I gotta say that I found Amsterdam sketchy and uninviting when I first got there (edit: based on an admittedly small sample of the city). I was staying in the Centrum district, near the train station, at the legendary Flying Pig hostel. Dudes trying to sell me drugs kept following me like tenacious mosquitoes and at night in the middle distance I heard women's screams which were not of the happy variety. (I was also reminded that two friends of mine had been attacked right outside my hostel.) It was by far the place in Europe that I most felt I needed to watch my back -- about the only place I felt that, actually. The marks of the sex and drug trade were seamy and dissolute without being hot or exciting (perhaps I would've seen that differently if I'd been there to indulge in either one, or both, but I wasn't). The sex museum was lame. I have to castigate the Flying Pig Downtown hostel too; its reputation was supposed to be tremendous -- "best place I've ever stayed" and so on -- but it was the worst; even with two weeks' advance booking I was in a moldy, windowless basement dorm; the place was not remotely clean and the showers backed up immediately. It bears mentioning too that this was the only time I've met hostel-goers who were uniformly furtive and unfriendly rather than social and outgoing (or at least making an effort at same) which has been my experience at virtually all other hostels before and since. A great many of them must have been stoned to the gills, and maybe that accounts for the weirdy unfriendliness -- I don't know.

I cut short my stay and was about to head back out into the warm welcome of the smaller cities and towns, but before I did I ended up spending a couple days 4 km away at the Flying Pig Uptown, which was clean, bright, filled with friendly people and right near the Leidseplein, a beautiful public square filled with shade trees and ringed with bars and bistros (it was near the Heineken Brewery too). Purely by chance I ran into an Aussie buddy that I had met in Arnhem earlier in the week, too. So that was good. YMMV.