from the first world to the end of the world and back

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

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