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About a year ago my friend and I took a trip to Amsterdam to see and experience the city that I’ve heard so much about.

For the people that have never been overseas I would certainly recommend taking a trip to a foreign country that requires you to take a flight over an ocean.

The flight to Amsterdam from London (I started my Euro vacation in London) was cool but once we arrived it was completely different from London and of course the USA.

I hardly heard any english which was expected but not being able to communicate left me with a very uneasy feeling.

We took a train from the airport to our hostile which was located right next to the Red Light District.

For those of you not familiar with the Red Light District I will do my best to describe it.

Imagine Las Vegas where ANYTHING goes, then multiple that by 10, minus people acting crazy.

Women and men (dressed as women) standing in windows with a “red light” indicating that they’re open for business, literally.

Seeing women in windows really wasn’t that big of a deal but the fact that you would see a family (through their window) eating dinner in between red lights tripped me out.

Drugs are also legalized and the drinking age is lower than it is in the states.

As we entered out hostile the first thing that hit me was how old the building itself was.

Second was how much I was paying for a room that was a joke.

We were literally right across the street from the Red Light District which made up for the fact that our room was terrible.

Well that and the fact that there was a restaurant attached to our hostile that gave us a 10% discount on our bill.

The place was ran by Argentineans and they had the best hamburgers that I’ve ever had in my life.

As the day went on we hit up the tourists spots, bought some merchandise and just navigated through the city to make sure that we had a basic layout of our area.

We eventually found a bar that had 1 euro yager shots were we decided to post up for a few hours.

The bar was cool and the food was decent.

We ate about 20 chicken nuggets and fries a piece (our waiter knew we were Americans after we placed our orders), took about 10 shots a piece and afterwards we were ready to hit the city.

I did have an interesting conversation with a guy from Paris but that’s an entirely different post.

Once we hit the streets the liquor and the atmosphere were a nice combination.

One thing that I need to make very clear is that there were NO ISSUES what so ever.

No drunks getting into fights or acting stupid and I felt safe 99.9% of the time that I was there.

All we did all night was walk by women in red lights, haggle them, sober up and then go drink some more then eat.

We ended up getting back at like 5 in the morning only to be back at it in a few hours.

I’m not going to go into every single detail but I enjoyed myself, I didn’t have sex with any of the “workers” and I made it back home safely.

The reason for this post was because one of the things that I realized during one of my brief moments of sobriety.

There were two nice sized churches that were on opposite ends of the city but on the same street that I was able to use as a guide whenever I got lost.

No matter where the red lights took us we could just use the lights from the church to come back home.

I try to see the message in every situation that I’m in and to me (while I was sobering up) this seemed to be a message.

The message was no matter how dumb, ignorant, deceitful or disrespectful my acts were that I can find my way home by following the light of the church.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been associated with a church or really active in reading my bible but I did see what I needed to.

When I will have to apply that lesson is anyone’s guess but point taken.

P.S. I will write about other elements of my trip later.