Amsterdam: From museums to red shop windows

From the special reporter "Vijesti"

Amsterdam - When you spend several days in Eindhoven, it quickly becomes boring, because everything boils down to the same thing, you go around in circles... Fortunately, at a distance of less or just over 100 kilometers from the streets where the great Brazilian footballers once took their first European steps, Romario and Ronaldo, there are several beautiful cities.

The closest is Den Bosch (or s'Hertogenbosch, as it is called), which is 35 kilometers away, and Antwerp and the capital of Europe, Brussels, as well as Rotterdam, the largest port on the Old Continent, and the German cultural and industrial center are not far away. centers Cologne, Dusseldorf, Mönchengladbach, Duisburg...

But when you have a day off, the first city that comes to mind is, of course, Amsterdam. The capital of the Netherlands is one of the most popular European tourist destinations for several reasons. On the Museum Square (Museumsplein) there is the Van Gogh Museum and several other very important ones, a little further on is the annex of the St. Petersburg Hermitage... Here is also the house of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose story of fleeing from the Nazis is one of the most poignant testimonies of human suffering .

But, Amsterdam would not have almost four million visitors a year, not even because of its beautiful canals, which criss-cross the city, if it were not for liberal laws. Something that is unimaginable to the rest of the world, is found in the widely known Red Lantern District, where girls stand behind glass doors, in a sort of window display, and offer their bodies!

Without any hiding, without dark lights, with a very transparent price list for all possible services. Not to go into detail, the tariff for "ordinary" sex is 50 euros.

The whole business is organized so that it looks very clean - if they rent a "room" in a good place, the prostitutes pay 110 euros for seven hours during the day, or 140 for the night. As you go to more remote parts of the district, the rooms are cheaper, and therefore the girls, that is, the women, are much less attractive. So who pays...

The problem, however, is that the authorities have recently suffered because of these liberal laws, because according to reports from the United Nations office, the Netherlands is the primary destination for all victims of human trafficking.

But that doesn't seem to bother anyone, everyone is smiling. And they have a "big" reason for that - literally at every turn there are coffee shops of a kind, where you can freely buy marijuana, hashish, many synthetic drugs, as well as numerous props and souvenirs.

The first "coffee shop" was founded on December 17, 1975, on the outskirts of the current Red Lantern District. It was called "Bulldog", and now it is already an empire, which includes numerous cafes, hotels, a "grass" bank...

Amsterdam is, of course, also the home of the famous Ajax, but probably the English don't come on weekends to watch matches at the magnificent "Amsterdam Arena". They have some completely different motives...