The popular “I amsterdam” sign outside the Rijksmuseum, once a celebrated selfie backdrop, was removed. The government has changed course, raising taxes on tourists in Amsterdam and attempting to divert them to other Dutch cities and towns (Zandvoort! Muiden!). But there’s now a perception, real or not, that tourism has crossed a threshold, that a phenomenon that was once manageable, even desirable, has grown legs and stumbled drunkenly into a canal. Today, some thousand guided tours pass through the red-light district each week-at peak times, twenty-eight groups an hour, according to the city. Between 20, the number of yearly visitors to Amsterdam rose from eleven million to eighteen million.
In 2004, Amsterdam created a slick marketing campaign to draw tourists (slogan: “I amsterdam”). Because prostitution and certain recreational drugs are legal there, the city has become a tourist destination for partiers from around the world. In Amsterdam’s main red-light district, or De Wallen-where the streets are long and filled with coffee shops, bars, and brothels with sex workers standing in the windows-the stag dos have become unavoidable. member state they’ve chosen as their destination. There’s the desire to humiliate the groom, who dons a onesie and a pacifier, or a foam imitation of genitalia, and follows his friends, bleary-eyed and stumbling, through the cobbled city center of a major metropolis in whichever E.U.
There are the traditions: the costumes, or “fancy dress,” for the groomsmen (jailbirds, wrestlers, Smurfs) the ritual drinking the ritual singing the ritual drinking again. There’s something particularly primal about a British bachelor party, or “stag do,” as they’re called something old and deep-rooted, perhaps not fully understood but immediately recognizable by both participants and onlookers.
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