Playing Catch-Up, Part 2: Amsterdam, Oh Boy...

Pretend that I am a commited blogger and that it is actually Halloween weekend and that nothing has happened since then even though I may reference things that have.  Ok, continue...

So, Amsterdam is not quite the magical fun time as John Travolta described to me in Pulp Fiction.  In fact, it kind of sucked.  Maybe it was the group, maybe it was the weather, maybe it was because I just wasn’t into snorting coke off of a prostitute in a red lit ally.  I dunno.

In actuality, it was probably because the city was largely artificial.  The most historical parts were the 200 year old phallic sidewalk-street separators with the city’s coat of arms (XXX… yup, that’s where that came from.  Surprised?) on it that the residents wanted to preserve.  The old city center, the one with the canals and red light district and stuff, was a rigidly planned semi-circular grid consisting solely of souvenir shops, novelty restaurants, and the infamous coffee shops where the sell pot by the quarter-pounder (of course, they’re on the metric system- they don’t know what the fuck a quarter pounder is…).

Then there was our hostel, the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel.  It was the worst place I have ever stayed in my life.  Dirty, overcrowded, and cold, the place actually took pride in its shitty facilities.  They turned the Gulag-esque conditions into a marketing gimmick- ‘it’s so shitty it’s good,’ I guess, like the poo stench, sex noises through the wall,  and dirty sheets were supposed to make you feel like everybody has an awesome time there.  You know the guy who only thinks it was a good night when he can’t remember it?  He must’ve been named Hans Brinker.

Despite all that, it was a pretty cool city visually:  lots of old houses, beautiful canals, and tight cobblestone streets.  Often the houses jutted out diagonally in several directions over thin streets making much of the city feel like Diagon Alley.  Because of its grid design, it was relatively easy to navigate and the center was only the size of 4 or 5 city blocks/ 4 Carleton campuses (actually, the amount of drinking, smoking, and general freedom and jovalty on the streets made it feel a lot like a Delta house college campus).  I explored most of the city on my own, moving at my own pace, which was kind of nice.

You’re probably all curious about the coffee shops I mentioned earlier.  Well basically, pot is the Amsterdam equivalent of beer and coffee shops are their equivalents to bars.  We went to a few (don’t worry, I didn’t get blazed, fall asleep on a couch to wake up robbed and then run out the shop to find the thief only to trip over a hooker and land in a sunken houseboat in the canals) and they were always heavily decorated with lots of cool art relevant to their store names (the Dolphin, for example, was covered in coral reefs made, much to some high people’s surprise, of Styrofoam) and served lots of good coffee and snacks with a smile and cute Dutch accent.  Oh, and mounds of marijuana.

The people there (though I probably saw more tourists than natives and heard and saw more English than Dutch) were the biggest disappointment.  Most likely because of the abundance of coffee shops, they were all very lethargic and spacey.  It was like being in a city where everyone was me, but not naturally.  One of the girls who went with me stated it best: “this place is just a city of zombies!”

The food was probably the best part.  We went to the greatest pancake restaurant I’ve ever been too, and that includes Evanston’s Walker Brothers.  Yeah, I said it.  Unsurprisingly, the city most famous for its abundance of pot is also famous for its pancakes.  I had a massive omelet with bacon and cheese one night and a Gyro omelet another.  For the former, imagine being able to taste in one bite the excitement in Times Square on V-J day with a dash of Nov. 4^th, 2008 and the feeling of kicking off your shoes and sitting down after running a marathon with a cool lemonade and a dog/cat on your lap.  It was just like that, I swear.

We were there for Halloween weekend.  It was supposed to be a big party there, I mean, Amsterdam, Halloween, what could go wrong?  Oh yeah, the city has a strung out zombie infestation.  I went as Michael Phelps, shown here giving a poor impression of that picture of him where he's yelling really loud: 

I was pretty proud of my McGiverd costume, but didn’t get to put it to much use.  We went to a really bro-d out club where people had as many popped collars as the number of times the DJ repeated “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It.”  Because no one could fit a costume over so many layers of collar, I was one of only a few dressed up people.

