They Said:

The following blog contains things we did in Amsterdam that you may or may not want to hear, but due to the culture of Amsterdam, we feel obligated to discuss its laws and cultures with truthful observations .

He Said:

A long, long time ago I came up with my ultimate day in Europe. Though it didn't go exactly as planned, it still lived up to everything I thought it would be. The part that didn't follow script also worked out fine, and it wound up making our entire five-month voyage somewhat symmetrical. My Ultimate Europe Day was basically split up over the last two days of our trip, but first what led up to them...

We arrived very early in the morning after our overnight bus trip from Paris. We took the tram out to De Pijp, which is an immigrant, working class neighborhood that is quickly becoming a bohemian center of Amsterdam. Since it was so early, we had a cup of coffee and waited with our packs like vagabonds on a bench next to a park. Around 10, we waded through the hordes of bicyclists and headed to Lauren and Sale's house where we were grateful to stay during our time in Amsterdam . Lauren is the cousin of one of Alli's family members.

Lauren and Sale were extremely gracious in opening up their home to us. We really enjoyed their company, met their friends, heard about Lauren's work as a freelance journalist, and almost became fluent in Dutch by watching Pippi Longstocking with their daughters Emma and Sophie. They were the kinds of kids that made Alli and I talk about speeding up our own clocks. That's how cute they were. Basically, for five days we felt like part of the family and got a glimpse of what it would be like if we moved to Europe to raise children. The downside is the distance from family; the upside is world exposure and trilingual children.

The weather was cold and rainy for most of our stay, but we managed to enjoy our directional and guided walks of Amsterdam's numerous canals and squares. We walked through Rembrandtplein, named for the famous painter who was celebrating his 400th birthday in 2006. Alli enjoyed the wooden tulips in the flower market since the real ones weren't in bloom. And we went to the Anne Frank house, which I found to be surprisingly uplifting.

While it was definitely sad to see that a family had been put through so much, living in tiny hidden rooms in a lofty annex over father Otto Frank's business, it is still amazing to see a realized dream in the face of such adversity . Anne Frank really did live out her life's dream. She became a published writer. She put a face on the plight of the Jews during World War II. And most important, she changed the way people think. Her insight has helped all of humanity, and it came from only 15 short years of life. She reminded me that a gift isn't a gift unless you open the box:

"I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing to express all that's inside me!"
- Anne Frank (April 4, 1944)

An interactive exhibit called Free2choose provided a thought-provoking end to the museum. It sited recent tensions across the entire spectrum of rights - freedom of press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc. At the end of each news clip, viewers were prompted to select "yes" or "no". Everyone's votes were then tallied and displayed. For most, it was very difficult to choose. Here is an example:

Should Muslim girls be allowed to wear headscarves in French schools? This clip directly followed a similar question of whether Muslim police officers should be allowed to wear turbans on the beat. Though the French government is trying to ban religious apparel from public schools, I think it is an infringement upon student's rights . It is their religious belief as individuals. Conversely, I think that police officers represent the state. The government is independent of religion; therefore, they should not be allowed to wear their turbans. It is the same issue with different parameters. You decide.

After all the thought-provoking seriousness of the Anne Frank house, it was time for some of Amsterdam's coffee shops. A coffee shop is really a misnomer. Marijuana in Amsterdam is viewed about the same way that cigarette smoking is becoming in the United States. It is legal and tolerated, though not everyone likes to be around it. There are certain places you can and can't do it. And, aside from tourists, it generates about as much excitement as a glass of wine. You buy marijuana in coffee shops, which can also serve alcohol if it's sold at a separate counter. Coffee shops can range from grungy to Jamaican to trendy to touristy to literary. Down the street from Lauren and Sale there is even a family-oriented coffee shop where parents actually bring their children . Mom and dad smoke a joint before reading the morning paper while little Johnny sits in his highchair eating diced up fruit. In the States there would be outcry. In Amsterdam there's no cry.

