Howdy everybody! I am here and safe and all that, and I found a cybercafe, so it is time to tell you of my many adventures. Some parts have been left out, others are in the wrong order. This will be rather long. Unlike Hunter S. Thompson, I was never impaired enough to be unable to handle day-to-day routines, so no true wildness happened.
If you are of a prudish bent, be warned! The following tale covers not only drugs, but also the infamous sex clubs of amsterdam. If you don't want to hear about live sex acts, you had best stop reading the moment I mention them again. Much of the following has been copied verbatim from my journal, in which I have written 9 pages since getting here.
The plane for england left at 8PM monday night, and I was on it. To my left was a financial specialist, to my right was a missionary engineer. The latter had quit his job in the US to do aircraft maintenance and repair for missionaries in Kenya. The movie was Jackie Brown, which I hadn't liked the first time and wasn't about to give a second chance. I couldn't sleep, it being rather early, so by the time I got to Heathrow, at 3AM philly time, I was a bit tired. It was 8AM GMT, and my plane didn't board until 11, so I had some time. I bought copies of Loaded and Total Film, two british magazines which I really like, and read them for a while. I learned lots about the new star wars movie and other important topics.
The flight to amsterdam was postponed, and whil I got on the plane at 11:30 (the time it was scheduled to leave), it didn't leave until 1 or later. That was ok, because I finally succumbed to my weariness and slept while the plane was on the ground . I had been exhausted, and had even written in my notebook that amazingly enough, I was no longer looking forward to amsterdam for the drugs, I was looking forward to finding a warm bed and going to sleep! I wrote that I was getting plenty high from the sleep-dep, and that "as the hours tick by, the chronic blunt of my consciousness immolates inch by inch".
My next entry starts "as to be expected, I couldn't resist". After getting 2 or 3 hours of sleep on the plane, I was fresh and ready to go. I found a dorm-style hostel bed, tossed my stuff into a locker, and was ready to sample the wares. First I bought an umbrella and some chinese food, then a bag of Super Skunk, some rolling papers, and suchlike supplies. I sat in the lobby of my hostel, "The Last Watering Hole", a nice place with live music every night, 3 pool tables, and a full bar, and prepared to smoke and write. It seemed as though everyone around me was writing, it was 9:15PM, the music hadn't started, in fact there were only 15 or 20 people there, but at least half of them were writing. I guess pot just stimulates the creative instinct, you have all these thoughts and want to get them out.
So I roll myself a fatty, light up, and prepare to record my thoughts. Unfortunately I had forgotten my notebook, and the only other place to write was on....the rolling papers! For those not in the know, rolling papers are the thin pieces of paper you use to roll joints or hand-rolled cigarettes. I started out writing a haiku, which I will share with you. I wrote the first lines, and then several possible endings:
Let me just mention that I had forgotten how annoying the smell of tobacco is. This is amsterdam, fer chrissake, why don't the idiots smoke pot?
After a while, I went back up to my room, got my notebook and contact juggling balls, and went back to the lounge. I began to write, when suddenly the mushrooms hit. Oh. I didn't mention the mushrooms? While I was wandering, I stopped and bought some shrooms and some 2CT2, which is a phenylethylamine, related to MDMA and 2CB. It is mentioned in the book PiHKAL, which some of you may have heard of. It isn't popular enough to yet be illegal, so they can sell it. Anyway, I was a bit wary of the shrooms, so I didn't take very much, and it didn't end up having that strong an efect. Sort of like weed, different, but not strong enough to really be able to tell what the difference is.
I whipped out two of my contact juggling balls and began to play, doing simple two ball tricks since I was indoors over a hard surface and didn't want to drop them. I am not sure if it just looked great to me, or if I really was good, but my table was lit by flickering candlelight, and I held the balls up to the candle and I thought it looked pretty dang awesome.
