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.