Amsterdam Anyone?
EvilToasterElf
Posts: 1,119
I thought this was kind of interesting when I found it on my computer - a little narrative of Amsterdam
We landed in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport 15 minutes before we took off from London’s Heathrow. We expected flags with pot leaves and hippies burning incense decorating the streets, we expected the entire city to smell like pot and munchies, we had envisioned a city both pungent and friendly, but as we left the airport it looked the same as much of Europe. Narrow streets and very low buildings, the sky was gray from yesterday’s rain, and many of the faces we saw were ashen, as if fighting off their own bitter winter despite the mild temperatures. We got directions from some hustler outside the train station; she jumped whenever it looked like an American opened up a map, and as soon as we had figured out how to unfold the map she pounced. We told her where we were going and she gave us what turned out to be not too terrific directions. She waited with slightly widened eyes after her instructions were complete but since no one made a move to pay her she immediately darted to the young couple behind us. Only when she had left did the scent of whiskey really hit us. It was time to find the hostel.
The roads here were unusually narrow and the trams snaked through the streets hissing to a halt near the center of the city. There was some kind of ticket mechanism we didn’t fully comprehend but managed to trade money for and get going where we needed to go. As we watched alien streets flash by the entire city began to take on the tone of an old movie set. Every street looked identical to the one before, each with its own small bridges and canals and rows of identical housing. Street names were hardly a distinguishing feature to us, all of them had too many consonants to pronounce with justice anyway, and I think the hostel was on Clverkenwholde Street or some such nonsense. I felt like a character in one of those clichéd cartoon chases in a hallway, where I could walk in any door of the city and come out on the opposite side of the street, or next door, or upside down at the end of the hall. This feeling was reinforced by the time we got within two blocks of the hostel, and into our first coffee house.
I personally didn’t know what to expect at this point. The only remotely familiar quality of the place was the pungent aroma of illegal herbs wafting across the room when we opened the door, at the very least we knew we were at the right place for some recreation. The room was not too large, about the size of a small New York café, the only difference really was what was sold at and behind the counter. There was a number of pot smoking paraphernalia on the counter, pipes, rolling papers, pre-rolled joints, pot grinders, and filters. The shop had it’s own menu for the pot, it came in flavors like purple haze, northern lights, white widow, and superskunk. We asked them the usual tourists questions like, are you sure this is legal, so we just order whatever we want, and can we smoke it outside too. The answers were all yes. So after a few minutes of giggling we sat down with a gram and a half or so of purple haze. We borrowed a small bowl from the shop and sat down to enjoy an environment of relaxed recreational drug laws. After the first breath of smoke I could feel myself separated from the room. I was no longer to be counted among the actual inhabitants; I was a fly on the wall. My brain would now function only to take in details and anything that I said felt as if it came from another part of my body, pumped out from the lungs without asking my brain’s permission. I would fixate on these people, most whom I had only known a couple of weeks, and allow those primitive intuitions to take over. As if smoking these herbs, altering our brain chemistry and slowing our motor skills truly amplified some of our other hidden qualities. You can really look at a person and tell whether they’re lying, whether they are genuine. Who is unsure of themselves, living a life of other people’s expectations. Pot heads are notoriously good at spotting bad acting, most non-comedies are pretty much unwatchable when you’ve puffed a good puff. You’re eyes become daggers, your mind a whirlwind of introspection, slicing and dissecting personalities making judgments, envisioning futures and pasts and altered presents. Ironically, as your mind settles into overdrive your body barely has enough function to sharpen a pencil to write it all down.
“Holy shit,” I said. After the stylish little glass number had gotten back to me most people could only nod in agreement. “Guys you realize we’re here for Binghamton University right now?” It felt good whether it was true or not that I had finally found a good way to buck the system. The group, 8 guys 6 girls, 12 smokers 2 non, could only laugh and giggle in eerie unison. There were some guys on the trip who had their own college battle scars but nobody could believe how potent this stuff was. Before the bowl got to me for the third time I began looking around at scattered magazines and papers when I saw a small cardboard flyer. “Hey Jay?” I said. “Yeah,” he answered. “Um, did you know mushrooms are legal here too?” “What!? You’re fucking joking me,” he blurted. “No dude look, it’s called the mushroom galaxy. I can’t believe we can fucking shroom in the streets here, this place in insane,” I said with a huge grin on my face. Jay screamed over to the guy behind the counter, “Yo, is it legal to take mushrooms here?”
