All Hail The Mighty Goat!

Beer Guzzling With Bleating Goats at a Czech Village Brewery.

Each year in June, thousands descend upon the otherwise quiet village of Velke Popovice to drink beer with live goats. Den Kozla or Goat Day, or Day of the Goat (which sounds decidedly more wicked), is a yearly celebration at the Velkopopovicky Kozel Brewery. Most beer labels in Europe have a dead king or an overweight noble dandy on the label. In the U.S., all the beer containers are as boring and bland as the beer inside. But not my favorite Czech beer, no sir. It's got a goat. A big, hairy bastard with twisted horns holding a foaming beer glass.

Spinning for beer and fabulous goat swag

I don't have too many rules binding my life, but I have beer rules: 1) in Germany, drink beer with a monk on the label, 2) in Czech, drink beer with a big wicked goat on the label.

Maybe I love the Mighty Goat because he reminds me of a simpler time when my religious parents forbade me to listen to hard rock music, so naturally I went to the music store (when they had those) and stared at the heaviest metal albums I could find. And they all enticed me with their red and black covers blazing with pentagrams and goats. Apparently, the goat represents the devil.
Hell yeah!

Den Kozla: Ancient Pagan Ritual of Beer Swilling

What are they feeding those goats?

Normally the wife likes to drag my lazy ass out to the woods to climb giant, slippery rocks or to get attacked by ticks and mosquitoes. If I don't feel up to plummeting to my death or contracting lime disease, I am always free to suggest a cultural event worthy of a discriminating European. Like a gypsy stomp. That's about as discriminating as it gets here in Czechia. But I tend to avoid organized hate rituals like we have in the States (tiki torch Nazis ferfuckssakes), so we just have to conjure up some culture from dead composers and artists in dull mausoleums.

Until the dawning of the Day of The Goat. Then we pagans don black robes, gather in a field, tie up a goat, dance around the writhing, bleating beast, rip its heart out, and then summon hellfire. Or we drink heinous amounts of goaty beer and suck down more sausages than a train station hooker. One of those. Either way, the shadowy figure of Pan smiles on us.

Despite its sketchy image in dark music, the Den Kozla goat fest rages on every year, and I've now been to three out of 26 of them. They never cater to metal heads by making a goat shirt with a pentagram, nor do they play headbanger music. It would certainly draw a crowd, as evidenced by the metric fuckton of mullets in this country. They would still make buttloads of money on beer. But maybe having a bunch of hopped-up headbangers chasing the goats around with meat cleavers is a bit awkward. So Czech folk music will have to do. And it does.

Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter

It was a blazing June day at the brewery and shade was scarce. As an industrial building complex made up of mostly brick buildings and cement roads, shady spots were at a premium. People were crowding into small swathes of shade cast on metal fences along sloping lawns. Since I left my stained, rain-soaked old straw hat on Palatine Hill in Rome last month, I would need new head gear, pronto. The alternative is a hat-less fat dude drinking beer for hours in the hot sun. What could go wrong?

The Kozel Times

I grabbed my Den Kozla straw hat for 99 crowns. I would not bake my noodle in the sun and suffer heat stroke after all. What a bargain. I bought a Den Kozla shirt as well, not because I worship the Mighty Goat, not because I revere goat beer as the nectar of the gods, but because they actually had a shirt in my wide-ass size. I usually ask for size WBJ (Wide Body Jetsetter) or TFA (Tall Fat American). I am usually disappointed. But not this year! I found the only 3XL t-shirt within 500 kilometers. Maybe some genius finally figured out that some of the types of dudes who inhale beer and sausages all day might be a bit on the big side. Or maybe they've always had fat bastardware in my size, but all the fat dudes show up at 8 AM to buy them all. Which reminds me of yet another beer rule: I never drink beer at 8 AM unless I happen to have stayed up all night long drinking beer til 8 AM.

Coke or goat dark, kid?

