HAPPY 21 in Amsterdam

For my birthday weekend I went to Amsterdam with 7 friends of mine. While many people think I went to go crazy in a country where it’s legal too go crazy I actually didn’t… I promise mom and dad :).

But we got there Saturday morning at 7 am and went straight for a city walking tour that we’ve taken in almost every other city, a New Europe tour. We learned a number of awesome traditions and fun facts about Amsterdam!

For instance, it is legal to smoke pot in ‘cafes’ in Amsterdam, however under NO circumstances is it legal to smoke tobacco. So if a police man was to enter a café he could arrest you for smoking a cigarette but not pot!

Another cool fact we learned is that the current mayor of Amsterdam is really working hard to clean up the image of Amsterdam. In fact he has officially outlawed all drugs besides pot and reduced the size of the ‘red light’ district in half.

We also learned a great deal about how the red light district worked. For instance each prostitute has to rent her window from hour to hour, costing about 100 euro per an hour and they work in 6-8 hour shifts costing them 600- 800 euro for each working day. However to ‘rent’ a prostitute it costs about 60-80 euro for ½ hour. But for each ‘special’ request it costs another 60-80 euro, then for each 15 minutes after a half hour the price doubles, triples, etc. So for ½ is 80 euro but for 45 is 160 euro and one hour is 240 euro.

And no I don’t know this from experience I know by asking questions... and no I didn’t ask a prostitute I asked my tour guide!

But moving on the night of my birthday we went to a Comedy club. It was set up in a Whose Line Is It Anyway setting, and was performed by 4 Americans and all done in English! Then of course we went out!

One finally fun fact from Amsterdam is the language they speak is Dutch… which is oddly similar to German. For instance every word I learned in German was the same in Dutch! So parents you’re really paying for me to learn 2 languages!!