February 10th
I spent this past weekend in Amsterdam. I’ve been in Amsterdam once before when i was younger and it has been one of my favorite cities in the world for a long time. The beautiful canals and leaning buildings give the tiny city a unique feeling that is difficult to fully express in words. Amsterdam also is such an interesting city. It contains some very high culture attractions like the Anne Frank House, Van Gogh Museum, and the Rijks Museum, but it also has a reputation for the legal marijuana, mushrooms, and prostitutes. What i found most interesting about the culture of Amsterdam of how short of a walk it was from one of these iconic museums to the infamous red light district. The, by our standards, scandalous aspects of life are so normalized. Tourists walk and gawk in the red light district but most people just walk right through not even phased and I would look around turn my head at the smell of marijuana but people will just smoke a joint walking down the street. So from an outsider perspective their seems to be a separation of the different aspects of life within in Amsterdam, however with more time in this city I imagine that both would just be normalized into one identity of the city.