A Strange Day in Amsterdam

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The day started with a restless sleep cramped up on the outer half of my mattress, a Californian girl taking up the other side. Turning off my alarm and starting to move around and get my shit together, I for the first time fully appreciated how awkward it must be waking up in some stranger’s bed after a night out. I mean, this was just a chick I had offered a bed because she was drunk and lived far away, and I’m a nice kind of person like that...It was so weird having another person in my room! In the morning! You have to like, offer them breakfast and a shower and stuff, while you stagger around feeling sorry for yourself, dehydrated and with a headache already starting. I don’t even know if it’d be more awkward or less awkward with someone you’d actually been intimate with.

Anywayyy...

Managed to meet Bahar and buy our bikes their very own train tickets (so disappointed we didn’t get checked, I bet the one time I’m sneaky and don’t buy one, I’ll friggin get fined), and awkwardly take up too much space in the wrong carriage on the train before jumping out and finding the official bicycle one, which ended up having almost less space anyway.

On the way to Amsterdam we argued over who was feeling worse – Bahar who hadn’t had breakfast or a cigarette and was dead from doing ‘Insanity’ the night before – or me, who had woken up with a girl in her bed. I won.

We also discussed how this trip was going to be somewhat of a ‘trial’ – in planning it, we’d also planned quite a few other trips together, despite only having really met two or three times and having barely any proper conversations. So we didn’t even know if we were going to get along (turns out she’s awesome, so it’s all good). We also checked out my little guidebook (present from Michelle!) and found a pancake place, which we headed to as soon as we got to Amsterdam Central. It was next to(ish) the Heineken Factory. On the way there I heard Bahar call out from her bike, I thought someone had hit her or something, but turns out she’d just seen the wax model of Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson in the window of Madame Tussauds.

She claims she’s ‘not into Twilight.’

Skeptical.

Anyway this pancake place was goddamn amazing. It’s run mainly by this one guy and only has three tables. While we ate a line to get in formed of about 14 people, and there was a list of people waiting as well. We seemed to have slipped in in the nick of time! The pancakes were traditional Dutch ones, about the size of a dinner plate, thin and juicy. Bahar had chocolate and bananas (such a great choice) and I tried one of the specials, pancake with ‘stoofpeertjes’ (pears soaked in red wine, sugar and cinnamon for three hours) and cream. AMAAAAZING. The syrup from the pears had like soaked through into the pancake so the whole thing was just a sweet, gluttony mess. And the cream was sugary. Omnomnom. Coffee was nice enough too, for Dutch coffee :P

Next we rode our bikes back up the street (which was getting steadily more packed, especially since a guy had started his busking whip/Houdini show in the Dam square) to the Sex Museum. Warning you, this was a pretty weird day in my life – from the first moment I should have known it was going to be a cut out of the average. Luckily we’d passed the Museum earlier so we had no trouble finding it, and the ticket to get in was only 4 euro. I won’t elaborate too much on what’s in there, so you guys can see for yourself, but a large part of the museum is photographs – like from the 1800s and stuff when they first got cameras and started taking sexyphotos. It also had interesting bits like figurines with movable intimates from ages ago, the history of the condom (used to be a cloth bag!! Before it switched to pig’s gut ... probably gave more diseases than it protected against...) and some rusty chastity belts on display. They looked frightening. Also apparently people used to give rings to people they slept with but had no relationship/commitment to/with at all (called a ‘love-forfeit’). It took a long time before rings became a sign of marriage/commitment.

Anyway I thought that was interesting. That note was accompanied by lots of little rings with lovemaking couples on them. There was also a ‘room of disturbance’ (my own nickname) where they crammed in all the photos and information about bondage, transsexuals, urolagnia (people who get off on peeing on eachother), Sado-whatsitcalled, abnormally sized bits, and a lot of cringeworthy piercings. Some of the stuff I could kind of get, but some of the things people are into, I just don’t see how that could ever feel anything other than horrific. But, each to his own. Just don’t touch mine.

