(But It's a Solid 70%)
I've read that in Amsterdam
you get your fries from a vending machine, your weed from baristas
and your hookers from window displays. As a serial expat, lifelong
traveler and a Wide Body Jetsetter, naturally I was intrigued and
titilated. I fucking LOVE fries, and I really wondered how a mere
machine could possibly pull off that particular culinary coup without
spraying hot oil on hapless customers or shooting mayo goo on their
shoes.
As my flight started
descending out of the clouds into the Netherlands, I could tell from
my view out of the thick plastic window that the reason for the name
of the country was clear: this spongy bog was clearly the nether
regions of Europe, the waterlogged goop where Vikings feared to
tread. From above it reminded me of a soggy green sponge. It also
reminded me not to do dishes at 5am before an early morning flight.
It was seriously fucking with my metaphor.
An airport is certainly not
the best place to get first impressions of any culture. But
Amsterdam tries so damn hard to be weird, so it is worthy of mention.
After what seemed like an hour walking through the airport in the
direction of the baggage hall (well, I stood on those floor
escalators like a blob, so that might have skewed my sense of time),
it became clear that the Dutchies were all completely high. At all
times. At least the architects and designers are. Bizarre mutated
pumpkins and squashes with hideous faces loomed out at me from
metallic walls and giant, mushy-looking alien blobs were bent over
backwards, leering at passersby. Just when I thought one of these
alien critters was a cushy leather couch beckoning my butt, I had to
slam on the knee brakes to keep from plopping down on solid metal
painted and distressed to look like leather. No sooner had I got back
into the cadence of the airport march than I saw a large alien hand
grabbing an actual rental car. I'll wager that small Euro-cars are
in huge intergallactic demand. That or the entire advertising
department of Hertz is completely stoned.
A visit to the Amsterdam
airport restrooms is also a unique cultural experience. Upon entry
to one of the busy relief stations (WC, toiletten, the bog), a large
Eastern European woman with a mop stood there staring at me. Ten
years in Prague had prepared me for the experience of seeing female
restroom cleaners at inappropriate times (like busily mopping behind
a row of urinating men). This particular character is usually a
female senior citizen, lovingly referred to by the Czechs as
hajzlbaba (crapper granny). So to be greeted by a middle aged
woman with a mop wasn't much of a surprise. But I wondered what kind
of service was being offered when she threw open a stall door and
beckoned me to enter with the sweep of her strong arm. Fortunately,
the stall could barely fit my luggage and my wide body, so I didn't
have to worry that she might saunter on in after me and offer me the
XXL Red Light Menu.
After only 30 minutes in the
Amsterdam airport, I was already giddy and paranoid. Maybe I will be
skipping the weed.
--
19:00, Amsterdam Schipol
Airport (5 days later, high as I write this):
I'm just coming down from
the weed. 24 hours ago I went to my first and only Amsterdam Coffee*
Shop. I told the chilled out skater dude behind the counter that I
was temporarily returning to the rastafarian recreational regime
after 20 years, and that I was a bit of a weed wimp.
"No problemo, Dudo
Grande (no, he didn't speak Spanish)," he reassured me and asked
me exactly what kind of depth, breadth and height of a high I wanted.
 |
| Photo by Gabriela Sarževská |
"Glad you asked, mini
dude. Y'see, it's like this: give me the mildest form of weed you've
got. I'm a lightweight (ironically enough) and I have a flight to
catch. I don't wanna be found in an alley sitting on my luggage
playing bass notes with my own drool strings or anything like that.
If you've got a scale of fuckuppery on your weed menu, like Nirvana
being the highest and Diggety Dank being the middle, I want the
lowest lawn. Just yer garden variety White Boy Grass. Nothing to
get me noticed as I plow my way through the chips, mayo, pizza and
airport snacks."
"Well," he said,
"we are actually known for our strong weed."
"Ok. I'LL DO IT."