As the day sweltered on, the cold refreshing goat beer was all that stood between the crowd and dehydration. I was right at that moment of the magical balancing act between the dehydrating effects of sweating in the sun and the diuretic effects of alcohol. One would think that after 6 or 7 beers, one would need to go to the toilet. One would be wrong. My plan was to slowly replace the liquid in my sweat glands with golden goat beer. After hours of walking around in a foggy haze of heat and alcohol, I stumbled into a cold stream of water spewing forth from the side of a fire truck. Children were splashing and running through the water jets chasing rainbows in the mist. It was suddenly like Harlem in the 1960s. With much better beer.

Den Kozla: Refreshingly Hipster Free

Brother from another mother

Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat around for more than five minutes before it sticks in some hipster's greasy beard. The beardos tend to congregate and coagulate around street food stands, 'farmers' markets serving up nothing ever eaten by farmers, and any event promising overpriced craft beer. But the Mighty Goat is keepin' it real: only three kinds of beer are tapped at Den Kozla: goaty original, goatesque amber, and goatacious dark. Served cold and cheap. One of the best things about Goat Day is that each year they release a new goat beer which is only served at the GoatFest. Once it has been tapped, drunk, and pissed into the bushes, it will never be seen or heard from again. This year's Goat Special was called Mistrův ležák (master lager), a pleasing amber lager with a crisp start and a smooth, refreshing finish.

No kale or gluten free hipster hovno here; the food stands are 100% Czech: pots of goulash swinging on chains over fire, deep friers cranking out massive potato pancakes, and enough klobasa to choke a dozen donkeys. You will not find one single avocado smashed on toast.

OGG: old gangsta goat

But you will find plenty of live goats and costumed goat people at Den Kozla. You can also visit Olda the Goat, the official mascot of the Velkopopovicky Kozel Brewery. He stands behind a fence under a shade tree waiting for your selfies while munching grass. This year, Olda seemed much older. He had shed some of the wild, curly goat hair of his youth, his goaty goatee was looking a bit gray, and he didn't seem like he could hold a foaming beer stein like he used to. I feel ya, OG.

We middle-aged old goats gotta stick together. I 'kid' you not.

The Czech Beer Revolution

Did They Really Need One?

For the Czech Republic, beer is king. They are the number one beer drinkers per capita in the world. Per capita is a fancy-shmancy term where they take the amount of beer sold in a year and divide it by the entire population. It's easy math wherein even babies drink. Per capita is the only way to get a decent head count, because some countries are bigger than others, and because some people can drink 10 times more beer than a baby. So it goes. You probably thought Germany would be the largest beer consumers, what with the lederhosen and that Oktoberfest thing. Well, they were. But Oktoberfest is more than half foreigners, so that shit doesn't count. That and Czechoslovakia split in half and the Czechs dropped their wine-swilling Slovak cousins into the dust while listening to Bohemian Rhapsody. When a city map is redrawn into specific districts in order to favor one political party, this is called gerrymandering. With beer consumption and countries, it is called beerymandering.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

Back in The Day (the day I first arrived in Prague, a fine day in 1997 to be exact), every Czech pub was pretty much the same: smokey, wall-to-wall wood paneling, small tv high on a corner shelf, and full of young and old drinkers from opening to closing. There were slight variations of course. The most notable was the type of beer offered. You could walk down a single street in working-class, punk rock, gypsy Žižkov and see at least a dozen different beer signs from an equal number of Czech towns. They had 3 things in common:

1. they were all good
2. they were all cheap
3. one day a week topless bar babes served you the beer.

The reason the beer was (and still is) cheap is simple. Czechs would overturn the government if they levied a beer tax and/or raised the price of beer too much. So beer was classified as 'liquid bread' so as to be taxed as a basic foodstuff, a necessity, a staple, and a mainstay of Czech existence. Clever bastards. Topless beermaids.

DIVERSITY

So many beers back in The Day, so little sobriety. There were pubs every 50 feet and a different beer sign sticking out of each one. It was like staring down a row of colored squares on a life-sized Beer Monopoly board. There was Pilsener Place, Gambrinus Gardens, Kozel Avenue, Samson Street and Budwalk. I saw it as a challenge to try them all. At about a quarter per pint (back in The Day, nowadays about a buck fiddy), the only challenge was not to get too wasted before noon. I never used to be a daytime drinker before I lived in Prague. But you can't pay double for a soft drink. It's bad beer math. One thing hasn't changed: Czech beer is cheaper than water. And who the hell would pay 50 cents for a small glass of warm, flat Coke with no ice when you can get a tall, cold beer for a quarter? Only a MADMAN, I tell ya.

