comment by Geoffrey Churchman

The Netherlands Capital has long had a reputation for being a quaint old city full of canals with much of its industry based on tourism — some come to see the Rijksmuseum and the Anne Frank house where her family hid from the Nazis for 4 years until they were betrayed — but the majority go there for legal drugs and be spectators (or clients) of the Red Light District where as well as sex emporiums you can see the human zoo.

The problem is that as well as tourists, the city is a magnet for all the sleaze in Europe and Spanian comments that unlike in the Hood, men on the street don’t look happy types.

When I last went there in 2010 the aroma from ‘coffeeshops’ (wacky baccy smokehouses) was one of the city’s features and there are still plenty of them. In 2008 the city decided to ban Magic Mushrooms (hallucinogens) because too many people were making pests of themselves, including by throwing up everywhere, and you assume, occasionally falling into canals, but Magic Mushrooms are now “Magic Truffles” with the same active substance. You can’t help wonder if Advertising Agents are big customers for them given some of the commercials we see, including for the BNZ and telcos.

But the whole scene includes the standard hard business types that the Dutch have a reputation for being (I’m told the jokes people make about Jews apply equally to the Dutch) so don’t expect too much to be happy-go-lucky, they expect their money. At least city authorities try to keep the place clean, unlike in the Hauptstadts of Ursula’s and Herr Merz’s Reich; Brussels and Berlin respectively.