OK!  The Red Light District.  Earth’s Asshole.  Vienna’s Troubled Little Brother.  Mos Eisley.  Detroit.  It goes by many names, usually focusing on the hookers behind the windows, the sex shops and shows, and the red lights lining the doorways of anywhere smutty.  Walking down the dimly lit streets (everything actually runs pretty much 24/7, even on Sundays next to the church in the middle of the district, yet it always looks dimly lit) I was offered more sex, coke, ecstasy, and bikes (yes, bycicles, I guess SOMETHING’s gotta be taboo) than ever before, well, ever.  If you got too close to the hookers’ door windows or made eye-contact, they’d nock on the doors and call to you.  From this I learned all about the pricing and logistics of it all!  Hooray!  Wandering around, I’d often start down an alleyway about 15 ft wide with people going through (I avoided the empty ones) and it would end up tightening to about a shoulder-width and a half with two flows of traffic (all men by the end) edging by each other and glass doors opening up on each side like nets counting on the tight current to push a straggler into them.

I felt bad for anybody actually interested in ‘buying’ anything there, going through that tight current of guys equally ‘excited’ for later ‘purchases.’  He would be like the ticker on the Wheel of Fortune and they’d be the Wheel’s notches.  (For the family: yes, I am making sexual innuendo.)

For all the grime and STDs most commonly associated with the RLD, it’s never remembered for its beautiful swans basking in the canal (in front of Porky’s sex Theater) or the nice old couples, kids, and young families laughing and playing (with the hookers) or the grocery stores, tourist shops, and businesses (in between the brothels).  Because you can buy or see anything, and I mean literally anything in the RLD, it really should be known as the internet in physical form- with more viruses.

Will

Playing Catch Up, Part 1: Obamanation!

Not like abomination, instead reads like domination... perhaps that just didn't translate well into text, never mind.

So I haven't updated in over a month, and for the sake of not flooding this blog with a post as epic in scale as Obama's victory split screen with The Dark Knight, I'm going to break it up into a few posts, so expect more each day talking about my experience Momento-style temporal order.

Anyway, WE WON!  I went to a Democrats Abroad in Berlin event/party/show for election night with most of the people from my program.  Of 800 people filling the old theater, about 40% were Americans, the rest were Germans in support of Obama.  I had been invited to several other all German Obama venues for election night as well.  They seem to like him as much as we do, possibly more, as evidenced by their 200,000 person showing when he spoke here in July.  I’m told that that is larger than any of his crowds in the US, but I’m not sure.  Grant Park was a ‘mere’ 70,000 on election night.

The party was led by Cab Callaway strait out of the Blues Brothers, you know, the guy who sang Minnie the Moocher (not really, of course).  Originally, the plan had been to ‘celebrate’ every five blue states, every time a swing state went blue, and at the end result.  Thank god we didn’t do that, because of the fucking landslide!  When the final result came in around 5 am, the whole room exploded.  Everybody danced, yelled, and cheered in celebration.  Apparently the band had been playing during the announcement, but I lost them in between the chants of “America!” followed closely by, “Fuck yeah!”

We stayed there for McCain’s dignified (unlike his crowd) speech at 530 and then Obama’s BAMFy speech at 6.  McCain gave the cleanest, most dignified, and most intelligent speech I’ve ever heard him give and I was glad.  My friends felt bad for him, being an old man who’s career basically ended last night, but I did not.  He ran a dirty campaign and even if it was not his idea, he didn’t have to.  Also, Palin. 

W.

T.

F.

Mate?

I can’t wait to watch John Stewart demolish CNN’s baby coverage of the election.  They treated the viewer like children, dangling the election numbers on a pair of shiny keys for the American people to bat and giggle at.  That hologram thing?  WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?  

She was in front of a poorly covered blue screen and there was no god damn 3 dimensional image of her in the CNN studio.  The Obi-Wan-Kenobi  aura around her was just the blue screen not phased out enough.  I bet it was a fluke and they thought the world was dumb enough to just roll with it.

Obama’s speech was epic, huge, monumental, moving- all the things you hear describing the next Steven Spielberg movie.  I was a bit put off by the gospel-church like ‘yes we can’ part towards the end, just because I hate when politicians bypass people’s rationales by going straight to their emotions.  I’m equally annoyed that people let that happen and getting all riled up because of it.  It was certainly great to see people moved to tears by his election, but I was wary when others were streaming tears blindly shouting along at every ‘yes we can.’  No I’m not against the message, or Obama, or hope, or emotion.  I just like to keep my head and worry when others have lost theirs.