I’ve been here for three days now and am settled into my apartment on Spuistraat in the Nieuwe Zijde area in Amsterdam. It’s the “new side” because it was built up after the “old side” in medieval Amsterdam.  Everything is relative.  My apartment is on the third story of a building owned by Hans and Rina, acquaintances of a friend.  Hans is a bit dingy, but Rina is delightful, which to be fair means that I never was able to communicate very well with Hans.  The apartment is an efficiency but quite spacious, and one whole wall is large windows looking out onto Spuistraat, which provides continual slice-of-life entertainment as the building directly across the street is the back side of a police station, and the handcuffed freshly arrested are brought in around the clock.

It's now 2045, and I'm going out for a beer as an excuse to take the trash (het vuil, which sounds almost like “foul” except with a damned ui phoneme) down to the street.  Household trash is placed twice a week at collection points about twenty meters apart on the street.  Street folks here pick through trash with just as much enthusiasm as in San Francisco.

I ended up simply going for a walk because as I shambled along I never saw a place that I wanted to have a beer in, so I just bought some batteries for my cassette player, which sounds really ordinary except that the entire transaction was conducted exclusively in Dutch and even included the tiniest bit of small talk. I celebrated when I got home by doing one whole side of a language cassette Bob lent me.

I've determined that if I shamble slowly enough, I can walk for several blocks without having to stop.  So I shambled west on Lijnbaanssteeg over to Singel, north on Singel almost to its end and then cut back east to the first block of Spuistraat and then back down Spuistraat home.  Directions, of course being approximate as no streets in Amsterdam join at right angles or remain straight for more than fifty meters.

God, this place is old.  This afternoon I noticed that the house diagonally across the street has a date on it: 1659. And it doesn't look like the oldest place on the block either.

And oh, is it ever blasé here in the Red Light district. In my block there are several ground floor windows in which women, for the most part beautiful, pose seductively at all hours, a gay brothel, a multisex porn and toy store, several "coffee" shops selling hash and marijuana, a "smart" cafe selling presumably legal drugs, a couple of youth hostels with a mixture of both squeaky clean and wholesome youths and maidens as well as some types who look like fairly advanced heroin addicts, all coexisting with the police station across the street. The church is in the next block.