Anyway, I was getting a little bored, so I wandered the city for a while. Ended up not finding much in the busy parts of town, but as I looped back through the residential section, I came upon a remarkable find - an english used bookstore and a juggling shop, right next to each other. The juggling shop not only had a small contact juggling ball in the window, it also had an ad for a 3-day jugglers weekend, happening....this weekend! I dunno if I'll go or not, but it could be fun. It was unclear from the poster where the festival is. Those shops are my next destination after this cybercafe, which is, by the way, the one used last year, and even has the same guy running it. For those I haven't told about it, this is the best place to hang out in the entire world. There is internet. There is a full bar. There is hot chocolate. There is mellow music. And you can smoke. Hmm, I guess my dorm room had all of those things last year, and better internet, but this is public, which I guess makes it cooler, somehow.
When I got back to the hostel, the band had started, so I sat down and listened to them. I was bored, so I started playing with beer coasters, something I had been doing all day. There are some fun tricks you can do by putting a coaster on the edge of a table, flipping it up, and catching it. Aaron Archer is the one who introduced me to the art of coaster flipping, and a noble art it is. My favorite move wright now is to flip the coaster up with the back of my hand, catch it in between my forefinger and ring finger, flip it over so my palm faces up, lay it back on the table, let go, turn my hand palm down, tap it to make sure that it is solidly in place, and repeat. The whole thing only takes a couple seconds, of course, so it looks way cool when you can chain 5 or 6 together in a row.
After a while, some dutch guy sat down, and we chatted a bit. I am not sure if he was trying to hit on me or just being friendly, you can never tell. He asked me what I thought of the Netherlands, and I replied that it would be as silly to judge the Netherlands on Amsterdam as it would be to judge the US on New York. He agreed that this was wise. Eventually he left, perhaps under the mistaken impression that my girlfriend was on her way to meet me. I had mentioned that she was coming to visit me in Italy in a couple weeks, but his english was far from perfect, and I think he may have misunderstood. I was not too sorry.
The live music was pretty good, twangy blues, but I was bored and decided to go take a look at the red light distrcit. I had no intentions of solicitation, since paying for sex seems (to me) to take all the fun out of it, but for some reason, paying to *watch* sex seems like a perfectly reasonable think to do. I saw quite an amusing sight in the district - there were 3 or 4 Japanese guys, looking sort of prudish and corporate, but also gaping happily at the flesh in the windows (for those who haven't heard, the bordellos have red lights, and the prostitutes stand around inside, scantily clad, so you can see before you buy). They were wearing dark blue corporate plastic windbreakers (the guys, not the prostitutes), the kind that look like wannabe american baseball jackets, and the logo said "Lucent Technologies" (For the ignorant, thats the company that bell labs turned into a few years ago). Hilarious incongruity.
So I found a live sex show, and after bargaining down to 35 guilders (18$) for the show and no drinks, I went in. It was a dark, smoky, bar like area with a central stage. There were about 30 or so other people inside, most of whom seemed to be english speakers, many of them young backpacker types who seemed to be there to check out the rumours, like me. There were more men than women, but not by that much, and lots of couples. The tout who I bargained with outside had insisted that there were lots of backpackers and "normal people" inside, and I hadn't quite believed him, but it was true. Unlike some of the porn theatres and shows I have heard of, this one had no funny business going on around the sides, everyones hands were out of their pockets, so to speak. I saw 5 shows, and you'll get to hear about them all. One of the funniest things was that all of the shows were dance routines, they were done to music, and mostly timed pretty well. This had an odd abstract non-sexual effect, made worse by the fact that they used lots of sports aerobics moves. That's right, Ian and Joey's favorite sport has roots darker than you thought. Some of the pushups, the twirls, and the scissors kicks were obviously the same as in sport aerobics.
The first show was already going on when I came in, and unlike the next 3, had no audience participation. The stripper was very strong, and I think may well have been a male->female transexual. "Her" face was very masculine, as was her body. She definately had real breasts, and when she stripped all the way, the rest of her gentialia were female, but surgeons can do amazing things nowadays. What convinced me was the way she looked from behind, naked. There is something very different about the way women & men's hips and buttocks are shaped, and this person had a very masculine build.