The Dutch don't believe in victimless crime. They think it's an oxymoron. In the United States, there are close to half a million people in the prison systems because of marijuana laws. This eats up tax funds that could be allocated in other ways, uses up manpower that should now be used for security purposes, and it takes something that is relatively harmless compared to alcohol and puts it outside legal jurisdiction. When something is illegal it is outside the law. It cannot be regulated. So, if marijuana was legalized we'd have less people in prison for victimless crime, law enforcement could focus on more important issues like the security of our country, we'd have more revenue because it would be taxed like cigarettes, and the new legalized format would eliminate supply and demand street crime caused by drug dealers. It just makes sense to legalize it.

At the end of our second full day, we wound up having Ultimate Amsterdam Night (not to be confused with Ultimate Europe Day to come later), doing all of the things that are illegal in the States, but are within the law in Amsterdam. We wound up at an absinthe bar, which was Bush League despite the fact that they had an enormous selection . The cute bartender didn't have any idea what she was doing, so I sort of coached her along as to how it should be served. In turn, she kept filling up Alli's glass of coffee absinthe for free whenever she filled her own. After about an hour, we were all feeling pretty good. The girls discussed weddings, and a fellow New Yorker who was studying international law in Holland sat down next to us and offered to share his joint.

Maybe because we're always coached on how to answer that question with public service announcements and after-school specials, I always go through a decision-making process on whether to smoke or not to smoke. Through my first two days in Amsterdam, I hadn't. Alli was almost beside herself that I had been in Amsterdam for 48 hours and had yet to partake in the local customs. In that situation in the absinthe bar, though, I decided to smoke. In fact, throughout our entire five days in Amsterdam I only smoked when I wanted to and not just because I could, and that made the freedom of doing it seem even more real . Maybe "freedom" is a word we throw around a lot without giving it much thought. As a general rule, the price you pay for freedom shouldn't include being denied freedom.

Because Alli had just finished her fourth glass of absinthe, she turned to me and said she had to get out of the bar. We bid farewell to the bartender and our law school friend, and began to walk home. Marijuana makes you think about things in a different light, and on the walk home we discussed many things. We talked about going home, and how we will have to make an effort to spend time with each other outside of our routines because that's how people learn and grow as a couple. Should a substance that acts as a therapist really be illegal? We passed over canals and bridges, and I brushed elbows with a guy that looked like Ernest Hemingway. And then, shortly after, we walked across a red carpet on the sidewalk that lead into a club, and I felt like I was walking on a cloud. I thought about Ernest Hemingway, then I thought about Anne Frank, and then I thought about myself.

Ultimate Europe Day began with a joint in the park next to the Van Gogh museum. If you've never gone high to an art museum, I highly recommend the experience. The paint popped off the canvas. Shadows and highlights became visible in paintings that I had never noticed before. We both immersed ourselves in the audioguide and had the best museum experience of the entire trip, and I was very proud of Alli for giving each painting the time it deserved . Never had I realized that Van Gogh interjected his paintings with so much philosophy, and many of his paintings were framed on the audioguide by voiceover narratives contained in letters he sent to his brother. One of my favorite paintings was "Glass of Absinthe and a Carafe". I had seen this painting before at an exhibition in Washington D.C., but this time, I could actually see reflections on the carafe that I had never seen before. For a moment, I thought I saw my own.

After the park and the museum, the ideal end to the day would have been the Heineken Experience, but since we had one more day, we decided to split up Ultimate Europe Day and save it for last. Instead we had a few beers at a local café and went to a great dinner with Lauren thanks to a generous gift from her cousin. We ate well and drank well and eventually waddled out of the restaurant to a great coffee shop across the canal, where we shared a joint and some more great conversation.

The next morning was our last, and for the first time in five months, if felt like a traditional Sunday. We all took Sophie to the NEMO science museum for kids and completely enjoyed the cool, interactive displays. In retrospect, we should have hit a coffee shop first because it would have made it even more entertaining. Then Alli and I walked through the red light district to get one more look at the prostitutes in the windows . A few days earlier I had failed to find the attractive ones, instead discovering a rather large woman sitting on her bed eating a bucket of KFC. This time, we found the hot ones.