Dude had only two pre-rolled
joints and a metric fuckton of various strains of weed—that you
have to roll yourself. So I opted for the weaker of the two
pre-rolled spliffs. One joint of 'Yellow Lolipop For Beginners' or
something like that and 24 hours later, and I'm back on the ground.
There were miles walked, cyclists dodged, hookers gawped at, fries,
pizza and burgers eaten, and long gaps of time stretching between
them. If I had opted for the OTHER joint, the stronger of the two, I
might have been fished out of a canal with a smile on my face. Trust
your weed barista. He knows what you need.
--
A brief moment of clarity
at midnight as I looked up from a spicy garlic sausage and gorgonzola
pizza (my 2nd in 24 hours) delivered to my botel: are
they looking at me? Am I playing bass notes on cheese strings
stretched from my bottom lip?" Aaawwww, the old familiar
self-conscious feeling again. But no paranoia. So I resumed
devouring the pizza with a face plant and serious snorfling sounds.
--
Something or things happened
between landing and takeoff. I will try to reconstruct these
experiences piecemeal from memory. Bear with me. My memory is like
sieve at the best of times. Always has been, even before the decades
of global pub crawling.
Ladies of the Evening (and
Broad Daylight)
'Enough talk of you
gorging on fries and pizza, you fat bastard. What about the
hookers?!'
Glad you asked. Our first
hotel was on the edge of the Red Light District, which was the inner
circle, if you will, of a spider's web of canals which expands
outward from the harbor to to the edge of the old town. If you'll
turn to the imaginary Amsterdam history book in my head...
'Do we have to?'
Yes. The only thing I
planned on this trip were the flights and the hotels. I didn't
Google or Yelp a damn thing about The Dam, just like I used to do in
the Daze Before The Internet. I like to just show up in a new
country and dive in headfirst, experiencing and living and finding
all the good stuff by sheer chance. I highly (snigger; I said
highly) recommend that all of my readers do the same. Your trip will
give you exactly what you need, not what previously-visiting
strangers need.
Oh, the history. I'm
guessing that this massive harbor leading to the North Sea trafficked
just a buttload of sailors on shore leave. What do hard working
sailors need? Vice, baby. Hookers, booze and weed. I don't think
Amsterdam is any more liberal than any other Eurocity. When the
foofy painters in poofy hats finished their run in the 1700s, the
industrial age brought in the goods. On boats. None of these
swarthy seadogs were buying paintings to take home. They wanted
hookers, weed (or whatever drug was the predecessor to the Mary
Jane), cheese and fried foods. And so that is what you get in
Amsterdam to this day. I have never seen so many snackeries dealing
in nothing but carbs, fat and oil in my entire life. It blows
American mall food away. Deep fried sour balls? Check. Fries
with dozens of dips? Check. 50 Shades of Waffle? Check.
50 kinds of cheese from the same cheese chain shops located every
200 meters? Check. The verdict: an entire city with weed
munchies.
As in most Eurocities, the
Euroweenies who inhabit them are in impossibly good shape for their
diet. Germans live on bratwurst and beer and they are largely thin.
Amsterdamers eat cheese, pizza, waffles and deep fried food (I could
find no other foodstuffs in the week I was there) and mostly look
like fashion models in hippie clothes. It's the goddam bikes. Both
Berlin and Amsterdam are flat, marshy lands with no hills in town.
This means that you don't have to be a Tour de France cycle nerd to
navigate the city streets. Slide into 3rd gear and dive
headlong into traffic.
Oh yeah: the hookers. Get
your map (electronic or print; they all have the Red Light district
highlighted in red) and dive on in. My wife and I (yes, we both
wanted to gawp at hookers in windows) strolled the boisterous streets
over canal bridges and into the thick of the night. Coming in from
the southwest side, we saw mostly large ladies of color in windows.
Once we hit another side street, the flavor changed to ladies of the
Asian persuasion, then on to Slav street. If there are dozens of
strains of weed in Amsterdam, there must be hundreds of flavors of
tail.