The next act was more standard, one woman, dressed in a sexy little studded leather outfit. The woman was reasonably attractive (note to economists: The prostitutes were mostly mildly attractive, and almost never more than that, the dancers were all attractive, but never gorgeous) although a little old looking and made-up. She did some bump and grind on a couple of random audience members, and then brought one on stage. She took off his shirt, and then lay him on the ground, and finished stripping. She then took a marker, squatted over his bare chest, and held the marker with what you would expect a naked dancer in an amsterdam sex club to hold a marker with. No, not her hands. No, not her breasts. Displaying excellent thigh strength (almost all the dancers were quite strong), she wrote something on his chest. She then stood up, and he stood up, and the message "That's all folks" was revealed.
The next act was much the same, except with a police theme. It started with some incoherent sampled police radio messages, and then a chick came in with a flashlight in a pseudo-cop uniform.
The next act turned out to be sort of touching, to a people watcher like me. Note that most of the conversation I am about to report I inferred, I could hear almost none of it, but it seemed obvious what the content of the words was. The woman was black and large, and seemed to be meant to appeal to people who like that sort of thing. As the woman did her dance through the crowd, looking for victims, she came to these 3 english speakers. They seemed uninterested in the fact that the dancer was right in front of them - it was obvious that she was not their type and they weren't turned on. You can understand how this makes her feel. So she says something like "What's wrong guys, don't like the show?" One of them replies "Sorry, I just don't like black women. nothing personal." She was a little offended by this, and said something, and he said "no, its no big deal. I am not a racist or anything, I don't have anything against you, i'm just not turned on. nothing personal." I could lipread the phrase "nothing personal". She obviously wanted to prove to him that she could be sexy, to get a rise out of him (so to speak :) ), so she dragged him and two of his friends on stage for the interaction bit. They were very good-natured about it, and co-operated in a friendly manner. When her act was over, as they were leaving stage, the guy said something like "hey, nothing personal, no hard feelings" to the woman, the they parted without any obvious rancor. It was kind of sweet how well the guy handled what could be a touchy issue.
The last act I saw was a couples one. A guy and a girl came out, stripped each other, and had sex. Real sex, right there on stage. He didn't orgasm, but it was intercourse. It wasn't really a turn-on, they were neither passionate or emotional about it, and it was very choreographed and timed. The dancing wasn't much of a turn on either, although it was fun to watch, and it might have been different if I had gotten some of the "personal attention" that some of the audience got.
After that show I was getting tired (2 hours of sleep in 37), and decided to head home. As I took off my socks which I had worn for those 37 hours, and had been dirty before hand, I realized that they were molding. I mean, real mold, black stuff. At the end of my first day of travel. NOT a good sign :). I trashed them and today I am wearing different shoes.
I still haven't finished settling in, getting used to this place again. I don't think I'll start hitting museums until tomorrow. I might try one of the porno movie theatres tonight. It was raining yesterday, but it is sunny today, tho cool. Whenever it gets sunny, I will go find a park and do some contact juggling. Maybe I can get some money out of it. I think I want to find someplace where the normal tourists, the old ones, the ones with money, hang out. The backpackers will appreciate the art, but I bet they won't pay to see it :).
Oh, I found a single this morning, and moved out of the hostel. I have a teeny room now, but its all mine, so I can spread out my stuff better. I have it for two nights.
That's the news. I will let y'all know when anythign else interesting happens, if I write any more rolling paper petry, or check out the sex movies, or whatever. I haven't started taking digital pictures yet, but I probably will tomorrow, and maybe upload them on friday or something. Y'all should feeel free to drop me email. I expect to be here for 2-4 more days. then go, I think, to england.
<< Welcome to the List, Wireless Email Description << || >> Amsterdam Books, Modern Art, David Helfgott >>