My latest travels took me to Amsterdam, city of everything a good Christian calls evil. So this means fun for anyone like my friends and I.

No matter how delayed the trains are, never take a bus. The ride was not as long as my trip back from Scotland, after all that took 26 hours, but much less comfortable. From the bus, we hopped on a ferry from Dover, England to Calais, France. The ferry ride was eventful since I forgot my Dramamine. Luckily it took only an hour and a half.

We hopped back on the bus from France to Amsterdam. But the long ride proved to be well worth it again — Amsterdam is beautiful. The streets and canals wind every which way. Amsterdam is the home of the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House, both of which I recommend. The Anne Frank House nearly brought me to tears.

But there is another side to Amsterdam. A side your family would not want you to experience. Coffee Shops line the streets pleading for eager young tourists to spend their guilders. Every coffee shop has a different theme. You can relax in reggae style, chill in trance music or laugh as much as you can at the dance anthem ones.

Different themes with one common purpose. All the coffee shops have two menus: the drinking menu and the smoking menu. You can take your pick of pre-rolled joints with a mixture of cannabis and tobacco or pure cannabis. You can smoke in the coffee shop or you can smoke on the street. No one seems to care too much about what anyone is doing.

After checking out what the coffee shops were all about we decided to go deeper into the culture of Amsterdam: the Red Light District. This area is beyond the ordinary.

We actually couldn’t find it for the longest time. Finally we started looking down side streets that had glowing red lights and we knew we were close.

It was a sad sight. I could not believe women were just sitting in store windows in their underwear, standing in shop windows literally with red lights shining on them. I thought they looked miserable. I saw a guy go up to a door and knock. The girl inside told him a price. She said 50 guilders ($20). He went in. They shut the curtain.

It made me sick to think of how many times each girl would sell herself in one night.

I saw another girl gnawing on a cob of corn. How sexy?

As if girls selling themselves on the streets weren’t enough for us, we decided to go to a live sex show. We waited in line by a penis marble waterfall that would make any man feel inferior.

The sex show was even more disgusting and more exploitation of the human body.

It was a cabaret theatre with couples, shady men and tourists. On stage were the “performers.” The shady characters were probably the most interesting people in the theater. They were the ones who had seats open on either side of them and for some reason had to place a hat on top of their laps. We had such a character sitting in front of us. He provided most of his own amusement for the night.

They had horribly choreographed dances to very bad music before they got down to business. Every part of the show was entirely disgusting. I thought porn movies were disgusting, this definitely reaches a new level I never wanted to know about.

The saddest part of it was the sex was entirely meaningless to the performers. What saved the entire show and provided comic entertainment for my friends and I was the audience participation section. The participants were friends and both were tourists. One of the performers put a strap-on on one man’s head and proceeded to use the strap-on (still placed on his head) for her own pleasure. The same woman made a man eat a strategically placed banana. Yum?

The best part about seeing the sex show was that the following night we saw the participants in a coffee shop. We yelled, “THERE’S PENIS HEAD AND BANANA BOY!” They ignored us.