BEER WARS AND THE END OF CHOICE

Prague survived all the major world wars intact by just giving up and being annexed by whatever bastard sons of bitches were in power at the time. This saved all the old precious buildings and even more precious breweries from being leveled. But Czech beer was in true jeopardy when all of the breweries were being bought up by foreign beverage distributors. UK's Bass company held sway for awhile, then sold off the Czech breweries it had owned to the Japanese. ABMiller bought up many of the major Czech labels, and as is always the case with corporate conglomeration, something gets diluted in favor of profit. Globalization equals Bud/Coors/Miller. Anhauser-Busch, the purveyor of the worst and most popular bilge water beer known as Budweiser, takes the And How's Your Douche Prize for stupidest legal move. They tried to sue Czech Budvar, the original Budweiser (from České Budějovice, aka Budweis in German) for use of the name Bud. Oh yeah, that went over really well. Hey, Douchebags! Czechs invented Budweiser in 1785, a hundred fuckin' years before your piss even passed the first Bowery bum's bladder. All they managed to win in the suit was the right to keep American beer fucking close to water. Again. Budvar beer is renamed 'Czechvar' when imported to the States. Wouldn't want to confuse the rednecks with actual beer.

So just like in the Monopoly game, that previously-colorful Žižkov pub street became one massive Pilsener Place, with every sign becoming Pilsener Urquell and Gambrinus (owned and brewed by Pilsener). Every pub started serving the same beer. Even the topless beermaids started to look a little tired and droopy. Pubs started closing (or worse, being sold and turned into biddie bistros where squared headed, burgundy-haired, middle-aged women met over cheap wine and squealed about how they got the house and car in the divorce).

BEERENAISSANCE

I left the Czech Republic and lived in Berlin for 6 years. They have more breweries, and many of them are run by monks. Especially in Bavaria. Ohhhh, mighty monk beer.... A nice German guy told me the best (and probably only) German joke: 'How are sex in a canoe and American beer the same? Both are fucking close to water.' Damn right. So I dove into the monk beer and was baptized in the rheinheitsgebot (German beer purity law of 1516).

On several return visits to Prague for photo jobs, I started to notice a change. On one particular visit to my favorite pub district of Žižkov, there was a new phenomenon brewing: the Czech craft beer. One pub I stumbled into had not only the usual 3 Czech beers, but a whole line of 9 taps serving beers I had never even heard (or dreamed) of. There were even a few microbrewery mainstays like IPA, the once-staple strong ale of microbrewery fame. There were porters, stouts, ales, bitters and blondes, all foaming at the mouth and screaming for my attention. It was about. Fucking. Time. Apparently the peasants revolted. Didn't want the same 3 beers. Hated the corporate oligarchy. Missed the days of old.

Since that glorious day, I've seen a host of microbreweries, craft beer pubs and guest beer tap lists sprouting and hopping up around Prague—even in the outlying areas. My latest cheap-ass apartment in the run-down, industrial district of Praha-Libeň houses several such fine and dandy beer bases. You can sip a strong stout in the cellar bar Napalmĕ at Palmovka Metro (or sit ouside in sunny weather), or you can even go to the Kolčavka pub just up the road, where they are raking steaming malt and hops out of steel cauldrons right in front of you while you sip your ale. It's like a 3D film for the beer enthusiast. With smell-o-vision. Something fondles my nostalgia when I smell beer being brewed. It's like Mom's Malt-O-Meal or oatmeal on the stove mingled with the smell of burning coffee. If I were to ever get rich and famous and be in need of my own fragrance line, that would be it.

