You arrive at the Central Station. People crowd in front of the escalator and everyone wants to descent into the dark corridors lined with shops. And so do you. You can see the stalls and smell their food, but then you see daylight.
A square filled with bicycles and trams. You nearly trip over a pigeon and around you, you can hear all languages of the world. Then you notice a bridge and when you look down over the railing, you can see a long, narrow boat with a roof made out of glass. People wave at you as they see you are looking at them. You wave back and then move on. A cab nearly hits you as you follow the stream of people while the traffic light is still red. On your left Berlage's trade centre lines the street and in the middle of the broad avenue there are colourful, strangely shaped lanterns. You walk along the Damrak, past souvernir shops selling wooden shoes and Delftware, a few snackbars and the Sex museum.
Then you reach the Dam, with its war monument which some thought of as a giant fallus. Once upon a  time hippies assembled here, but nowadays it's the domain of pigeons and performers. People try to look like statues on the square, while statues try to look like humans in Madamme Tussaud's.

You take a small street behind Krasnapolsky. At first it appears just like any other shopping street, but then the objects in the windows change. You see pipes in all colours, mushrooms and toadstools, and soon you encounter coffeeshops which sell quite different things than coffee. The scent of drugs fills the air and you hear a lot of English around you. Bob Marley clones try to sell you things which are not even allowed in Holland.
You cross another bridge, for there are many in Amsterdam. In the shop-windows there are still stranger things than the pipes and mushrooms you just saw. Women wearing naught but underwear stand in cabins the size of phonebooths. The shops are decorated with red lights and it all has the surrealistic atmosphere of a themepark. Yet instead of dinosaurs or Ali Baba's thieves there are prostitutes. Women for hire, here on display...
You cross dark alleys, looked upon by these women. What goes on in their minds? What brought them here? How many sad stories lay behind the faces in this human zoo?

Then suddenly a streets opens up before you and yet another world begins. The signs are in Chinese, even the street names are bilingual. Here there are no prostitutes, nor drug dealers. Instead you see chickens and ducks hanging in the shop windows. And between the restaurants and grocery stores, a temple... Buddha smiles at you, the enlightened one waits behind so many earthly things...