Prostitution in Amsterdam is completely legal. The prostitutes are actually in a union. They rent out small rooms with big windows to entice passers-by. My theory was that the more attractive women take the lower-rent, less-visible rooms because they are more sought after, and when we walked down a tiny alleyway about the width of my shoulders, the windows on both sides confirmed my belief. Beautiful blondes were twirling their bangs and winking. Sultry brunettes were shaking their hips. We walked past them, and then turned around and walked past them again. Sorry, it's not a very good idea to take pictures in the Red Light District.

It's amazing how some countries can be so prudish about sex, while others are so open. The Netherlands definitely falls into the later category. Laruen even showed us a safe sex guidebook they give to children in school. They believe in teaching and education younger members of society on the joys and dangers of sex, which results in people acting more responsibly. Why in this day in age do we restrict teenagers from receiving important information and birth control under the guise that they should be practicing abstinence until they are married? Why do our conservative leaders have such a hard time passing out condoms in Africa when we know they help prevent the spread of AIDS? Why does a sex ed country like the Netherlands have 6 .5 abortions per 1,000 women according to a 1999 U.N. report when a more abstinence-pushing country like the U.S. has 22.9 per 1,000 women? Nobody, either pro choice or pro life, is FOR abortions. We all want them to stop. But statistics prove that the more we open up and educate ourselves, the less number of abortions we will have. So the real question should be, then, are we just out there to say that we're against abortions, or are we out there to eliminate them? If the answer is the latter, than we must allow them to be safely preformed, and more important, we must educate people and allow access to birth control. Passing out condoms in school won't determine whether little Johnny breaks his vow of abstinence and has sex. That decision will be made by the hot cheerleader who has the corner locker, and, of course, God, whom Johnny has been soliciting for pickup lines since hitting puberty two and a half years ago. You see, it's in God's hands after all.

Finally, we ended our five-month voyage the way we began it back in Dublin . We went to a brewery. The Heineken Experience was filled with interactive gadgets and displays, but let's face it, everyone goes for the beer. We had our three complementary glasses, and then headed to a great De Pijp coffee shop, where we sat underneath a picture of Woody Harrelson and smoked our last joint over a few more glasses of beer and some great conversational wrap up of the entire trip. We began to discuss our course of action once we returned to the States. We talked about the sadness of leaving to go back. And then we went to a traditional Indonesian dinner and ordered a rijsttafel.

To the colonizer go great ethnic cuisines of the colonizee. For the Dutch, this means great Indonesian food. Our waiter was the most polite man I have ever seen in the entire world. He deliberately placed dish after dish in a line across our table, and we joyfully tasted each exotic flavor as if we had a case of the munchies, which we did. He was like the Dalai Lama. He walked like he was meditating. He served water because it was "his duty". And at the end of the meal when we asked to wrap up the remaining food, he said slowly, "You mean a doggie bag?" "Yeah, I'm not really sure why we call it that," I said. "Not everyone has pets."

Amsterdam was the perfect last stop, and it will be the first stop the next time we return to Europe. There is so much we didn't get to see, including the Dutch countryside . The coffee shops allowed us to step off the ride, in a sense, though I don't think I was ever ready to get off. I wasn't ready to quit learning and exploring. I wasn't ready to share my wife with everyone else again. And as I expected and many predicted would happen, I really had no desire to come back to the States.

She Said:

Having previously taken an overnight train and an overnight ferry, we took a chance, and the cheaper option, and booked an overnight bus to Amsterdam. Initially, there were only two other people on board, but as the seats began to fill up, we quickly switched to the back row so we could spread out. Just as I looked at the clock to see how much of the ten hour trip had elapsed, the TV went on and a subtitled version of Pretty Woman began to play. Chad wasn't as excited as I was and put his headphones on while I curled up to enjoyably pass two hours of time. The movie ended just as we stopped for a bathroom break, and then it was time to try and get some sleep. Like most overnight excursions, we didn't exactly get a good night sleep, but an hour here and there would suffice for our last travel day adventure.

