The most striking visual aspect of the Red Light District is probably the windows. You feel like you're walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, except that in the windows you don't see Gucci bags and Hermes scarves.

You see girls. There are the fat ones and the skinny ones and the Eastern European ones and the Asian ones and the old ones and the "barely legal" ones. One woman was bent over touching her toes, while her rear end--apparently her special feature--protruded in the window.

I'm in Amsterdam today, and last night my wife and I conducted an anthropological visit to the Red Light District. (Wow, the things we have to do to advance research and scholarship.) Amsterdam's Red Light area makes Las Vegas look tame.

The sex shops have special sections with categories like  "animals" and "grannies" and "watersports." There were also categories were so exotic I'm going to have to look them up. The evening acts feature not erotic films but rather "live sex acts".

A fellow was standing outside theater Casa Rosso, inviting people to come in. "Three on one action," he called out. "Fifty euros, three free drinks."

On one of the bridges, the Dutch Tourist Authority was conducting its regular tours. Speaking with unembarrassed aplomb, the local guide--an elderly Dutch woman with her white hair in a bun--was explaining where the good deals were to be found. The foreign visitors stared in wonder. I saw lots of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans taking pictures. There were South American tourists, Indian tourists, even Muslims walking around with chadors and headscarves.

If as Americans we found the sight very strange, I could only imagine how strange it was for these visitors. This is not to suggest that prostitution or anything that we saw in Amsterdam is unavailable in non-Western cultures.

These are universal vices, and from what I hear, there is stuff in Thailand that would put Amsterdam to shame. But nowhere else in the world are such things given the sanction of public endorsement. Nowhere else do they enjoy government approval. This I realized is what makes Amsterdam so odd. Not the availability of prostitution but the fact that it's out in the open, with the government conducting tours and the locations of brothels helpfully listed in the tourist information catalogs.

Dinesh