changed since my day. In 1973, the most outspoken thing was a club with a sign that said,
ON STAGE -
REAL FOCKY-FOCKY
show. Now everything was much more explicit. The shop windows were filled with a
boggling array of plastic phalluses, vibrators, whips, video tapes, unguents, magazines, leatherwear and
other exotica not to be found in your average Woolworth's. One window contained a plastic, life-size,
astonishingly realistic woman's reproductive region, complete with dilated labia. It was
awful.
It looked like
something that would be used in an anatomy lesson, and even then you could imagine students fainting.
The magazines were even grosser. They showed every conceivable variety of couple doing messy and
urgent things to each other - heterosexuals, gays, sadomasochists, grotesquely fat people (a little comic
relief, I guess) and even animals. The cover of one showed a woman providing - how shall I put this? - a
certain oral service to a horse that a horse wouldn't normally expect to get, even from another horse. I was
astounded. And this was just the stuff in the windows. God knows what they keep under the counters.
The whores were still there. They sat in luminous body stockings in windows lit with a pinkish glow, and
winked at me as I passed. ('Hey, they like me!' I thought, until I realized that they do this for everybody.)
Behind them, I could sometimes glimpse the little cells where they conduct their business, looking white and
clinical, like someplace you would go to have your haemorrhoids seen to. Twenty years ago the prostitutes
were all Dutch. They were friendly and sweet-natured and often heart-breakingly attractive. But now all the
prostitutes were Asian or African, and they looked mean and weathered, even when they were pouting and
blowing kisses in their most coquettish come-hither manner.
There was a whole street of this stuff, several blocks long, with a spill-over into neighbouring side
streets. I couldn't believe that there could be that many people in Amsterdam - that many people in the
world -
requiring this sort of assistance just to ejaculate. Whatever happened to personal initiative?
I spent the morning of my last day in the Rijksmuseum. 'The Night Watch' wasn't on view because a few
days earlier some crazy person had attacked it with a knife, and both he and it had been taken away for
rehabilitation, but the museum is so massive - 250 rooms - and so filled with wonderful pictures that there
was plenty else to look at.
Afterwards I strolled on to the Anne Frank House on Prinsengracht. It was packed, but moving none the
less. Eight people spent three years hiding in a secret flat above Otto Frank's spice business, and now an
endless line of visitors shuffles through it every day, to see the famous bookcase that hid the secret
entrance and the five rooms in which they lived. The tragic part is that when the Franks and their
companions were anonymously betrayed and finally captured in August 1944, the Allies were on the brink of
liberating Holland. A few more weeks and they would have been saved. As it was, seven of the eight died in
concentration camps. Only Anne's father survived.
The Anne Frank museum is excellent at conveying the horror of what happened to the Jews, but it is a
shame that it appears not to give even a passing mention to the Dutch people who risked their own lives in
helping the Franks and others like them. Miep Gies, Otto Frank's secretary, had to find food each day for
eight people, as well as herself and her husband, for three years at a time of the strictest rationing. It must
have been extremely trying, not to mention risky. Yet this was hardly a rare act: twenty thousand people in