The guy nodded his head, and we all put our heads closer together at the table. “Ok, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we HAVE to shroom this weekend, Jay whispered.”
We walked out of that coffeeshop into a completely different city that we had left only an hour ago. Cars showed no great hurry to be anywhere, bicyclists to beam smiles at us, casually stumbling down the street, obviously tourists, obviously stoned. 11 of them were staying at a different hostel than the 3 of us, it couldn’t have been more than a ten or fifteen minute walk between them but I knew for sure we’d need a cab. None of us had the motor skills or cognitive recognition to sign ourselves into the hostels, so the burden fell on the two sober girls to get everyone through the ordeal. Alex, Ryan and I sat outside and watched the sun shout colors into the canal. Rippling reds, and oranges, yellows, reflecting off the odd colored roofs of the nearby street. The canals were empty with the exception of the sun’s incessant wall of beauty and the scattered thoughts we spared for the waters, like pennies in a wishing well, I could see them sinking to the bottom. It seemed like it took a little longer than usual for them to get situated but that was understandable, but our 11 companions, 9 stoned 2 growing impatient, finally drooled through the dripping maw of the hostel and spilled into the streets. Ryan and I still had packs on our backs, Alex had signed in the day before but we decided to wander towards our hostel, in no particular hurry to sign in. We decided to find another coffee shop before we got there.
As we walked past canal after canal, tram after tram, row upon row of identical buildings the feeling of walking through a movie set became fixated in my mind. The people whose language I could not hope to grasp, their funny little European cars, the countless six foot tall amply proportioned Nordic blondes that flew by on bicycles; all these things began to lack worth because they were no longer real. The entire town had blended into fantasy, people were simply reduced to characters in my story as I explored this strange European town. It felt like a good city to die in, as if it already had its share of phantoms mingled with the locals, making the air heavy and sad. It was certainly a city with it’s own personality, an ethereal block of humanity, an island away from the fundamental laws of the universe.
We landed in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport 15 minutes before we took off from London’s Heathrow. We expected flags with pot leaves and hippies burning incense decorating the streets, we expected the entire city to smell like pot and munchies, we had envisioned a city both pungent and friendly, but as we left the airport it looked the same as much of Europe. Narrow streets and very low buildings, the sky was gray from yesterday’s rain, and many of the faces we saw were ashen, as if fighting off their own bitter winter despite the mild temperatures. We got directions from some hustler outside the train station; she jumped whenever it looked like an American opened up a map, and as soon as we had figured out how to unfold the map she pounced. We told her where we were going and she gave us what turned out to be not too terrific directions. She waited with slightly widened eyes after her instructions were complete but since no one made a move to pay her she immediately darted to the young couple behind us. Only when she had left did the scent of whiskey really hit us. It was time to find the hostel.
The roads here were unusually narrow and the trams snaked through the streets hissing to a halt near the center of the city. There was some kind of ticket mechanism we didn’t fully comprehend but managed to trade money for and get going where we needed to go. As we watched alien streets flash by the entire city began to take on the tone of an old movie set. Every street looked identical to the one before, each with its own small bridges and canals and rows of identical housing. Street names were hardly a distinguishing feature to us, all of them had too many consonants to pronounce with justice anyway, and I think the hostel was on Clverkenwholde Street or some such nonsense. I felt like a character in one of those clichéd cartoon chases in a hallway, where I could walk in any door of the city and come out on the opposite side of the street, or next door, or upside down at the end of the hall. This feeling was reinforced by the time we got within two blocks of the hostel, and into our first coffee house.