We arrived to the bus depot before dawn and navigated our way to the central station to find our tram. Chad was in a quasi-state of depression because he didn't need to use his French anymore, so I took charge and utilized all of the English translations that accompanied the Dutch . In fact, the transfer from the bus to the train to the tram went so smoothly, we arrived too early to go where we would be staying; in fact, we couldn't even find a cup of coffee that early. So, we sat on a nearby park bench and enjoyed the stillness of the sleeping city. As the sun began to rise and the bikers set out to begin their day, we decided to take a walk and try to find some coffee.

When enough time had elapsed, we went to meet our gracious Amsterdam hosts. We were lucky enough to be staying with a family member's cousin, Lauren, who lives with her partner, Sale, about ten minutes from the center of town. Lauren's first words to us were, "I am so sorry the place is a mess, we are renovating the kitchen." We laughed at the obvious construction underway, but explained that we were so grateful to be staying in a nice home where shower shoes weren't required that we didn't really care about the state of the kitchen. We met four year old Emma and two year old Sophie, both incredibly adorable and shy, essentially hiding behind Lauren unsure of their new guests . We arrived on the day following Election Day, so for the better part of the morning, we watched CNN and BBC awaiting the results of what turned out to be a very favorable election for the blue team. Then we took a nap and a shower and felt refreshed enough to begin exploring. Since we got a late start, we decided to do some informal exploration of the city center and its surroundings. We stopped at a coffee shop on the way home where I ordered my first joint for a grand total of about three dollars. Since Chad decided that he "wasn't in the mood", I had to ask myself if smoking alone was equivalent to drinking alone...I decided it wasn't.

For our second full day, we planned on starting with an orientation tram tour, but discovered that the tram designated to tour the main loop of the city center no longer existed. So, despite the increasing wind and colder temperatures, we decided to walk the tour instead. One really cool thing about Amsterdam is the layout of the city . Trams divide the routes of the city, fanning out in all directions. There are about 90 islands, hundreds of bridges, and tons of canals. There are pleins (squares) just about every twenty feet - Muntplein, Rembrandtplein, Waterlooplein, Frederiksplein, etc. - all with different sights surrounding them. We started in the city center, Dam Square, and took in the view from the Amstel River with many boats lined along the docks. Next stop, Muntplein, with a beautiful flower market unfortunately not in season (I had to settle for a picture with wooden flowers!). Waterlooplein, which is famous for its flea market (which we clearly walked through), and also gave us a superficial peek at the old Jewish Quarter. We saw Museumplein with all the surrounding museums we would eventually visit and finished our tour at the Anne Frank museum.

I had already toured this museum the last time I was here, but the intensity of Anne's diaries and the preservation of the hiding space amazed me all over again . There was also a new wing added since I was there, sort of an interactive, thought-provoking series of quizzes regarding our constitutional rights. There was also a bigger display of her diary entries and loops of video clips of Holocaust survivors and/or people associated with Anne and her family. It's an amazing museum that left me with a sigh of relief that, although unjust and barbaric, her death helped realize her dreams through the publication of her book. One can only hope that her message of peace and tolerance for all cultural and religious differences will also one day be realized.

We went home to change and hang out with the kids (i.e. watch another enjoyable hour of Pippi in Dutch) before heading back out for some pizza and one last visit to the green fairy. This was another bar that bragged of being an exclusive absinthe bar; however, I think they forgot to inform the bartender of that. She was very interested in all Chad taught her and was even having drinks with us after a while . I discovered an absinthe coffee liquor that I liked a little too much. So much that after a few hours I proposed we leave immediately and walk it off in the rain! It was actually a very fun walk that struck up some great conversation between us. If it weren't for my fourteen-euro Woolworth boots killing my feet, we probably wouldn't have taken the most overpriced cab in all of Europe.

