Drugs, Sex and Tourism.

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, says that to be a good writer one must know how to balance the extremely anti-social and secluded act of sitting down to write with the actual living of life, which of course is necessary for the gathering of ideas. So, while I haven't really written anything in the last week, let's just say I've been gathering some ideas.

In Berlin, I found a really nice English used bookstore and picked up a copy of Mark Twain's travelogue, The Innocents Abroad, which documents his trip to Europe and the Holy Land. Although 150 years separate his journey and mine, I am excited to hear another American's opinion on this strange land.

I am in Amsterdam now, the point of my final departure as well as my first arrival over a month ago. Due to some late planning, I am staying in 3 different hostels for my 4 nights here. Today, in order to get to Hostel #2, you could have seen me riding my rented bike all the way across town with my giant backpack on. In the rain.

Last night, I talked to a Chilean guy who worked at my hostel. We talked politics. I told him that someday California would become its own nation and then my country wouldn't have been responsible for imposing any dictatorships in his region of the world. We discussed the relaxed social laws in Amsterdam and I said that the United States probably won't lower the drinking age to 18 because the majority of the country still thinks condoms should be punishable by death. For me, the verdict is still out on Amsterdam's policies on drugs and sex, but I think it is an important social experiment. Although it has its problems, the population of hard drug users in the city is an aging one and drug related deaths are few and far between. Getting off the train, I walked right into the heart of the city, an endless row of souvenir shops proudly selling Amsterdam's party-hardy image. This city has chosen to embrace the effects of controlled hedonism, instead of shoving all that activity underground, creating a whole dimension of the city moving illegally. The dark side of these streets is by choice, not caused by poverty like it is in many places. The other day I saw a study that said there have been steep increases in crime in American cities over the last couple years and although it had been increasing slowly for awhile, now the downtrodden economy will make crime in the innercity skyrocket. Just ask restaurant owners in Oakland. Amsterdam has taken a dangerous aspect that exists in every city and turned it into a quite profitable tourist industry meanwhile taking a little danger out of that pleasure. I know America is far from adopting radical policies like this, but it might do some good to start shifting the way our culture views these things if we want to improve the situation.