All of the hookers in The
Dam mostly rent tiny cubicle cubbies with glass windows and white
tiles from floor to ceiling inside where they wriggle like bait on a
hook (hence the historical origin of the name 'hooker'). The wife
commented that it all seemed so clinical and sanitary, like standing
in a hospital shower stall. I guessed that all that sends out the
right message: cleanliness and godliness and all that. But there was
definitely a weird vibe beyond the obvious voyeuristic one. It's
hard to look at something in a window display and not want to ask
about the sales and discounts. Fortunately, we didn't have to. An
Asian man walking in front of me suddenly succumbed to temptation and
tapped on a window. The door swung open, the lady slapped a smile on
her puss and leaned out. I heard the man say 'How much?' and watched
the woman stick out her hand with five fingers, which could mean
almost anything.
A) No way is a hooker
5 EUR.
B) No way is that
hooker worth 500 EUR.
C) Talk to the hand. No
fucky-sucky with Asians (racist whore!).
Maybe he only asked for
directions. That would be worth five bucks.
Being Chased By Smarmy,
Swarthy Pimps (In My Mind)
The sun must rise and the
ladies of the evening must retire, the white tiles are hosed down and
the morning shift checks in. Amsterdam must keep up with Vegas in
the 24 hour party cycle. The only thing more ubiquitous than the
rows of window women are the signs that scream NO PHOTOS! everywhere
nearby. We were near the end of our trip, our last day in The Dam
before the airport shuffle began the next day. I remember craving
only one thing in this city of vice: having a beer while looking at a
canal. Previously, it was 'munching fries while watching women
writhing and wriggling in windows', but every seat was taken. So I
resigned myself to the daytime tourist blob leaning against wrought
iron railings overlooking party boats slithering by with old rich
guys dressed as sailors hosting bored women with buckets of slowly
warming champagne. It was good. It was perfect.
I had read that you don't
want to be caught photographing the hookers in the windows. Smarmy,
swarthy pimps will chase you. I must have subconsciously wanted this
type of adventure, because I found myself innocently taking pics of
canals and rows of bikes and people and coffee shops and and
and...suddenly the row of houses I was photographing had windows with
legs and stockings and cleanliness and godliness sticking out. At
this point it is wise to mention that I had had another puff of
coffee. I was getting paranoid. So I high(snigger)-tailed it out
there just in case. My pimp fu is not very good after a puff or two.
Avenue Anarchy and Bicycle
Road Warriors
Just as in Berlin, cyclists
seem to have the right of way at all times. Only worse. They
seem to have the Dam Right to shoot out in front of cars, pedestrians
and other cyclists alike—with impunity. I asked one of my kindly
drivers about it as he was driving down a one way street with an
obstinate hippy obliviously biking on the left hand side of the road
directly towards him, with only a hair's breadth between the cars,
the bike, the canal and mayhem. "Yeah," he smiled,
"They're not supposed to bike against traffic...but if a car
hits them—it's always the car driver's fault."
Meh. I HATE one group
having more rights than another. It's like Apartheid or senior
citizens on Prague public transport. And the hits don't stop there.
The swirling mass of cyclists in Amsterdam was larger than anywhere I
have ever seen;
Berliners are like babes on trikes compared to the
Dammers. So as I strolled through the city center snapping photos, I
was constantly under threat of grievous bodily harm as bikes flew by
me in all directions at all times, narrowly missing my lens, nose and
other protruding appendages with only a PING! Sound as they strafed
me. It was total. Fucking. Anarchy. How is it possible that there
not constant accidents? It reminded me of driving in Tijuana in a
giant circle of dirt and mud with cars entering the high speed
vehicular tilt-a-whirl at top speed randomly. There were no traffic
lanes. And there were no accidents. It defies reason.
Maybe I'll have to rethink
the whole anarchy thing as a viable human political system. When
bikes and cars dive pell-mell-into-the-breach-balls-out, it somehow
seems to work. Maybe humans only need to be left totally alone to
succeed.
I just realized: I never did
get fries from a vending machine. Oh, I saw them. I was just too
high to operate coins at the time.
*Coffee
is Dutch for WEED.
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