Home Abroad

Amsterdam is not what I expected. I didn’t really expect anything from Amsterdam. I knew that my eleventh grade anatomy teacher told us that he and his wife spent their summers in Amsterdam. — When pressed for why, he effectively said, “You’ll understand when you are older… Or you won’t.” That man had a huge propensity for dropping wisdom into his everyday conversation and he once beat up Ed Harris. — I knew that prostitution and marijuana were the primary draws of tourism, but also understood that was likely a derivative view of the city. Nevertheless, it was only ever an ancillary interest somewhere in my mind.