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AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands

Welcome to my city of birth. What neighborhood are you going to settle down in?

Nice pictures, my compliments. Although it seems, you didn`t explore the eastern island and Oud Zuid yet... a MUST DO.
BTW The weather isn`t bad. Maybe 100 days like in your picture, 100 days very light rain, and the other days are some nice spring and summer days that end in a hail or thunder storm, and some nice cloudless winter days with very cold wind. ^^)V

Quote:

Originally Posted by otto (Post 3020337)

Welcome to my city of birth. What neighborhood are you going to settle down in?

Thanks. My apartment is just west of the Vondelpark.

Quote:

Originally Posted by otto (Post 3020337)

Although it seems, you didn`t explore the eastern island and Oud Zuid yet... a MUST DO.

I did, although not during my visit in February. I actually visited Amsterdam 9 times before I moved here, so I'm quite familiar with it.

Nice pics mate - and congrets on the move!

I thought you were German? ( Dutch seems like a hard second/third language to learn )

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mr D (Post 3020823)

I thought you were German? ( Dutch seems like a hard second/third language to learn )

Actually Dutch is by far the easiest foreign language to learn for a German. They share so many similarities and with a good course you can be almost fluent in as little as 3-4 months. Just like Danish is similar to Swedish and Norwegian or Spanish is similar to Portuguese.

Beautiful Pics...Can not wait to be there next month.

Amsterdam Dims the Red Lights
Monday, Sep. 24, 2007 By JOOST VAN EGMOND/AMSTERDAM

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/20...m_red_0924.jpg
Amsterdam Sex Prostitution Red Light District
The "red light" district in Amsterdam.

If the city authorities have their way, the widely sold tourist T-shirt proclaiming that "Good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to Amsterdam" will become a relic. Indeed, those bad boys may soon struggle to find their way to the city's fabled red-light district of "storefront" prostitution. Last week one of the main entrepreneurs in the city's perfectly legal sex industry cashed in, selling his properties in the district. The buyer, for $35 million, was a not-for-profit organization backed by the city of Amsterdam. The plan is to convert the buildings in which prostitutes pose in the windows into apartments and more conventional commercial space.
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From a strictly entrepreneurial point of view, this is not a good investment. The buyers reckon that the value of the properties may fall by $21 million, a deficit that the municipality would have to fund. But for the city elders, that may be the price of transforming the old city center, which they say has become clogged with undesired and outright criminal activities. While prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, the city has found the trade is a magnet for female trafficking and money laundering. "Our aim is to push back criminal activity, to gain more control over the area", Mayor Job Cohen commented.

Nor is the sex industry Mayor Cohen's only target: He also sees the buyout as a chance to begin clearing out the cannabis-selling coffee shops and what he calls "bad horeca" (the hospitality industry term meaning hotel-restaurant-cafe). The move underpins the strategy of the leftist city government to curb what they see as the excessive proliferation of commerce based on sex, drugs and alcohol, for all of which the city earned its global reputation. While they do not plan to stop the sale of undesirable goods and services altogether, they say it has gotten out of hand.

City Hall's drive to clean up the streets has been going on for some time, but last week's property buyout marks a major escalation — it will eliminate one third of the prostitution rooms in the red-light district, and one fifth of those citywide. Nor is this likely to be the last buyout.

And the authorities appear ready to accept the inevitable impact of the cleanup on tourism. While the canal-lined historic center of Amsterdam is known as the Venice of the north, many visitors are often too overwhelmed by the ready availability of sex and drugs to notice the city's architectural and art treasures. But these tourists — dismissed by alderman Lodewijk Asscher as "vertical drinkers" for their habit of downing cans of Heineken bought at the supermarket while gaping at the prostitutes from the street — are not the ones on which city plans to build its tourism strategy. And, of course, these "bad boys" won't disappear completely, as the red-light district still offers a vast array of prostitution "windows," as they are called. But, with the red lights dimmed, somewhat, the area may once again draw a less hedonistic brand of tourist.

Why do these articles always have to contain sensationalist titles or first paragraphs?

Quote:

If the city authorities have their way, the widely sold tourist T-shirt proclaiming that "Good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to Amsterdam" will become a relic.

How would these T-shirts become a relic if only 1/3 of 500 windows will be shut down? It's not like all 500 windows are ever open at the same time anyway. So most likely this would mean that the left over windows (still some 330!) will become more active resulting in a more vibrant and concentrated Red Light District. In other words, the Red Lights wont get dimmer at all!

Anyway, real city lovers know Amsterdam is much more than the RLD.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fabb (Post 3080241)

But these tourists — dismissed by alderman Lodewijk Asscher as "vertical drinkers" for their habit of downing cans of Heineken bought at the supermarket while gaping at the prostitutes from the street — are not the ones on which city plans to build its tourism strategy.

100% agreement. Everybody who lives in this city is sick and tired of the type of tourists who just come to Amsterdam to get drunk, stoned and laid. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.

I'm all for keeping prostitution and marihuana legal, but 90-95% of the coffeshop and whore customers are tourists, that should tell you something. Also the RLD has some of Amsterdam's finest architecture. So why do the canalfront buildings have to be occupied by brothels? Just open nice cafes and bars there instead, like in Jordaan. The windows can move to small sidestreets, where most of the 'business' is done anyway.

nice pics, thanks!

are these builings about to fall?

http://www.jochenhertweck.com/pics/n...l/Img_0568.jpg

aww amsterdam.... was there when i was 9 :P stayed at a hotel in the red light distric...
was coming back from morocco...