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From memory (at) blank.org Tue May 29 15:01:37 2001 Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 15:02:40 -0400 From: Nathan J. Mehl <memory (at) blank.org> To: memory (at) blank.org Subject: illegal, immoral and probably fattening [Aside: the following travelogue contains descriptions of acts which are probably, technically speaking, "against the law" if only in the niggling sense of being completely illegal in most countries. Avert your eyes if such things bother you, and we of course don't recommend trying any of this at home, unless your home happens to be in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in which case we recommend that you invite us over before trying them.] Okay, so my last ramble was a bit on the dry side, and for that I apologize. To make up for it, we have plenty of salacious content in this one! But before we get to the sex, drugs and assorted depravity, it's flashback time. I unconscionably forgot to mention the best part of our day in Singapore! After we'd escaped from the shopping district, we wandered into Little India for tea. Once we'd had our fill of chai, we took a slow wander back into the center of town, aimlessly looking through stores and parks. Along the way, Miranda noticed that we were passing a sign store and had a flash of inspiration... ...and I am now the proud owner of a graphical "No Durian!" sign, as seen in subway stations and hotel lobbies all over Asia! It's got a recognizable graphic of a durian fruit with a circle and line over it, and "No Durian!" in bold letters underneath just in case the meaning wasn't clear. I intend to mount this in a place of honor in my kitchen. Back to Amsterdam. Which, by the way, was a bit of a meteorological shock after three weeks in the tropics. In all of Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand, the temperature hadn't once dipped below 80 degrees farenheit while we were there, and we'd merrily gone around in shorts and sandals the entire time. When we landed at Schipol Airport, the temperature on the ground was 45 F, and it barely nudged 75F at the peak of the first afternoon. After all that time in the tropics, it was a bit of a shock, and I found myself wishing I'd brought a windbreaker or something. After finishing up my last missive, we decided to get down to business and see Amsterdam's primary tourist attraction: the coffeehouses. Minor sociological digression: for those who perhaps don't know, a "coffeehouse" in Amsterdam does not serve coffee. It serves marijuana, usually in joints, bags and brownies. While pot is actually still illegal in Holland, the police and government have, in resoundingly straightforward Dutch style, carefully codified the extent to which they don't really care about it. As such, while they still reserve the right to arrest your ass if you make a pest of yourself in public or try to deal large amounts of the stuff, small portions are openly sold over the counter in specially marked "coffeehouses"... seemingly primarily to wide-eyed American and British tourists. Digression to that digression: while the Dutch are generally renowned for their spirit of tolerance, most people tend to think of that in terms of their willingness to cope creatively with drugs, homosexuality and minority religions. Which is all true, but to my eyes the single most impressive aspect of Holland's forbearance is their tolerance of the truly spectacular volume of tourists who descend on Amsterdam in the spring. In certain areas, the british and the americans seemed to outnumber the actual Dutch by a 2-to-1 margin. If New York City ever hit that kind of concentration anywhere outside the Times Square area, we'd be distributing baseball bats and tasers to the locals and offering bounties on tourist hides. Anyways. Of course, having decided to take the plunge and explore Amsterdam's quasilegal delights, we of course were instantly unable to actually find a coffeehouse, despite seemingly having been unable to go a block without hitting five not an hour previously. We ended up wandering around for about and hour and a half, through the flower market and another street fair, before we finally stumbled upon a little place called "Relax", whereupon we wandered in and did a stunningly accurate impression of a pair of idiotic American tourists discovering an Amsterdam coffeehouse for the first time. The comedy began with us trying to actually buy the stuff. First we attempted to buy a joint. Luckily, before the money changed hands, Miranda remembered that the pre-rolled joints there are actually marijuana mixed with tobacco. Since that involves, for me, coughing, retching, rolling on the floor in pain, and generally having a non-fun time, that option was out. Brownies seemed like an equally bad option given that we had to make an 8am flight the next day (eaten, cannibis lasts for a very, very long time), so we finally decided (and at this point, the counterwoman was rolling her eyes visably) to buy the smallest baggie of weed we could, and to roll our own. Fine, we buy a .5g bag of the White Widow, and availed ourselves of a few of the free rolling papers and filters in a large jar on the bar. Well, that plan lasted for about ten minutes, at which point we came to the awful realization that neither of us remembered how to roll a proper