Locals want visitors to appreciate the city beyond its hard-partying image.
AMSTERDAM – A strip club is perhaps an unusual place to learn about a city, but this is, after all, Amsterdam – perhaps best known for its red-light district studded with “coffee shops” hawking marijuana.
Mr Machiel Mol, who founded the tour in collaboration with the club’s owner Lotte Alberg in 2019, says one of his goals is to shed light on the sex work industry and gain respect for its workers. The Dutch capital draws bachelor parties and boatloads of tourists cruising down its narrow, Unesco World Heritage-listed canals.
Signs in Amsterdam’s city centre discourage irresponsible behaviour. The city has doubled down on campaigns to deter the wrong kind of tourist, such as British men between the ages of 18 and 35. ST PHOTO: CLARA LOCK The community-led We Live Here campaign puts up photos of local residents on doors and windows to encourage respectful behaviour from tourists. ST PHOTO: CLARA LOCK“People misbehaving in the red-light district is a part of Amsterdam, but in my eyes, that’s not the major part of our tourism. We have to find a balance of how to welcome people,” says Ms Alexandra Gudowski, founder of tour company Who Is Amsterdam.
Tours discuss topics such as slavery; LGBTQ issues; refugees; and mental health. They also address things Amsterdam is famous for, including cycling and sex work, in a holistic manner – such as through Tour de BonTon. Sandwiches are one of the items available for tasting on a self-guided food tour through De Jordaan, a gentrified working-class neighbourhood. ST PHOTO: CLARA LOCK
For international visitors, she recommends spending time in other destinations beyond the capital – Maastricht, for instance, a university town in the country’s south, or Utrecht, a small city about half an hour by train from Amsterdam.The highlight is a vegetable bouillabaisse with edamame, asparagus and pesto, and a dessert of strawberries and delicate rosemary crumble. Vegan fine-dining restaurant Kasvio manages to tease out meaty notes from the soup’s plant-based stock.
The outdoor seating area of Little World Kitchen, one of the lush, cosy stops on a vegan food tour I am unlikely to have stumbled on alone. ST PHOTO: CLARA LOCKFor me, a meat-eater, going cold turkey on animal products feels like a stretch. But the day is a friendly and inclusive taster of veganism, enough to make me consider a plant-forward diet when I am home.
Former refugees lead tours, run by tour company Rederij Lampedusa, on a pair of boats that once ferried people from Africa to Italy. PHOTO: REDERIJ LAMPEDUSA Despite the imperfect system, he speaks of the city with pride. To him, it is a place where a man can seek refuge from his war-torn homeland and find a new community; where he can make Dutch friends who meet him for weekly soccer games and write testimonials on his behalf for his asylum application – that eventually went through in 2022,Mr Yusuf Sauli, a former fisherman who came to Amsterdam from Somalia in 2009, leading a boat tour.
Dishes at A Beautiful Mess include dips such as labneh and moutabal , paired with freshly baked flatbread. ST PHOTO: CLARA LOCK Cacao And Spice Amsterdam is a chocolate shop located in what was formerly the working quarters of sex workers in the red-light district. ST PHOTO: CLARA LOCK
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