Rick Steves' Red Light District audio-tour

The Rick Steves audio-tour is a free download which, like so many other Amsterdam walking tours, starts at the foot of the national monument on Dam Square. It begins with narrator Steves, advising against taking pictures, particularly photos of the women in the windows, advice I duly followed. The images here are therefore few in number. If you want to see what the place looks like, however, there are videos of walks online. The tour is basically a very simple 50-minute continuous narration given by Steves and co-guide Lisa.  Whilst Steves did say there was always the pause button, for those who want to get more personally acquainted with what the area has to offer, I just kept on walking and listening, lapping it up like a National Geographic documentary.

The two narrators play a bit of a good cop/bad cop routine with the woman staying on the straight and narrow, while the man is interested in the sex, drugs and sleaze. The way they do this is, Steves relates mostly positive information about the coffee shops, prostitutes and smart shops, explaining what you can find, how much it costs, and finishing off with a line he repeats again and again, "and it is all perfectly legal!" Lisa, however, sticks mostly to giving directions to keep the audio-tour moving. She interjects, from time to time, "that's enough, we have to keep moving." 

The tour is really very simple and that is one of its strengths: it tells the most obvious story clearly and it is easy to follow and not get lost. Steves has positioned himself as the American expert on European travel, and I can see how he can have some appeal. His audio tour has enough humour to make it feel relaxed, but he still does the bread and butter work of the tour guide of explaining the history and the life today. He sounds like a slightly risqué uncle who is basically very respectable, and knowledgeable too, but likes to joke around now and then. I am guessing that he probably represents the progressive side of middle America, as there are a number of times he talks very positively about Dutch pragmatism and the country's social security system. In this sense, he holds up Amsterdam as an example that America could learn from.

I took the tour around 8-9 PM, which seemed like a good moment; the streets were growing busy, there were women in most of the windows, and I saw several tour groups being led around. There was a Spanish group, a rather random mixed group of tourists getting a guided tour in English, and an older group of Chinese tourists with their own Cantonese guide. I can only guess they were all getting slightly different takes on the same basic story. Actually, as well as this audio-tour, I myself have also taken a walking tour which also passed through the Red Light District, and both that one and this related many of the same stories. Of these, the most particular is the peeing men falling into the canals story. On the walking tour I was told 10 dead bodies a year are pulled out of the canals, the corpses usually being men with their fly unzipped. Curiously, on this audio tour the number of men succumbing  to this ignoble death swelled to 12. What the two tours seemed to agree upon, however, is that those in greatest danger of coming to this pitiful end are British men. With that in mind, it was time for me to heed their warning and leave the Red Light District, lest I should join their number. 

Safely back home, I watched this Youtube video of the Ultimate Amsterdam Coffeeshop Tour. It is a record of another American visiting Amsterdam and taking a tour, but a somewhat less respectable one than Mr Steves. Call it age, if you will, but I think this is a tour I can best enjoy from the comfort of home watching it on my laptop. This guy smokes an astonishing amount of weed. It is painful to watch but, as Rick Steves says, "it's all perfectly legal!"

The Sex Tourist's Tour

This afternoon I took a rather different sort of tour: the sex tourist's tour of Stuttgart. I did this after stumbling across the internet forum International Sex Guide and then distilling the information on Stuttgart into a series of addresses in the city centre and travelling from one to the next. Here they are. 

This place did not exactly announce itself from the outside, it was the internet that placed it on the sex tourist's map. There were a couple of reviews of the service, which was pricey and not so great, if you take the contributor's opinion as valid.  

The Red Light District of Stuttgart is a different proposition altogether. This place is visible from the street; it is a concentration of businesses more or less offering the same thing: sex for money. The area is very close to the city centre, just tucked out the way so as to not intrude too much upon the clean image the city wants to present to the casual visitor. 

I went to the Red Light District during the daytime when most of the places were closed. There were one or two women smoking cigarettes who'd quietly say, "hello" and a few more or less sleazy guys hanging around, but it was for the most part quiet. These two roads must come alive after dark and at weekends, I suppose. The Internet guide said that it was inexpensive here, but that there were some rip-offs with "the champagne trick".

On my way to my next address I passed one of the many sex shops that are in the city centre. This one 'beate uhse' is a chain I believe; I think I even saw one of these in the airport. The overall impression this highly visible sex-shop chain gives is not sensual in the least but rather strangely mechanical, kind of like the Stuttgart Tour bus giving you the come on.

I then made my way to a club called Phoenix that was highly recommended in the guide. It was nothing to look at from the outside, stuffed inconspicuously between a shop and a kebab house. The guide said this place was mostly frequented by German men in the 50s and 60s and was part of FKK, a national chain of sex clubs. The quality of girls was meant to be 'good' and the prices 'reasonable'. There was even someone offering tours of these clubs such as a four-city package in which you travel as a group of four guys with him in a BMW and he takes you to a new club in a new city every night. What's more, he can arrange to pick to you up from the airport, take care of all hotels and translation so that you exactly what you're looking for. The final service he offers is the most imaginative. He says he can provide you with excuses for you to be away for a few days, such writing a letter inviting you to an imaginary conference or meeting which you can then show your boss or, perhaps more to the point, wife.

This was the last point on my tour and it was surprisingly central, in a gloomy passage just off the main shopping street and near the city hall. The 'Three Colours House' seemed to being doing brisk business with a steady flow of men coming in and out of the door. This place is laid out on several floors inside and there are up to 80 women working there at any one time, each of them having an individual room. It is meant to be cheap, but the service is very variable, according to the forum. One poster thoughtfully wrote "Ask Rebecca in the third floor, she is Romanian 5. 2 tall and brunette, good shape and attitude. Of all the girls there, she is a gem, you will surely get GFE with her." 

I then traced this route out on a free Kunst map (the green numbers) that I picked up earlier so as to turn the forum information into a proper tour route complete with information for each point. I rather enjoy superimposing one map upon another, it's just a pity I could not see a neat way to make the dots trace out the shape of a giant cock. I am well aware that the sex tourist's information is neither neutral nor reliable; it comes with masses of assumptions that the non-sex tourist might well reject. That is fine with me as I want the various tours I quote from on my Tour of Tours to have different even conflicting sorts of baggage. This should make for a richer meta-tour. It will also make it more surprising when a site appears on two of more different tours. For example, I looked at the men coming out of the Three Colours House and they were mostly in their 50s and 60s. This demographic must also be the mainstay of the conference trade that accounts for a significant number of the city's visitors. It does not require the powers of Sherlock Holmes to deduce from this that there must be some crossover between the two. Guys come to Stuttgart for work which can include a conference organised tour of the city which they slip away from and turn into a sex tourist's tour.