Amsterdam definitely has something to enjoy, but there is much more than just a tourist attraction!

“The first time I came here, a black man leapt out of the shadows and screamed at me, ‘What do you want? Boy? Girl? Heroin?’ ”

“I was absolutely terrified! I thought he was asking if I was a boy or girl! I hardly knew myself back then!”

“Listen kid,” he snarled at me. “If you don’t want boy or girl or drugs then what the hell are you doing here for Gods sakes? **#@ off!” “I did, of course, I ran like hell! But I swore that one day I would live here!”

We are sitting in a house in the notorious red light district of Amsterdam, an area once teeming with crime and punishment, freaks and misfits and a global magnet for the Age of Aquarius children.

Gunnar, the singer continues, “In those days, I would open my curtain in the morning and scream at the junkies sleeping in my garden, and gossip with prostitutes and now it’s all just changed!” A small door in a wall in the very heart of the city leads to a woman’s community that has existed since the 14th century. We meet Sophie, a performance artist who came to Amsterdam in the seventies, attracted by the liberal and artistic lifestyle.

“There was nowhere like it in the world,” she remembers with her eyes alight. “We all came to Amsterdam with a dream to be something, do something out of the square. All the real artists have gone to Berlin,” says the woman. “I came from Berlin to Amsterdam in the seventies but now the drift is back to Germany, there is more freedom there.”

Tourists leak in a steady stream from Amsterdam Central Train Station; they ebb and flow like the tidal wall beyond the city of canals. “Is this a coffee shop?’ A tourist has his head in through the window; For one crazy second, I fight the urge to scream at them like the black guy did to the singer at the beginning of this tale. "What do you want? Tea? Cookies? Scones? If you don't want that then what the hell are you doing here for God’s sakes! #@** off!"

But the second passes and I don’t, I silently point towards the coffee shop on the corner. And so the legend lives on through another hangover.

By Dianne Sharma Winter