re you looking for an exotic getaway to someplace where it's always fun, sunny and picturesque, the people love you, and the pace of day-to-day living is comfy and relaxed?
Uh, try Greece.
Do you like Vermeer, van Gogh, de Kooning? Do you like being surrounded with hundreds of little cafés, some of them hundreds of years old, many with outdoor seating in the warm weather? Do you like decent beer? Do you like canals and bridges? Do you like poking around open-air markets where you might find a cool one-off hat, or dig up some schoolgirl's 1958 diary for two euros? Do you like hearing a lonesome saxophone from around the next corner, or two guys from Romania on the fiddle and accordion playing for coins alongside the street café where you're eating Thai food, or passing a band of Peruvians with pan flutes and mandolins and llama-wool vests, and have you ever heard a quintet of accordionists blaze through Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D minor? Do you like Indonesian, Ethiopian, Indian, Cantonese, Szechuan, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Egyptian, French, Japanese, Thai or Vietnamese cuisine? Are you not sure but maybe you wanna find out? Do you like eel sandwiches? How about a delicious bowl of snert? 
Do you like wandering around looking at cool old buildings that seem like they're trying to tell you something — and being momentarily transfixed by some weird little detail? Are you into house, d&b, jungle, trance or whatever the next trend in dance music has been named since I last checked? Would you like to see the place where Anne Frank wrote her diary in hiding? Wanna go see the building where she lived before she went into hiding? Would you be interested in a whole museum about the people the Nazis called terrorists — ordinary local folks who resisted the occupation during WWII? Are you in the market for a cool pair of boots? Do you like never knowing when it's gonna start raining again? Do you enjoy dodging bicycles?
Then maybe you should come to Amsterdam.
Do you wanna come to Amsterdam cuz weed and prostitution are legal here and it's like some wild-ass party town?
Think twice.
Forgive me if I go on about this for a minute. I meet a lot of folks online to whom Amsterdam is nothing more than a mythical place where you can legally get stoned and laid. And that's why they want to come, period. There may be other reasons to visit, but they don't wanna know about that stuff, it reeks of homework. "I'm just coming for the weed," they tell me. "And the babes."
Then I'm torn. I don't wanna discourage narco-sex-tourism, it's part of the economy after all. For the record, I'm glad that soft drugs and sex business are functionally — if not entirely technically — legal in Amsterdam. I think it's preposterous that such things are prohibited elsewhere.
But I hate to see somebody spend their hard-earned vacation money on something that might disappoint them. A holiday in Amsterdam isn't the cheapest. Somebody splats a wad of cash flying in to what they have falsely been led to believe is the Disneyland of vice. They get here and find out it's not quite all that. They may have mistaken the city's legendary "tolerance" for a general license to misbehave. So they act like total dickwads, under cover of the excuse that they paid good money to be here. They swagger into the red light district with their buddies oozing testosterone into the atmosphere. After a few minutes the novelty wears off, and it starts to sink in how creepy and depressing this all is. They vaguely sense that somebody around here is trying to rip them off — and they're right, somebody is. But they cannot yet bring themselves to say out loud, "uh, this kinda sucks, doesn't it." Because they paid good money to be here. After a few more beers they find their way into to a "coffeeshop," sit down and experience the momentary thrill of actually ordering a drug from the menu. They take a drag or two off the joint. They start to feel weird, like oh shit this stuff is really fucking me up. Then they're more or less done having fun for the night. They may or may not remember how they got back to their hotel. Depending on their personal constitution they may or may not sleep through the next day. And then what? More of the same? Dinner at Burger King? Then what?
When someone from my homeland comes here and makes a total ass of himself, I take it personally. He's basically dropping by to say "fuck you" to the place where I live. Then he goes home, having made life just slightly more difficult for 5000 other Americans who live here full time. Next week I will still be here, and I speak with the same accent.
The sad part is that there are people who literally avoid Amsterdam because they're not interested in dope, hookers or tulips. A friend of mine was once touring Europe with some of his art school pals, but chose not to join them on their side-trip to Amsterdam. "Nah I'm not into that stuff," he figured. So he missed the Vermeers and the cool buildings and the open-air cafés and street music and canals and bridges and the basic bliss of aimless wandering.
If you don't want to miss those things, come to Amsterdam. If you don't get totally baked, you'll even have the presence of mind to enjoy it.