joint, and the skill did not seem to be an easily re-acquired one. So, back to the counterwoman to buy a small pipe. More eye-rolling. Okay, we have a pipe and we have weed. One missing ingredient: fire. Neither of us, of course, have a lighter. So it's time for one last trip up to the counterwoman, who appears to have swallowed a persimmon. Oddly enough, they don't sell lighters. There's a moment where you can practically hear her mentally considering the advantages of throwing us into the nearest canal, and then she sighs and hands me her own lighter. Finally, we can get busy! A word, here, about the Amsterdam Homegrown. If you're like most Americans, you have most likely spent an inordinate amount of time, money and effort on acquiring, smoking and claiming to get high off of a mixture of oregano, catnip and parsley flakes. If you think about it, the combination of high demand and legal sanction create an immense incentive for dealers to sell the lowest quality (or better yet, something that isn't actually marijuana at all) at the highest price to the greatest number of suckers. Personally, I never really understood what the excitement was about: you smoke, you cough, you feel a little dizzy for a minute, then it's over. Big deal? The Amsterdam Homegrown is... um... not like that at all. The entrance of marijuana into a more or less open free market has led to the availability of a stunningly good product at entirely reasonable prices. The sample we acquired had a thick piney smell, and the buds were sticky with resin. Half a gram cost us 25 guilders; the equivalent of about $12. And after smoking an embarrassingly small amount, we were... not "high" or even "stoned", but emphatically and thoroughly _baked_. The sensation was almost hallucinogenic in the way that time seemed to move in hesitant jumps. The spaciness was akin to the nice parts of being drunk (blissfulness, silliness, disinhibition) without many of the nasty parts of being drunk (vomiting, falling over, random violence, brain-shattering hangovers). The only time in my life I'd previously had that kind of effect from marijuana was when I'd accidentally eaten most of an eighth ounce in college (but that's a story for another day), but this was much more fun and much less terrifying. Which was all very well, except that we were in a coffeehouse somewhere in an unfamiliar neighborhood in Amsterdam...and we had to try to get back to our hotel. Oops. Herewith, some advice for my fellow Americans who might be tempted to try this themselves. I will leave it to your imagination which ones are based on immediate personal experience. 1. Go slowly, cowboy. It's stronger than you think, and will sneak up on you quickly. 2. You'd be surprised to find how difficult it can be to make sense of a map in a foreign language when you're completely and utterly stoned. Well, perhaps you wouldn't be, but in any case: pick out your route home before smoking, not after. 3. Remember the First Law of Drugs: all cars are real. (Some bicycles may be imaginary, but don't count on it. Luckily, the Amsterdamers are more or less used to stoned tourists weaving down their streets, and are adept at dodging them.) 4. Remember how much trouble the map was? Counting up foreign currency is even harder. Even the most patient salesclerk will get frustrated with you counting up the same five coins over and over again: buy your munchies _before_ smoking up. If you have no choice, just pay with your largest bill and let them deal with the change-making. 5. When you start to hear a persistant 60hz tone overlaid on every sound, you have probably Smoked Enough. 6. Resist the urge to wander the major tourist areas, unless you like being pickpocketed to death. Return to your hotel room and watch TV or something. Amazingly, we were able to pick our way back to the hotel without incident, and we spent the rest of the afternoon in a kind of blissed-out coma (punctuated by the occasional demolition of a unsuspecting chocolate bar), waiting for sanity and sobriety to return before we made our final expedition out for the night. A few hours later, we judged that we were fit to be seen walking around in public, and emerged in search of dinner. We found a "Pancake Bakery" that did an assortment of sweet and savory pancake dishes; sort of a dutch-style creperie. Nothing spectacular, but filling and cheap. Afterwards, we went out to take a look at Amsterdam's Red Light District. Finding the RLD is easy: just follow all the other tourists. I am not entirely sure that the RLD makes any significant amount of money from actual prostitution: the primary financial interchange there seems to be the fleecing of hordes of british soccer hooligans from their money in one of about a dozen strip clubs located along the main drag. Like Bangkok's Patpong, Amsterdam's red-light district is primarily a single, relatively small drag, with a few second-tier establishments off on side streets. And also like Patpong, it's primarily filled with gawking tourists. But that's where the similarities mostly end, and the contrasts are instructive. In Thailand, prostitution is actually illegal, and Patpong only exists because "the police are powerless to stop it", for which read they are "unwilling to stop taking the massive amounts of bribes, kickbacks and tourist dollars generated by it". Whereas in