Amsterdam
Imagine a festival, a big one, perhaps Glastonbury. Take away the bands. Pave over the mud. Turn the tents into hostels, turn the market stalls into shops. That’s Amsterdam, more or less.
I was out there for the weekend to visit my World of Warcraft guild, which may well be the geekiest thing I’ve ever done, but in my defence, at least I was going outside to see them rather than just talking to them on Teamspeak. We were supposed to meet them at 6pm and go to a restaurant, but our flight was delayed by four hours, so we blew our compensation refreshment vouchers on beer, got drunk, and eventually left the plane feeling hazy in a totally unknown place with no-one to meet us or help us get to the meal. We set about trying to find our hostel but the directions that they gave us were extremely poor, so we ambled about looking like lost tourists with a bad map. Seeing our obvious confusion, a rather odd gentleman who smelt of weed asked us if we needed directions, but rather than pointing us in the right direction and carrying on, he walked with us and talked to us. At first I thought he was just being friendly, but it rapidly became obvious that he expected money. Eventually we convinced him that we only had English money and pressed a two pound coin into his hand to get rid of him. We took a long detour before turning around, for he had led us right past our hostel and to the other end of the street. We checked in, headed out, met up with the others, and sat in a bar for the evening drinking beer out of very small glasses.
The next day we toured Amsterdam, visited a market, and drank more beer. In the evening we went to a Mexican restaurant in which you barbequed meat at your table, picked up from an all-you-can-eat buffet of raw meat and ate it with a variety of salads and sauces also available in fantastic quantities. We ate until it hurt and predictably moved on to a bar. Somehow we ended up in a gay bar, which seemed like quite an Amsterdam-esque thing to do, so we had a few drinks out of very small glasses (Pints are rare in Holland apparently) before moving on. We went around a few places looking for somewhere that would hold 15 people with enough room for us all to sit and chat, and eventually settled into an Irish bar. I ordered a Guinness and had a little cry about how much it cost me before moving back to regular lager. We drank until the bar closed before racing back to our hostel in time for our 4am curfew. My memory is a little hazy, but I definitely racing back efficiently enough to stop in at the nearby kebab shop for a chocolate covered waffle. I found the fact that this shop sold kebabs, croissants, waffles and donuts absolutely delightful. Getting into our bunk beds, which were about as tall as me, silently, whilst drunk, at 4am, was a real challenge. I suspect that we failed.
The next day we met the others for a superb lunch at Japanese Pancake World (We were as surprised as you to find such a place existed) before saying goodbye to the majority of our party. After that, culture was the order of the day so Anne Frank’s house was our next destination. It is a little disappointing that the recreation of the house feels rather new, and makes no attempt to be musty or atmospheric, but it still tells an awe-inspiring tale. The last of our foreign friends left us at this point and just five English people remained, so we bar hopped for a few hours and then went to an Argentinian steak house. For some reason that we could not derive, there are many, many Argentinian steak houses in Amsterdam. We picked one at random. The menu contained steak, steak, and more steak, so our meals were easy to order. As soon as we began to eat my friend Ben began to choke quite seriously and ended up being dragged upstairs to the toilets by Mat to receive a severre beating in order to extract the lump of steak from his throat. The noises he made were quite incredible and I apologised profusely to the restaurant manager. I’m quite upset that I didn’t take photos of the event because in hindsight it was hilarious, but at the time it was a pretty scary experience because none of us had the faintest idea what to do when someone was choking. We ended the night as the only customers in a hotel bar drinking the only really good beer we’d found all weekend, letting time pass with a lingering euphoric feeling that occurs mostly at the end of hungover days when all but a few of the guests have made it home.
Our flight home ended up going via Dusseldorf and took 3 hours longer than expected.