Amsterdam’s unattractive sex workers

OORSBURG, Netherlands — I have a public service announcement. Planes are not walking or running tracks. Planes are not halls for family reunions. Planes are not free day-care centers. Planes are not dive bars. Planes are not your personal bedroom. And above all, planes are indoors — not outdoors. Children, that means that on planes, you need to use your “indoor voices.”

The issue at hand is my flight to Amsterdam, where an enormous family sat down in about 10 seats next to me across the aisle and immediately proceeded to yell, laugh inappropriately loudly, and act as a constant alarm clock for the next eight hours. It really didn’t bother me that much — David Denby’s American Sucker kept me company and served as a shield between me and the 50-year-old yet flirty woman beside me who wouldn’t stop intentionally touching my arm — but I don’t think I could even think of enough material to share with my family for eight solid hours if I were forced into a family loudness competition. To be fair to my family, this indoor-voices-ignorant family did have a secret trick to keep the conversation afloat. An example: “Damn Devin, this brownie is a damn good brownie!” “WHAT?!” “This brownie is a damn good brownie!” “WHAT’S THAT?!” “Devin, why do you never listen when I talk to you?! I said this brownie is a good one!” Voila. You only need one sentence to create three with this technique. That’s how you win a family loudness competition.

Upon arriving in Amsterdam, I immediately set out for the city’s famous Red Light District. I was looking for my cheap hostel, which happened to be in the Red Light District, but I found a lot of prostititues and marijuana at the same time. For the uninitiated, Amsterdam’s sex workers stand behind glass windows in cute little houses in which you’d instead expect small Dutch children with wooden shoes to be living. Wearing only lingerie, they generally look bored and mostly talk on their cell phones as they wait for customers — to who, I have absolutely no idea; maybe they talk to their mothers (“Nope, there’s nothing new mom, I’m just standing here naked again,”) or maybe they phone their own wooden-shoed Dutch children who live in the house with them.

Now, I’m sure every man asks themselves now and (rarely) again whether they would pay for the kind of services these women provide — actually, I’m sure I have no idea about the breadth of their services — but when I looked at these sex workers, it never even occurred to me that I would want to partake. Looking bored and uninterested in the men walking by, they were also distinctly unsexy. You’d think cute and hot girls would be most successful at the trade, but apparently they are excluded from the industry. Thus, a simple suggestion to Amsterdam: if you want people to keep your sex industry alive, you’ll need to find some sexy women. I can’t believe this never occurred to the Tourism Board.

Not that there aren’t hot women in Amsterdam; in fact, exactly the opposite is true. Amsterdam women (the ones who are not Red Light sex workers) make Seattle girls look like they just stepped out of a dumpster (no offense intended toward cute Seattle girls). I suppose Seattle compares poorly to most major cities this way, but being constantly surrounded by tall blond girls speaking Dutch is a loud reminder.

All of this happened, of course, while reading Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s exceptional new book about what life is like as an insecure teenager at a preparatory school. Sittenfeld apparently knows this experience so well that reading this book is like reading a book about my life; she captures the complete insecurity of being a freshman at a boarding school, the obvious yet hidden air of money all around, the constant obsession with other students and members of the opposite sex, and the everpresent feeling that you’ll never fit in, all in a poignant story about a girl who has no chance of being admitted to Brown. I’m many years past my similar experience now, but it seemed like a strangely appropriate and humbling book, being surrounded by blond Dutch girls to whom I’d never even think of trying to talk.

Not, of course, as humbling as getting something stuck in your teeth. Why is it so painfully annoying to get a piece of food stuck in your teeth? It doesn’t hurt, no one can see it, and it doesn’t prevent me from doing anything, yet as soon as it happens, I become obsessed with removing it. So much so that I completely interrupted my day of lunch and the Rijksmuseum, after being rejected by an old Dutch food vendor who simply could not part with one of his hundred toothpicks — to return to my hotel and try to remove the stuck food with all of the following: a toothbrush, a Swiss army knife, a fork, and a Dutch design magazine. All of which failed. I became consumed by this food nugget, which had already ruined my day and caused me to totally ignore my vacation in Europe. Thus, I spent much of the afternoon trying to buy dental floss (it’s apparently not all that common in Holland, but if you ever need it, try the popular dutch store HEMA). Excited when I finally found it, I was too embarrased to use it right there in the store, so I went to find a bathroom. The first I found, embarassingly enough, was in the Dutch queen’s palace, in Amsterdam’s large Dam square. Inside the huge marble castle, I finally found a bathroom and unwrapped the dental floss.

Afraid the Queen would catch me in her bathroom, I worked quickly to remove the food, but it was a humbling experience. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so silly and insecure as this moment, trying to use Dutch dental floss to remove food from my teeth in the Queen’s abode. I guess we never leave prep school insecurity behind. But apparently, the Queen didn’t care, and I escaped unscathed. WB