Amsterdam, prostitution is a legal, recognized, and strictly regulated trade. That small difference in approach seems to make a world of difference in presentation. The prostitutes in Amsterdam sit safely behind glass windows at street level, usually posing in front of black lights in flourescing lingerie. They're neither being hassled nor pawed by the clientele, and while there's still a tangible aura of boredom about them, they at least appear to not be entirely dreading the evening's work (or are, perhaps, better stilled at avoiding that impression), and what I could see of their workrooms appeared to be clean and neat. Probably still not the best job in the world, but in Amsterdam at least I could see choosing it over, say, fast food perparation. The other big differences were in the area and the crowds themselves. While both were pretty crowded, the herds of tourists in Amsterdam were decidedly better-behaved, and it was possible to move through the crowd without having to assault people in order to merely put one foot in front of the other. And whereas the crowds in Patpong (and, even moreso, Patong Beach) were heavily skewed toward the sort of person who you'd generally switch seats on a bus to avoid accidentally striking up a conversation with, the tourists in the Red Light District were largely the same tourists you saw everywhere else in Amsterdam, including a disconcerting number of retiree couples taking a post-parandial stroll. There were a few too many drunken british soccer fans (the drunken part was obvious, and we heard a few of them discussing the Premier League championship -- Manchester yet again, in case you were curious) for my taste, but we're pretty sure we saw a number of people having an unforced, actual good time. Also scoring highly in Amsterdam's favor was the lack of bar touts grabbing onto you at every step. Indeed, the only on-street marketing going on at all was an occasional barker outside of some of the strip clubs, and a few of them were even mildly amusing: the barker outside the Rossi Room promised us a show that was "educational and fun for the whole family!" We didn't bite, but we did giggle a bit. So in case you hadn't figured it out by now, if you are looking to tour though a seedy sex neighborhood, my firm recommendation is for Amsterdam over Bangkok. Unless, of course, you like that sort of thing. As a side note, we found that probably the single greatest concentration of coffeehouses in amsteredam can be found within a 3-block radius of the red light district. On the whole, I suspect that to be the result of intensive and creative lobbying by Amsterdam's Pickpockets Union. Anyhow, after about an hour and a half of this, it was getting on 11pm, and as we had to be at the airport by 7:30am to check in for our flight, we reluctantly headed back to the hotel to pack and go to sleep. Thankfully, westward-bound jetlag, if nothing else, makes it easy to get up at such ugly hours of the morning. We got back, packed, smoked a bit more of our Horrible Illicit Drugs, and went happily to sleep. The next morning, we realized to our sadness that despite our best efforts, about 4/5ths of our little bundle of weed was still unsmoked. With great sadness, we left it and the pipe as a gift for the cleaning staff. In retrospect, I have to imagine that being a cleaner in a tourist-centric Dutch hotel might be the best of all possible jobs for the aspiring stoner: overeager tourists leaving their drugs behind has to be a daily occurance there. The flight back was smooth and unremarkable, except for an additonal ration of toxic airline food. I suspect that two weeks of eating nothing but freshly prepared thai food made me a bit more susceptable than usual to the crap. We both picked at it a bit and went back to our books pretty quickly. Amazingly, we cleared customs with no hassles other than an x-raying of our luggage that is apparantly part of some anti-hoof and mouth disease initiative by the Department of Agriculture. Given that our itinerary had taken us directly from the center of world heroin production (Cambodia and Thailand) to Europe's biggest source of marijuana and ecstacy, I was completely expecting to be strip-searched, cavity-searched and given a barium enema before being allowed back into the country. But no...a quick wave and on we went. I'm almost a little disappointed. But only a little. And that brings me to the here and now: jetlagged, a bit shellshocked from it all, and...happy to be back? Mostly. Two and a half days was really not long enough to see Amsterdam properly; I think I'm going to have to plan some sort of return trip there as soon as possible. But it's nice to see my cats and my apartment again, and dear god is it nice to have proper bandwidth. This morning, after waking up at a stupidly early hour (yay jetlag!), I ran out and got a bag of proper bagels... this city does have a few advantages. I have, at last count, roughly 25 rolls of film to develop. I'll send one final note to this list once they're all scanned and on the web. My thanks to you all for putting up with my crazed ramblings! -Nathan J. Mehl alleged world traveller ------------------------------------------------------------<memory (at) blank.org> "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." (PKD) <http://blank.org/memory/>----------------------------------------------------