is there a way to see the actual contents of a symlink?

The ls -l command will show you that:

$ ls -l foo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user group 11 2010-12-31 19:49 foo -> /etc/passwd

Or the readlink command:

$ readlink foo
/etc/passwd

So, the symbolic link foo points to the path /etc/passwd.