Who would have thought that I would find a reliable wireless connection in Split, Croatia? Not I, said the pig. I am sitting in this coastal town's only "modrujl," or laundrette, run by a friendly Australian couple who have been ever so helpful in washing my clothes and setting up my computer to post! Unfortunately, I have to run and catch a bus to Dubrovnik at the southern tip of Croatia, so I only have the time to publish part two of my Amsterdam ramblings, which clearly should have been posted a month ago when I was actually in Amsterdam. What are ya gonna do? READ, that's what. If you missed part one, you can find it
here. Otherwise, I now present...
Amsterdaaaaaaamn!Part Two
I guess I reached my peak at around dinnertime. I say that because when dinnertime came around, I was pretty hungry. Scientists call this “having the munchies.” We ate at a little Italian restaurant that looked nice from the outside. I had the vegetable lasagna. I think it was delicious, but I was so high that I don’t remember! I’m kidding; it wasn’t very good.
Having never before experienced the “high” druggy feeling that one feels when one gets “high” on drugs, I didn’t exactly know what to expect. All I had to go on was what I remembered from health class about impaired mental acuity and from
Eugene Mirman’s video about growing a second dick. But from what I gathered after my first experimentation with weed (marijuana is sometimes called “pot,” “grass,” or “weed”), it was a rather tame experience. Looking at my reflection in the restaurant window, I felt like I was watching ice dancing – you keep waiting for something to happen, but nothing ever does. These two hyper-enthusiastic losers are just prancing around on the ice to a Gloria Estefan/Christina Aguilera medley, and you keep thinking, “Am I gonna see a triple sow cow? Are there gonna be any upskirt shots? Why does that dude think he can get away with a Seagal ponytail when he is clearly the farthest thing from a renegade martial artist/environmental agent?” It reminded me of the time I was watching ice dancing.
The only difference in my drug-induced behavior that I could detect was the several times I caught myself staring into my plate for extended intervals. But as someone who is prone to frequent sober zone-outs, I was not impressed. I felt relaxed, sure, but I have felt relaxed ever since I got to Denmark, spending a worry-free semester jetting around Europe. There were no hallucinations, no visions of clarity opening the door to an alternate reality, no bursts of creativity that would inspire me to record
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the way it did that band with those haircuts. I thought of just one premise for a new joke, a germ of an idea about people who take candid photographs (yeah, it’s hilarious). Maybe I didn’t take to it, but I’d prefer to say that
it didn’t take to me. That puts the blame on the brownie. Several pot smoking acquaintances have suggested that some people don’t get high the first time, that I should try again. But now that the allure is gone, I don’t see the point anymore. It’s like when you finally gather up the courage to ask out that hot chick you’ve always seen around the laundromat, and then she tells you in broken English, “I don’t speak America.” You
could learn Danish, but it’s not worth the effort.
Saturday night was devoted to exploring the city’s family fun park - The Red Light District. After catching another Boom Chicago show (completely different from the Friday Nite Late Show, mostly rehearsed sketch and video), we ran into the rest of our crew who happened to be hanging around the Leidsplein. Rachel and Alan had some high school friends in town, as did Brandon and Shaira, and we caught Sly and Nelson walking into a bar just as we were getting out of the show. Somehow we all ended up together in a completely coincidental sidewalk reunion. A few beers later, we were hot on the trail of the glowing red lights with our Euros in hand and our pants unzipped (they charge by the minute; it’s all about saving time).
As we approached the beacons of whoredom, we began to pick up on the variation of the Dutch dialect that is spoken in the notorious neighborhood. It seems in these parts, the traditional Dutch salutation, “Hello, how are you?” has been replaced with, “Coke, X, weed?” or sometimes, “Weed, X, coke?” Not much else is said between passer-byers in this part of town, but friendly under-the-breath murmurs of “Coke, X, weed” will greet the tourist on every street corner.
There are three types of tourist walking around the Red Light District:
1) Older couples, church groups, and Asians who have decided to check out of the place for novelty’s sake only to become immediately turned off by the rampant sketchiness. They can be seen hurriedly crisscrossing the canals with their heads down, looking for a cab back to their bastion of morality, the Best Western.
