European Vacation Part Three: Amsterdam
There we were. Sitting in a Paris train station, hot and sweaty from running in vain to the train we were supposed to be on as it pulled out on its way to Amsterdam. Luckily there was another Netherlands-bound train leaving a mere 4 hours later, and, luckier still, it had available seats. We could have wandered around Paris some more while waiting, but we had all our bags and the lockers in the station were like a zillion euros an hour. So we just hung out.
People-watching in a train station is always interesting, and Paris is no exception. There were all sorts of dramas playing out around us, from the 'stranded' guy hustling money for a 'return trip home' (isn't there ALWAYS one of those guys?) to the bald-headed eyebrowless evil-scientist-looking man who never blinked, to the woman with the gigantic silver sunglasses who looked like a big housefly and who constantly kept changing seats. I could swear she was making buzzing noises under her breath as she moved closer and closer to us, sending a chill up my spine and prompting me to wonder if I had unwittingly ingested some sort of mushroom. Finally the time passed and we got on a train, just in time to avoid the fly woman, who proceeded to feast on the living juices of some poor girl who had fallen asleep next to us in the waiting area. Or at least that's what it looked like to me.
After a brief stop in the middle of nowhere because of some protest on the tracks or something (we never quite figured out what it was, but there was some sort of strike going on, as there usually is in France), we were on our way. The landscape from Paris to Amsterdam is rather unremarkable; I'm sure there are interesting things to see in Belgium, but you don't see them from the train.
By now my jetlag was wearing off and I started to feel somewhat human, so I knew something bad was going to happen. By now you should know my life well enough to understand why. That, however, didn't stop me from eating the cheese.
At some point -- I think it was somewhere in Belgium -- a couple of tasty-looking EuroChix from some cheese company's promotions department boarded the train and handed out free samples of packaged cheese. Gotta love Europe for stuff like that; it just wouldn't happen here unless you're a doctor and they're pharmaceutical reps. Anyway, since we had planned to be on the earlier train, we hadn't eaten much in awhile and I was famished. So I woofed down the whole package of cheese, which was actually quite delicious. I think there were six jumbo slices in there -- not bad for a free sample.
Too bad it was poisonous.
OK; well, maybe I'm exaggerating. Nobody else seemed to have a problem. But within an hour we were pulling into our destination and I was looking a little on the purplish side with a tinge of green around the edges. I couldn't breathe very well, and I felt uncomfortably edgy and anxious, like I was having a heart attack or something. So all I can think of is that I had an allergic reaction. Don't have them to food very often; probably only a couple of times in my life, but this was definitely one of them. I was sure I was going to pass out, as I staggered out of the train and the station and into the cold, wet air of Amsterdam in the Spring.
Cheese has never bothered me, and if it did, I would expect it to be more of a digestive thing -- but this was definitely tweaking my cardiovascular system, and of course I couldn't tell just how bad it was going to get. As Rachel and I climbed aboard a bus to the vicinity of our hotel, I could barely get air into my lungs and my hands and feet were feeling all tingly. I've often thought Amsterdam wouldn't be a bad place to spend my final days, but I had hoped to actually get to see the place first.
Somehow made it up to the hotel room, which was up about 20 narrow flights of stairs, wheezing and gasping the whole way like it was Machu Picchu or something. I'm sure Rachel was wondering why she had opted to travel with this pathetic invalid as I coughed out, 'I'm not g-gonna make it; b-better go on without me. Save yourself.' Surely she had read what had happened to me in Madrid?
Took some antihistamines. Crashed on the bed for awhile. Color came back. I'd live another day.
Still don't know if it was the cheese or what, but I can't think of what else it might have been. But I was rather sniffly for the rest of the trip, thanks to some unfamiliar pollen or whatever flying around. I don't know what planet I'm from, but I seem to be overly sensitive to this one. Jesus. I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway and instead I turned out to be Woody Allen.
The hotel was a decent little place right in the center of town, above a headshop and a Chinese restaurant that proudly offered 'ALL YOU CAN EAT IN ONE HOUR' for 7 Euros or so. The restaurant was devoid of conversation; all you could hear from the doorway was slurping and chewing, as the patrons tried to cram in as much food as they could in the allotted timeframe. I figured they were probably Americans. I saw lots of people with Canadian flag stickers recently applied to their backpacks; I figured they were probably Americans too.
