Marcus Meets Europe! -- The Netherlands

Stacey (Canada) and me at a canal

There's a line from the novel Omerta, by Mario Puzo (The Godfather) that went something like this: "There are some men who live with honor their entire lives to commit one supreme act of treachery." Mine was going to Amsterdam.

The city was pretty enough to attract tourists without its famous tolerance of vices. Tram cars whisked passengers between tilted houses and offered views of tranquil canals. The weather was sunny but a little chilly. English was commonly spoken, which made things much easier. It's the most laidback place I've been to so far. The city centre was small enough that I could walk everywhere. In other cities, I felt like I spent half my time underground in the metro.


Amsterdam postcard of a canal

I'd heard Europeans were rabid football (soccer) fans, but I didn't witness this firsthand until Amsterdam. Ajax, Amsterdam's team, became the champion team of the Netherlands. A mob of people wearing the red and white jersey of Ajax overran the Leidse Plein, the main square, for a celebration. There was an MC on a stage who sang songs badly, like "We Are The Champions" and shouted slogans to get the crowd riled up. They were plenty charged already. Guys climbed up lampposts and buildings, hoisting their beers aloft and singing along. I hid out from the madness at Miami Kebab, which was close by. I talked to the Egyptian guy behind the counter while I ate a shawarma (shredded, grilled, and seasoned turkey in a pita wrap). He said that drunk football fans always come in asking for beer. He stopped telling them he didn't sell beer because they would get mad. He switched to telling them he was sold out. The football fans would understand and move on.


Stacey and me at the Heineken Beer Experience. The giant can is a photo booth, where you can take a picture of yourself and e-mail it to your friends.

One day, I went back to my room at the hostel (The Flying Pig Palace) and found two guys rolling joints in my room. Quick introductions were made, and they started to plan the next day's activities. They wanted to go to a coffeshop; but not just any coffee shop, they wanted the best one in Amsterdam. I showed them a free guide to Amsterdam I had gotten from the lobby. They flipped to the Naughy Amsterdam section. There was a well-recommended coffee shop close by called The Rookie Cannabis Cafe. That was the top choice, until they read about The Grey Area. According to the guide, it had won 13 Cannabis Cup awards in the past four years, as well as being mentioned in High Times. It was much farther away than The Rookie, but they felt it would be worth the trek to The Grey Area.



It was a surprisingly small place. There were only three tables and the counter. The walls and doors were papered over with marijuana bumper stickers. The guys went straight away to order. The owner was a skinny guy that looked like one of the co-creators of South Park, the one with the glasses and curly hair. He showed us the menu. Here's what my roommates ordered, as taken from the menu I got as a souvenir:

Grey Area
16th Annual Cannabis Cup
Home of:
Grey Haze (bio-super sativa; energetic buzz)
AK-47 (bio-mostly sativa; the original head buzz)
[this isn't the complete list]

Prices
1 gram 7.50 euro
2 grams 15.00 euro

The only other customer besides us was this really old black man. He'd talk to us, but we couldn't make out what he was saying. We just nodded along. A roommate took a picture of him. When the old man smiled, I saw that all his upper teeth were gone except for the front two. He once muttered to himself, stepped outside the coffee shop, then said "Naw, I can't leave this place," and went back in. That guy was a walking warning sign of what happens if you smoke too much for too long.

We continued to the Van Gogh Museum. Mike, one of the roommates, stopped at a smart shop first. Quick course in Amsterdam vice merchants: Cafes only sell coffee. Coffee shops sell you-know-what. Smart shops sell magic mushrooms, hallucinogens, and semilegal substances. Mike thought it would be a brilliant idea to munch on shrooms before seeing some art. He and an equally insane Canadian guy with us bought some from a smart shop called When Nature Calls.

Later, when we were in there, Mike asked me what seemed like a very important question to him. He waved his finger in front of his face, fascinated. "Hey! Do you see the trails I'm making?"

"No."

"Well, I do."

My favorite art at the museum wasn't by Van Gogh. One of Van Gogh's favorite artists was Utagawa Hiroshige. There were 21 Japanese prints by Hiroshige called "Views of 53 stations along Tokaido." My description of them would be blasphemous to an art history person, but here goes. I thought they looked like really cool comics. Bright colors, simple lines and shapes, vivid expressions on the tiny faces with a minimum of detail. I went back to see them two more times before I left.

That night, we went to the Red Light District. It was unnerving to see this stuff out in the open and regulated. Half-naked women waited behind windows for willing johns. Each compartment was lit by a red light. The place brought out the worst in guys. For once I was thankful for the langauge barrier. I didn't want to know how they talked about women in this environment. The first impression was that this was like buying women from vending machines. I would never go for that, health reasons being number one. Moreover, renting lust would be an admission of defeat, that I'd failed in every conceivable way to relate to women. For me, that would be the real Sum of All Fears.