2) Roving gangs of Eurotripping fraternity brothers and otherwise obnoxious college-aged kids who are super wasted and eager to make asses of themselves. They can be seen knocking on windows, making lewd and lascivious gestures, and saying things to each other like, “Dude, she totally wants me.”
3) Lonely Verbal Kent types who shuffle around seriously contemplating a “suck and fuck.” Every now and again, one can be seen emerging from a window front to enthusiastic applause from those in Group 2.
Amsterdam is like the Major Leagues for hookers. Most women would turn to prostitution as a last resort, but for the women working this town, a life of harlotry is a calculated career choice. It starts by getting signed to the local strip joint where the starlets are quickly separated from the single moms. The raw talents move up to Hunts Point or Atlantic City to hone their skills, while the more ambitious may tackle the big city escort gigs. After paying their dues for several years in the shaved bush leagues, the brightest prospects can expect a cup of coffee in The Netherlands. Few make it to the windows, even fewer become established veterans – far too many whither away on the streets of Slovakia still waiting for the call. But for those would-be vixens who can walk away with the Red Light District on their résumé, the door to the adult film business remains wide open as long as their legs do.
Contrary to some of the more self-respecting members in our little tour group, I didn’t feel the least bit sleazy as I walked by window after window of scantily clad strumpets illuminated in halos of sexual energy. The whole scene was completely hilarious to me, especially the earnestness in which these women conducted their business. Many could be seen sitting in their chairs networking on their cell phones, presumably scheduling future appointments, ordering restocks of AstroLube, and checking in with the babysitter. When it comes to the money-making, some girls take the passive approach, standing in the window dragging on a cigarette and letting their enormous breasts do the talking. Some find the occasion to dance in a suggestive manner and pose erotically. If eye contact is made with a potential suitor, she might take a step outside and use her hooker charm to seal the deal.
To put it simply: If you don’t get laid in this city, you’re not carrying enough money. The competition among the women is fierce, and therefore negotiation expected. Until you have haggled with a prostitute in Amsterdam, you haven’t truly haggled with a prostitute:
Me: I don’t want to get too close. How much for a motorboat?
Whore: What do you have?
Me: A loving family, a bright future, and t-shirt that says, “Perot for President.”
If my weekend was filmed and released as a DVD, the chapter title for Sunday would be “Pancakes and Paintings.” That is because we ate breakfast at a traditional Dutch “pannekoekenhuis” and went to the Van Gogh Museum in the afternoon, thereby crossing out the second half of my “Famous Shit to See in Amsterdam” list. The pancakes were really good, heavily dusted with powdered sugar, but would have been “really fucking good” if served with my beloved Vermont Pure Maple instead of the traditional Dutch molasses,
stroop. Stroop tastes like burnt asshole, probably because it’s prepared in a Dutch Oven (that’s the kind of joke you would hear on
The Guyster Show). But seriously, stroop sucks.
I had high hopes for the Van Gogh Museum. I assumed they would display his famous severed ear, or if I was lucky, there would be an entire exhibit of famous severed ears (Reservoir Dogs and Tyson/Holyfield II come to ear). So you can imagine my disappointment when I walked through the museum to find a whole bunch of art and nary a detached appendage. The paintings were nice and all, and Vincent’s letters to his brother Theo were interesting if not a little latently homoerotic, but the thing about art is, I don’t get it. I don’t get how one guy can be regarded as a timeless master while equally-gifted others can spend their lives huddled in oblivion, their work never to be appreciated. I can’t understand how they can construct a huge museum devoted to Van Gogh, yet Bob Ross could paint a breath-taking landscape of happy trees and smiling clouds in half an hour with a television camera in his face and there is no monument celebrating his achievements. Hell, they don’t even have a museum for the most important figure in art history, the guy who invented the paintbrush (and when I say “they,” of course I am referring to CREEPDOM - the Committee for Reelecting the President and Deciding On Museums).