We took advantage of the very comfortable, low-lit accommodations we were given in the basement, and slept very late the next day. We woke up and walked through the local market with Lauren and Sophie and picked up some delicious waffle cookies (Sale and Emma had left for Belgrade to visit some family). We had some lunch and walked through the park. Unfortunately, Sophie slept through it all! We went back and did a little bit of nothing until it was time for dinner. Many times throughout the day we made attempts to motivate and tour a little, but it was just one of those hangover, rainy and cold days where staying in someone's comfortable house (and watching some quality Pippi Longstocking) is all you want to do...so we did.

The next day began with the Van Gogh museum. I really like Van Gogh's work. The content isn't all that different from other artists per se, but his thick application of paint and artistic style make him one of my favorites. I had no idea how much more intense his work would be stoned, so much so that I purchased my own audio guide and studied each painting one by one . We spent a pretty long time there, and I can definitely say that it was one of the most enjoyable museum experiences of the entire trip! We headed home after a stop for some local Heineken beer and aimless wandering through town. Another very generous family member had sent us money to have a nice dinner with Lauren, so when the babysitter arrived, we headed out to a delicious meal at Casa di David. We enjoyed some of the best Italian food we've had since leaving New York and Italy with a few great bottles of wine. We stopped at a coffee shop on the way home and hailed a cab with barely enough time to give the babysitter her Red Bull so she could go out (at almost one a.m.). After some obnoxious encouraging on my part, Lauren finished the night beautifully by telling the cabbie that we were all from NY, and although we were un-sober, we were very aware that he was taking us for a ride the long way home!

The next day, we headed to the NEMO science museum with Lauren and Sophie . We watched kids run wild in this interactive playpen and even tested out some of the more advanced scientific hands-on activities ourselves. Although a very cool museum, this place can be very over-stimulating and overwhelming, so we didn't stay too long. We left them to go to a place called Cannibus College. This wasn't really a museum, but more of an information hub for all the research and medical studies currently being conducted with the use of hemp and/or Marijuana. We skipped the tour of the "gardens" and opted for a self-guided tour of the red light district windows. We had walked there on our second night in town, but complained to Sale that the women were less-than-attractive for lack of a better word (apparently, we went to the wrong place and went to the fifty euro windows instead of the one hundred euro windows). One larger woman was actually eating out of a KFC box in her bed. So, after some better directions, we saw the pricier windows and walked through the maze women. When in Amsterdam ...

Following the windows, we decided to tour a museum somewhat unique to the city, the sex museum. I won't get into details about the contents of this museum; you will have to visit it yourself. But I will say that this is one of those places that makes you wonder why people are so uptight about sex in our culture. I mean, there were exhibits dating back to the 1800's; everyone did it, everyone does it, and everyone will continue to do it. For all those that I am embarrassing, ask yourselves why. What is the big deal? This actually brings me to another point regarding sex - education. We saw a brochure sitting on a coffee table about prevention, protection, and illustrations of STD's. It was written for a child/young adult to understand, void of pro-life or pro-choice conversation. It was just what to look for, how to prevent it, and how to protect yourself. I know, it's an age-old argument, but I will make it again. We need to spend more time focusing on prevention and protection and stop obsessing over the bi-partisan, what-to-do next question . Amsterdam has one of the lowest rates of abortion of first world countries; this leads me to believe that we could learn a thing or two from our liberal, Dutch friends!

Since we are both full circle type of people, we decided to save our final event, the Heineken Brewery tour, for last. We began the trip in Dublin and the first place we went was the Guinness Brewery. So, to end the trip, we geared up for a tour of the local brewery with what I remembered to be free beer at the completion of the tour. When Jamie and I took the tour eight years ago, it was a quick guided tour with an all-you-can-drink hour at the end in a big beer hall. Apparently, Heineken felt it needed a face lift since then and has completely renovated the place. Now, the tour is self-guided with progressive, interactive exhibits, virtual rides, and three free beers to be collected along the way at modern bars. Although enjoyable, I liked the old tour better. Nonetheless, the tour marked the end of our official touring. In denial that our five month trip was coming to an end, we went to one last coffee shop and re-capped for a while. We stopped for some Indonesian food on the way home and packed up for an early departure the next morning.