I personally didn’t know what to expect at this point. The only remotely familiar quality of the place was the pungent aroma of illegal herbs wafting across the room when we opened the door, at the very least we knew we were at the right place for some recreation. The room was not too large, about the size of a small New York café, the only difference really was what was sold at and behind the counter. There was a number of pot smoking paraphernalia on the counter, pipes, rolling papers, pre-rolled joints, pot grinders, and filters. The shop had it’s own menu for the pot, it came in flavors like purple haze, northern lights, white widow, and superskunk. We asked them the usual tourists questions like, are you sure this is legal, so we just order whatever we want, and can we smoke it outside too. The answers were all yes. So after a few minutes of giggling we sat down with a gram and a half or so of purple haze. We borrowed a small bowl from the shop and sat down to enjoy an environment of relaxed recreational drug laws. After the first breath of smoke I could feel myself separated from the room. I was no longer to be counted among the actual inhabitants; I was a fly on the wall. My brain would now function only to take in details and anything that I said felt as if it came from another part of my body, pumped out from the lungs without asking my brain’s permission. I would fixate on these people, most whom I had only known a couple of weeks, and allow those primitive intuitions to take over. As if smoking these herbs, altering our brain chemistry and slowing our motor skills truly amplified some of our other hidden qualities. You can really look at a person and tell whether they’re lying, whether they are genuine. Who is unsure of themselves, living a life of other people’s expectations. Pot heads are notoriously good at spotting bad acting, most non-comedies are pretty much unwatchable when you’ve puffed a good puff. You’re eyes become daggers, your mind a whirlwind of introspection, slicing and dissecting personalities making judgments, envisioning futures and pasts and altered presents. Ironically, as your mind settles into overdrive your body barely has enough function to sharpen a pencil to write it all down.
“Holy shit,” I said. After the stylish little glass number had gotten back to me most people could only nod in agreement. “Guys you realize we’re here for Binghamton University right now?” It felt good whether it was true or not that I had finally found a good way to buck the system. The group, 8 guys 6 girls, 12 smokers 2 non, could only laugh and giggle in eerie unison. There were some guys on the trip who had their own college battle scars but nobody could believe how potent this stuff was. Before the bowl got to me for the third time I began looking around at scattered magazines and papers when I saw a small cardboard flyer. “Hey Jay?” I said. “Yeah,” he answered. “Um, did you know mushrooms are legal here too?” “What!? You’re fucking joking me,” he blurted. “No dude look, it’s called the mushroom galaxy. I can’t believe we can fucking shroom in the streets here, this place in insane,” I said with a huge grin on my face. Jay screamed over to the guy behind the counter, “Yo, is it legal to take mushrooms here?”
The guy nodded his head, and we all put our heads closer together at the table. “Ok, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we HAVE to shroom this weekend, Jay whispered.”
We walked out of that coffeeshop into a completely different city that we had left only an hour ago. Cars showed no great hurry to be anywhere, bicyclists to beam smiles at us, casually stumbling down the street, obviously tourists, obviously stoned. 11 of them were staying at a different hostel than the 3 of us, it couldn’t have been more than a ten or fifteen minute walk between them but I knew for sure we’d need a cab. None of us had the motor skills or cognitive recognition to sign ourselves into the hostels, so the burden fell on the two sober girls to get everyone through the ordeal. Alex, Ryan and I sat outside and watched the sun shout colors into the canal. Rippling reds, and oranges, yellows, reflecting off the odd colored roofs of the nearby street. The canals were empty with the exception of the sun’s incessant wall of beauty and the scattered thoughts we spared for the waters, like pennies in a wishing well, I could see them sinking to the bottom. It seemed like it took a little longer than usual for them to get situated but that was understandable, but our 11 companions, 9 stoned 2 growing impatient, finally drooled through the dripping maw of the hostel and spilled into the streets. Ryan and I still had packs on our backs, Alex had signed in the day before but we decided to wander towards our hostel, in no particular hurry to sign in. We decided to find another coffee shop before we got there.
As we walked past canal after canal, tram after tram, row upon row of identical buildings the feeling of walking through a movie set became fixated in my mind. The people whose language I could not hope to grasp, their funny little European cars, the countless six foot tall amply proportioned Nordic blondes that flew by on bicycles; all these things began to lack worth because they were no longer real. The entire town had blended into fantasy, people were simply reduced to characters in my story as I explored this strange European town. It felt like a good city to die in, as if it already had its share of phantoms mingled with the locals, making the air heavy and sad. It was certainly a city with it’s own personality, an ethereal block of humanity, an island away from the fundamental laws of the universe.
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