Emerging back out into the real world, we both felt a bit overloaded. Once you’ve spent so long looking at naked people, it’s weird to see fully clothed people going about their non-sexual lives. We decided to steam ahead with the touristy stuff so we found our (roundabout) way to the Rijksmuseum (the best in the Netherlands maybe? Didn’t go inside, will save for another trip), behind which are the giant letters ‘I amsterdam.’ Problem was there were so many people with the same wish to get their private photo with the letters that everyone was posing at once. It’s like a Where’s Wally to find us in our photos. Oh well. Having fulfilled our sole purpose of taking a photo with the letters we went for a ride into De Wellen, the red light district. We left our bikes outside the Condomerie, which is filled with condoms with little animal heads on the end, flavoured condoms, chain-mail condoms, condoms for your mobile phone (if you want to go swimming, apparently) etc. At first I swear all the hookers we passed in their windows were really, really hot. They don’t look real – I think the lights are a combination of red lights and UV lights (when they wear white lingerie it glows) and so their skin looks like Barbie-skin. They’re so close to you as well, it’s only a window separating you and it feels really weird! They all smiled and winked at us as we went passed. There were not many other girls in this area of Amsterdam. We considered asking one of them if they even take girls, but decided our need for the answer wasn’t overwhelming enough. As we went along, either I became indifferent to their good looks, the quality of the lights got shitter, or the hookers just got progressively more ugly. We stopped and ate some chips in a cone (paper cone), which is a typically Dutch thing to do before heading back to our bikes.



At various times during the day we had also gone into a few random shops, like the gay-BDSM one near where we parked our bikes, in which I couldn’t/wouldn’t imagine what half of the stuff in there could possibly be used for. Bahar gave some rather crude suggestions and we left before we got halfway into the shop.

We then spent about half an hour failing to find the Vodka museum, which we both swore we had seen on our way into town from the train station.

By now it was about 6:30pm. Most Dutch people eat dinner at 6pm but I never really feel hungry enough for it, plus we’d just had those chips. So we went to Theatre Casa Rosso to see what the deal was with these live sex shows. Ended up buying a ticket to the show and going in at 7pm, clutching our free dick-shaped lollipops. We sat about halfway back, and the room had only just opened so there was like six people in there. Two old weird-looking guys came and sat in the two seats next to us, when every seat of every row in front of us was empty, so we ended up moving after about ten minutes under the pretence of wanting to be closer to ‘see the details.’ Then we watched people having sex for two hours. Bahar got some French-maid boobs in her face and also made the mistake of volunteering for a segment. She has requested we both erase that ten minutes of our lives from our memories. The girls were all quite flexible and got better-looking as the show went on, but it was not what I was expecting, really. It all looked so rehearsed, which I guess is kind of the point, but none of the women even pretended to look happy about being pounded, which I assume they usually do in porn. (Most of the men didn't look very enthusiastic about having sex either!) Actually in some parts it looked like the women's faces were spasming, but maybe that was my imagination. The strippers/solo acts looked like they were enjoying themselves a lot more. One of them got a guy from the audience to lie on his back and then she wrote ‘BAD BOY’ on his stomach with a pen ... but she wasn’t using her hands to hold the pen. Anyway it was quite an eye-opening and interesting, if not slightly depressing, experience that I’m not sure I’ll ever want to do again.

Just looked up that Vodka museum, turns out it’s closed anyway. Damn.

By now it was dark and we felt we needed to sit somewhere and recover for a little bit. We ducked into an Irish pub for a drink before grabbing our bikes and heading onto the train back to good ol’ Utrecht. Interesting day! Not sure if I’ll go with my house mates tomorrow again, although I do want to check out those markets...

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Photos

Dutch couple
Saw this on the way to the train station! So cute! Even they, holding hands and meandering along, overtook me on my bike, despite my frenzied and desperate pedalling style.