Today I went to the Pivovar Kolčavka brewpub up the road. As it was lunchtime and I have no compunction whatsoever about daytime drinking, I sampled 3 different beers. I also had fried smoked cheese to wash the beer down with. Cuz I am all about the smazhak. The first (and best) beer was the Summer Ale, 13 degree. Czech beers are sold by degree: 10 (most common), 11, 12 and... you get the pic. The degree is something about specific gravity or something hoppy or jumpy—I don't care about the geeky bits. I just drink the stuff. But the higher the degree, the stronger, which is all a beer mathematician needs to know. The 10 degree is about 4% alcohol, and it goes up about a point per degree. All of the beers I sampled had that fresh micro brew taste. I can't describe it without getting all nostalgic about Malt-O-Meal again, but that flavor is exactly the same in Sacramento or Praha-Libeň. Except Czech beer is 5x better. Add to that the various types of hops and malts offered in each type of beer and you get beer perfection. I also had something called Best Bitte, which I thought was German, but it was in fact a bitter beer. They also had a hořka, which is Czech for bitter. Then there was the IPA, famous for hoppy bitterness. Apparently you can't be bitter enough. There was also one called Mrtvy Kostelnik, translated something like 'dead friar.' It was the strongest beer on offer. As tempting as that was, I had to pass, as fried cheese, french fries and 3 strong ales is already enough to kill a bull moose.

I oozed home along a winding path by a creek and I stopped to listen to the water burbling off the stones. I thought about how a small country won against imperialist brewers and purveyors of cheap swill to the growing global economy. Half of the major Czech breweries and most of the minor ones are still owned by Czechs in spite of the best efforts of Big Beer. But in a country that has been brewing beer since about the year 800, that makes all the sense in the world.

Smažený Sýr!

One Wide Man's Comfort Food

Fried Cheese. It's the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of my life in the Czech Republic. Everyone needs to find their vice, their relief from the pain and suffering of being mortal. Some choose heroin, meth, crack, hoes, or heroin-addicted, methed-up crack hoes. I do not judge. For me, my vices are The Beer and The Sýr. I guess I would call fried cheese my comfort food. But that's not saying enough. It doesn't 'comfort' me in the way that macaroni and cheese comforts a white trash stoner. My smažený sýr (pronounced smazheny seer) experience is more like trying to stuff a slab of greasy cheese into a hollowed out knitting needle and jam that bitch into my tongue. I'm almost ready to seek help.

Tourists and travelers alike want to know what Real Czech Food is. Yeah, you can have gulash, but the Hungrarians already had that, and sure, you can score some chunks of roasted meat and sauerkraut, but the Germans probably invented that shit as well. If you want something so real, so tasty and so gawdamn decadent that Czechs themselves swear it's the FIRST thing they eat after returning from abroad—it's the fried cheese.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

'But we already have that,' a skeptical American friend said. 'Au contrare, mon frer,' I corrected, you have your mozzarella sticks. In Czechia, they take 2 fuckin' SLABS of cheese, batter the beJAYzus out of 'em, then chuck 'em in the deep fryer right next to your order of fries, then throw it all on a plate with tartar sauce. Occasionally there are small strips of sad sauerkraut or shredded parsley on the side as a garnish. You can safely ignore that shit and dive right on into your hunka hunka burnin' cheese.

Fried cheese is like sex: the worst fried cheese I have EVER had...wasn't bad. It was served in a train station, lukewarm, rigid, rushed and served with no enthusiasm by an old woman who clearly hated her job. And then there was the fried cheese...

The Smažený Sýr Zine

Back before weblogs became blogs, feckless writers who couldn't be published in magazines wrote zines. These poorly crafted tomes were oftentimes the alternative mini manifestos of whatever subcultures were popular before the iphones made zombies of our chilluns. I wrote one of those things, hand printed in pen and ink, to be released in Prague in the late 90s in the height of the (sticking fingers in air in ridiculous quote signs) Prague Literati (unfingerquote). There was just a metric fuckton of American wannabe writers (and Brits as well) living in Prague, sucking up the fried cheese, cheap beer and doe-eyed babes like a whale sucks brine through baleen.

My Smažený Sýr Zine was subtitled 'A Toxic By-product of the Prague Literati.' At the time, too many poetry readings were being given by thin, twitching vegans under the banner of Beefstew. When I first arrived in Prague in '97 with 400 bux in my pocket, I was also a misguided vegetarian. My last girlfriend in the States had warped my brain and stomach into a new diet without meat. Since then I have discovered that the vegetarian diet doesn't work for large men. All the tofu in the world won't fill the protein void. And kale? Gofuckyerself.

