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Amsterdam: City Overview

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Amsterdam is blessed and cursed by its reputation as the world's most liberal city. So many backpackers, stag nighters and lost weekenders flood into the city each day in search of a pot-smoking party town that their expectations have become self-fulfilling.

It's the visitors, after all, gawping at prostitutes in the Red Light District or spluttering inexpertly on joints inside coffee shops cashing in on dope tourism. Forget the counterculture; these days cannabis capitalists run the show.

Wandering through some areas at night it can appear the city has pushed back the River IJ from its walls only to be swamped in sleaze. For critics, a neat city of canals, bicycles and gabled townhouses has been blighted forever.

Yet the Amsterdam of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and flea markets is as much an artifice of the tourism industry as the city of sex shops and stoners.

In reality, Amsterdam is and has always been a city characterized by urbanity, worldliness, tolerance and a lively, unpretentious nightlife.

And if those values have spawned a gray market that trades in the seedier aspects of human behavior for the benefit of visiting voyeurs, enlightened Amsterdammers would say that reflects the failings of other cities rather than the openness of their own.



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