A note on Amsterdam tourist shops: You can expect souvenir fare becoming of the city’s prurient reputation – penis-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers, titty-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers, “Che Smoking a J” t-shirts, and comically oversized pencils. Not much different from your Daytona Beach or Key West, that is, unless you venture into the back rooms of many of these establishments. There, in plain view of impressionable youths, a curious shopper will find a produce section that beats even D’Agastino’s. Marijuana plants grow undisturbed in nurseries of hedonism and psychedelic mushrooms chill innocently in refrigerators fit for Gomorrah. That’s right - ‘Shrooms! Tijuana Toadstools! The Devil’s Toppings! The Netherlands may be our ally in the War on Terror, but as far as the War on Drugs is concerned, they are sitting dead center in the Axis of Evil.
What’s hot in Amsterdam for 2006? Anti-Semitism! I posed with this freshly minted homage to Nazism on Saturday, and by Sunday it had been cleared by the city’s Swastika Removal Unit. They’re a busy bunch!
With an amazing weekend in Amsterdam under our belt, we thought our adventure had come to an end Monday morning as we packed our bags for the flight back to Copenhagen. But from the way I wrote that last sentence, you can obviously tell we had thought wrong! Ah, the power of literature.
So we were like sitting in this bagel shop, enjoying our last meal in Amsterdam, right? And we had left all the flight information and everything up to Jeff, because he booked the tickets and he’s supposed to be the responsible one. So he had told us that our flight was at 2 in the afternoon, and it was like 11 or something, and we’re sitting there eating and everything’s okay, right? And then Jeff decides to take out the ticket confirmation receipt, and he’s looking at it, and Christina asks, “What time should we be at the airport?” And Jeff goes, “Uh, well, we should have been there at around 7 because our flight was at 9.” So Jeff fucked that one up pretty bad. How do you even mistake 8:55AM for 2:00PM? There are no similar numbers there. It wasn’t like he thought it was 12 when it was 2, or he mistook an 8 for a 6… he just fucked up. Big.
So we get to the airport, right? It’s 11:30, and we head to the Sterling Airlines desk to see if there’s another flight. This woman was being such a bitch, she was like, “You’re going to have to call or use the internet to book another flight?” WE have to call? You’re sitting there in a booth designated for helping Sterling passengers, you’ve got a phone and computer at your desk, and you’re telling us we have to trek around the airport with our bags looking for a computer to reserve a plane back to Copenhagen? So the woman finally agreed to call the airline for us, only to find out that the next flight wasn’t until 9:30PM, and it would cost 98 euros each. And oh yeah - our tickets couldn’t be refunded, so there goes $70 down the fuckin’ drain (thanks Jeff).
The idea of renting a car and driving back to Copenhagen was initially conceived out of despair and seeming implausibility. How long would it take? How much would it cost? Would we be able to find our way home? Would there even be cars to rent? While Jeff scoured the airline representative booths for earlier/cheaper flights, Christina and I looked into the car rental situation. Avis was the only company that had a car with Danish plates, making the proposition actually affordable. A one-day rental would run us 184 euros, split between the three of us. The woman at the desk said the 600 km trip should take 8-10 hours, depending on weather conditions (snow was forecasted in northern Germany). As we stood there listening to the woman explain our drive on the map, the drive to Copenhagen seemed not only more and more appealing than sitting in Schipol but also certainly feasible. When Jeff reported back from his flight-finding mission with nothing to show for himself except a wounded ego, we summoned the spirit of William Shatner for an impromptu Priceline.com comparison shop: Three airline tickets to Copenhagen, departure at 9:30PM and estimated arrival at 11:00PM, at 98 euros a piece (total $294) ---- one rented car to Copenhagen, departure at 2:00PM and estimated arrival at 11:00PM, 184 euros (total $200). For us budget-conscious, airport-weary travelers, the decision was snap and completely idiotic.