I chose cheese. It was in a restaurant near Karlovo namesti where my cheese cherry was first heated, stretched, and broken. The joint was full of smoke and beer and just the kind of apathy that made me comfortable in my own skin. I took the unintelligible Czech menu from the unintelligible Czech waiter and pointed to the plate of the man at the next table The man was cutting into a fried, breaded pillow of something which oozed onto a pile of french fries. 'Is that vegetarian?' I asked. 'It's cheese,' he replied. Then he brought me one.

And with that, Craig Robinson was in love.

I needed to tell the people. They needed to know my love. I wanted to start cults of fried cheeseheads which would put the Green Bay Packers fans to shame. And I wanted to smear the sýr all over the local newspapers and shout cheesy yelps of joy from the rooftops.

The Smažený Sýr Zine project withered in the udder. I had hand printed one—all 4 pages of it (double sided A4, folded in half) and all I needed was the money for a copy machine. I would print HUNDREDS of these cheesy little bastards, change the global diet, and jam my middle finger up the collective noses of all those wannabe 'Prague Writers.' Maybe the project died because a good friend of mine read it and called me a fucking idiot. Or maybe it died because the world wasn't ready to embrace a radical deep fried cheese diet, one which would throw the Earth off its axis from our sheer heavy human MASS. Or maybe I didn't have fifty bux to print the damn thing. You and I will never know. Oh, the bullet we dodged.

In the meantime, I attend cheese church religiously, looking for my sacred cow. Many times I have thought about writing reviews about where to get the best fried cheese in Prague, but the lack of culinary consistency in this country makes me think the cooks are on a rotating prison work furlough. You can get a perfect fried cheese in a pub one day, and the next—total fucking hockey puck. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason.

Cheese Spotting

As mentioned before, bad fried cheese and bad sex are still better than a sharp stick in the eye, so fried cheese reviews might seem pointless with such a non-gourmet food. But after a few thousand pounds of cheesy goodness washed down with cheap, delicious Czech beer, I can offer the following fried cheese guidelines with absolute authority.

1. The cheese must be at least 40% fat in order to melt well. Otherwise you are eating a rubber hockey puck. You can often get 3 or 4 diffferent types of fried cheese: the basic eidam, the snooty camembert, and the risky blue cheese. My staple is the eidam (eidamer in Deutsch).
   
   
2. The fries must be cut thick and fresh on the premises and fried to a golden perfection. Anything less is just frozen fast food fries. The better joints even let you choose the style of your fries: traditional, 'American' (wedges) or boiled potatoes. But don't order the latter unless you are a starving Russian author just released from prison.
   
   
3. The tartar sauce must come in a mini gravy boat with lots of little green herbal chunks. If they try to fob off a package of tartar sauce, you can feel free to deduct that shit from the tip. Cheap-ass-bitch tax, I call it.
   
   
   
4. If a menu has fried cheese and french fries on it, but doesn't include the tartar sauce in the price, keep walking. These cheap ass Czech fucks like to charge for condiments. Hell, they even charge 50 cents for each ketchup packet in McDonald's or any other American fast food joint. The nerve.
   
   
5. Hit the lunch menus between 11am and 2pm. It's a few bucks cheaper. Some of the more enlightened restaurants extend those golden, cheesy hours to 3 or 4pm, knowing that some of us don't get up at 5am, work in factories, and eat lunch at 11am.
   
   
6. After all I've said, you still might be tempted to get one of the meat dishes from the lunch menu. Don't do it, I'm telling you. Unless you like eating three tiny, outdated, discount market chunks of stringy, fatty, grisly, dried out meat served in a sea of universal brown sauce and a metric fuckton of dried out dumpling paperweights. Trust me, life is too short for that shit.

The blogger is chock full of fried cheese as he posts this. But he still needs to ask you:

Where did you have your best fried cheese in Prague? 
Where can I find that tasty shit?

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

Amsterdam: Not Just Hookers and Weed

(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 2^nd 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 3^rd 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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