As our ferry arrived at the Hoek van Holland around 7:00, we find ourselves walking out of Amsterdam Central Station not fewer than ten minutes before 9:00. On a Sunday morning. Needless to say (or not?), Amsterdam isn't exactly the picturesque ideal of a bustling Dutch city around 9:00 Sunday. There's foot traffic sure, and more bikes than you can shake a stick at if you were to keep shaking for the rest of your days. That much stick shaking would inevitably drive you crazy, and that's without taking the rest of the city into account. All the coffee shops are open so we decide on some breakfast at a little cafe (not to be confused with coffee shops, which have marijuana for sale) called Soup Kitchen that you can pretty much see from the station.
Before you ask, no, we don't get soup. It's more of a bacon and eggs on toast kind of morning anyways, cloudy, with the sun still low on the horizon. Sunlight doesn't even reach the road on some of the narrower streets we encounter between the post-breakfast coffee shop we chance into and our destination; just something with grass we can sit on and a canal we can look over, a little out of the way. Not too specific, but then again one tends to shy away from specificity with a 50 lb. pack on his back. So it is in this still tired, not altogether nourished tunnel-vision state that we begin to street guess our way northwest through the city in hopes of finding this mystical park of our dreams.
And it is in this state and around this time that we have our first run in with professional prostitutes in what many refer to as the Red Light District. Except at this time of day there are no red lights illuminating the canals and storefronts. Most of the window curtains on the main street by the canal are pulled close. The only ladies working are on narrow side-streets we venture down half-heartedly in our weed-craving induced trek. And let me say this; they definitely aren't A-squad. A few of them, agewise, could be my mother. The few women not quite at that motherly age more than make up for it in pure grotesqueness; faces, bodies, and teeth more suited to gargoyles. But instead of looking all awe-inspiring and gothic, cast of stone and exquisite craftsmanship, they're very much alive and trying to have sex with us for money. We politely decline their offers, and after the first few times, avoid the tiny side streets of the Red Light District like the fucking plague.
