Well folks, not that much has happened since last time, which is why I waited to email, but lemme fill you in on the last few days. After my email yesterday, I wandered by the bookstore and bought the following:

Bio of a Space Tyrant, Vol 1 (Piers Anthony)
Straight (Dick Francis)
Tarzan of the Apes (Edgar Rice Burroughs)
Miskatonic University (various authors, short stories occuring in and around that odd institution. much black magic and carnage).

i then wandered back to my room and consumed the bulk of the shrooms which I had bought ( I hadn't had very many the previous day, i am conservative about drugs which I have never tried). It was not a particularly interesting experience, sort of like being delirious from fever. With my eyes open, everything pulsed and was sort of a wierd color, but I could have interacted normally if necessary. With my eyes closed, the little shapes that dance behind your eyelids became steadily more real and vivid and believable, until they turned into hallucinations. Still, the images were only visible with closed eyes, and thus not that vivid, and it wasn't particularly novel and exciting. I don't recommend shrooms. Of course there are several varieties, and according to the guy at the "smart shop", they have very different effects. I had gotten the philosophical one that is supposed to effect your thinking the most.

While waiting for the shrooms to hit, I read a bunch, and sometime during my trip I fell asleep, and didn't wake up until midnight. It seemed a bit late to go out, but I really wasn't tired anymore, having slept for 5 hours, so I read for a while and then went out. There weren't that many people around, and I wandered into the wrong area and got harassed by two annoying people. I wasn't in any real danger, I was in a public well lighted area, but it was annoying. After a few minutes of telling them no, I wasn't going to give them money, no, i wasn't going to give them weed, no i wasn't going to get on a bus with them, i wandered into a snack shop and bought a coke. They left, and I headed home. I continued reading until about 6AM, and finally fell asleep. I awoke at 2PM on thursday, and managed to book the sister hotel of my hotel for the weekend, my room being only available until friday morning.

BTW, at the end of the day after my first long one, I took off my shoes, and discovered that these socks had become moldy too. The problem was not in my socks, but in my shoes. They had to go. I threw them away and got a new pair.

I then went to the tourist office and managed to get a ticket for David Helfgott, the guy who the movie shine was based on. Yeah! He is playing on sunday, he will be playing Rachmaninoff. I asked the lady "Do you have tickets for David Helfgott on Sunday" She replied "I have *my* tickets, but lets see if we can find you any."

After that, I headed for the musum area, where the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh museum, and the modern art museum are. It took me an hour to get there, though it was very educational. The parts of amsterdam I saw were very different from the area around the train station, wheich seemed to cater a lot to the "holy shit, you really can buy weed here" type. Lots of bars and clubs and stores, and even a few coffeeshops (amsterdam term for places that sell weed), but it all seemed more geared towards the locals, and it was a lot less cheesy and seedy. Anyway, i got there half an hour before the closing of the Rijksmuseum, so I went to the modern art one instead. It was pretty weird. European modern art is even more fucked up than american modern art. There was a corner with some familliar stuff, Monet, Van Gogh, Klee, Picasso, but most of it was wierd.

The one thing that I liked was a project called "your coloring book". This guy took scenes from pictures of nazis, and turned them into a coloring book style, bare outlines on a page, some of them obviously nazi, some of them totally out of context. He then set up displays at varoius european cities, with information about the holocaust, some of it locally relevant, and oversized & undersized (like, huge and tiny) picnic tables with crayons and this book. People could then color in whatever they wanted. Some of them didn't know that it was nazi, some did. At the end of the book was an index with the images in context and their titles (ie a picture that shows an arm and a hand reaching towards a child is labeled "a young boy meets the Fuhrer"). The interesting thing about it was the amazing variety of things that people managed to do with these 10 or 15 pictures. Lots of people found different clever ways to manipulate the images to convey the horror of the war. There were a lot of very powerful images that people created, all drawing on the lines that were provided. Many of them parodied, satirized, and caricatured the images, but in very different ways.

I went to bed earlyish, at about 1AM, got up at 10 to pack and move half a block to my new room, and went back to sleep. I didn't get up until 6PM, so I was in bed for 17 hours with a 1 hour break to move. I think my body was really tired from all the wierd hours, and my neurotransmitters needed time to recover too :). Today I haven't really done anything except eat dinner/breakfast and wander over to the cybercafe. There are a lot of big parties cuz its friday night, so I might go to one of them. First, of course, I have to play hearts on the internet.

If anyone ever wants to ytalk me, my account is patri@izzy.com, so if you happen to get a mass email and are online, feel free to give me ring.

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