Some minor details that I chose to downplay/not factor in at all when making the decision: 1) the only car available with Danish plates was less a car and more “a small bus,” in the words of the clerk who rented to us; 2) the price of toll ferries and gasoline would add another 150 euros to the final cost of the trip; 3) I don’t know how to drive stick.
To the first point, we were told our ride would be the nine-passenger Mercedes Vito. Perfect, we thought; there would be room enough for all our bags and for the non-drivers to stretch out. Besides, I had a best friend in elementary school named Vito, and I considered his namesake to be a good omen – the protective spirit of playdates and bowling party birthdays would surely guide us through our treacherous passage eastward. But when the car pulled up to the Avis stand in the airport garage, we were surprised to find our Vito not as advertised. Instead of nine passenger seats, we had been rented a cargo van with plenty of room for our bags in the back but little room for us in the three seats at the front. The shrewder traveler might have refused the rental or demanded a new contract, but living in Baltimore had trained me to handle life’s curveballs with an amused indifference, and I simply laughed off the snafu and threw my bags in the back.
To the last point, Avis really does try harder. While other car rental companies might have balked at our collective lack of experience with manual transmission, Avis readily accepted our desperate terms and admirably substantiated their claim of relentless striving. On this March day in a parking garage of the Amsterdam airport, either out of basic human pity for helpless American tourists or because Christina’s got boobs, several benevolent Avis employees volunteered their good time to help us acclimate to the intricacies of a standard automobile. I was the first to give it the old college try, with my Avis driving instructor coaching me from the passenger seat. Each of my multiple false starts and herky-jerky stall outs elicited good-natured heckling from a growing audience that had assembled to witness the parade of American incompetence. After twenty minutes of practice, I felt comfortable enough to be a participating driver in our little ad hoc road trip. Christina, the only one out of the three of us who had previously encountered the stick shift, needed just a few practice runs around the lot before she got her groove back, and once we were deemed road certified, she boldly climbed behind the wheel and got us goin’ down the road.
We stopped for food in Hengelo, a decent-sized town in eastern Holland that was hit particularly hard by Allied bombing in the Second World War. The luncheonette we found to serve us was notable for its bizarre Laurel & Hardy décor and for the two-woman staff who spoke negligible English. Ordering was a chore, but we were content with our cheese sandwiches, and I took the reigns for the rest of the drive home.
This little paragraph could be titled “How I Learned to Drive Stick on the Autobahn.” The remaining drive took us through northern Germany past Bremen and Hamburg to Puttgarden, where we picked up a car ferry across the Baltic to southern Zealand, Denmark. It was my first foray into German territory, but sadly my only opportunity to touch terra Germa-firma and converse with Germans came as a result of being pulled over by border patrol guards, presumably for driving a suspicious vehicle and for being Americans. Two men came over to my driver side window, and the shorter one with a white moustache asked, “Spreken ze Deutsche?” I felt tempted to say, “Ja, ACHTUNG JUDEN!” Instead, I handed over my passport and got out of the vehicle to open the cargo door for inspection. When the German cops realized we were just a bunch of moron college kids with no aspirations of international drug running, they flirted with Christina and let us go. After a difficult u-turn on the elbow of an off-ramp, pulled off with a surprisingly exceptional show of skill and grace by yours truly, we were once again on the road, and we weren’t going to stop until we reached home.
Save for the treacherous blizzard conditions that plagued the last quarter of our trip, the driving wasn’t all that bad. Starting and stopping were difficult, but once I kicked that baby into fifth gear and coasted down the motorway, I felt like I was in Cruisin’ World, the arcade video game that I used to dominate at Sportstime USA. Christina, Jeff and I spent close to ten hours in the car together, but our spirited conversation hastened the passing of time.
We reminisced about dead pets, discussed possible things DHL could stand for (Delicious Handjob Lube, Dangerous Hippo Lovers, Denver’s Horniest Lesbians), and desperately searched for radio stations not playing the Black-Eyed Peas. We dropped off the Vito at the Copenhagen Airport just before 1 AM, and were in bed back at the kollegium by 2. The adventure was truly over, and I couldn’t be happier.