Amsterdam was beautiful despite the weather, which started out partly crappy in the morning and progressed to mostly shitty by mid-afternoon. the cold and wet were not particularly conducive to sightseeing, so as a result we spent most of our time in the -- ahem -- coffeeshops. If there could possibly be any of you who as yet aren't familiar with this terminology, go ask one of your pothead friends, who will probably just laugh at you. Let's just say I don't generally drink coffee.
Our stay in The Netherlands was thus a hazy one, spent floating and/or stumbling around in a perpetual daze, wandering around quaint cobblestone streets and looking for warm places to hang out. There being a coffeeshop every fifteen feet or so, we managed to visit quite a few of them, striking up interesting conversations here and there that both of us only vaguely remember. One guy looked like a pirate. He kept mumbling incoherently to us, and we acted as though we knew what he was talking about. One time a pair of identical twin females, both rather husky and with crazy big-ass kinky red hair out to here, dressed alike and each looking a bit like a cross between Carrot Top and a Viking, came in and started playing checkers while sharing a gigantic joint. I looked at Rachel, who nodded as if to say, 'Yes, there are two of them. I see them too.'
We decided that it would be prudent to visit some museums, so that when people asked us later, 'Did you visit any museums?' we wouldn't have to say, 'No, we just wandered around stoned.' So we wandered around the Van Gogh Museum stoned -- which was not advisable since they had an Egon Schiele exhibit, and his stuff is just too fucking miserable to look at while high. I mean, I'm no fan of the guy anyway, but with a potentially semi-paranoid headful of Northern Lights, he's just way too disturbing for words to describe. We wandered around the Tropenmuseum stoned -- which was hilarious, because that has got to be one of the saddest, tackiest little excuses for a museum I've seen yet (with the possible exception of the Roy Rogers Museum, on the way to Vegas from L.A.). The current exhibit of note was called 'Het Kwaad,' which means 'All About Evil' in Dutch. And evil it was indeed. Kinda like a haunted house at an elementary school. Amid backdrops made of cheaply-painted cardboard and aluminum foil, there were all sorts of representations of 'evil' from throughout the centuries displayed, from ancient gargoyles to pictures of goth fetish models. Ooh, scary. My favorite was an obviously cobbled-together five-foot mannequin of Darth Vader, complete with black rubber rainboots -- yes, rainboots -- and an undersized head that obviously originated on a much smaller model of The Dark Lord himself. The overall effect was as if Zippy the Pinhead were seduced by the dark side.
Upstairs in the same museum was the Permanent Collection -- a disjointed and confusing walk through Dutch colonial history, with strange wax figures of Dutch colonialists engaging in various indecipherable activities, along with all sorts of items of questionable origin and even more questionable value. There was a life-sized re-creation of what looked like an Apartheid-era African township. No, I'm not kidding. Mistaken, perhaps. But kidding? No. At any rate, it was one sorry-ass exhibit.
Didn't go to the Rijksmuseum. As an artist and former art student, I've seen enough Rembrandt and other Old Masters to last a lifetime, thanks. But we DID go to the Sex Museum, which was mostly anticlimactic coming from a place like San Francisco, but I can see how it would be shocking if I were from, say, Kansas. The real fun of that place was watching everybody else get all giggly and embarrassed at the goofball displays. You just haven't lived until you've watched a middle-class Japanese family pose for pictures next to a giant fiberglass erect penis.
Speaking of erect penises, I guess I expected the prostitutes in the red light district to be skanky. Man, was I wrong. They have certain streets designated for legal hustling, and they're lined with these sliding-glass doors all lit up with various colors of neon, mostly red and pink. Standing behind the doors were some of the most gorgeous girls I've ever seen, all regulated, taxed and supposedly disease-free. I was taken aback, to say the least. Never thought of myself as the sort to consider paying for some action but to be completely honest, I must admit that the thought crossed my mind. Must have been the dope. Yeah, that was it.
Anyway, rather than give Rachel the dubious choice of waiting outside or joining in, I kept my lascivious fantasies to myself.
Instead, we went and found a nice, warm...coffeeshop.
To be continued...
* * *
People-watching in a train station is always interesting, and Paris is no exception. There were all sorts of dramas playing out around us, from the 'stranded' guy hustling money for a 'return trip home' (isn't there ALWAYS one of those guys?) to the bald-headed eyebrowless evil-scientist-looking man who never blinked, to the woman with the gigantic silver sunglasses who looked like a big housefly and who constantly kept changing seats. I could swear she was making buzzing noises under her breath as she moved closer and closer to us, sending a chill up my spine and prompting me to wonder if I had unwittingly ingested some sort of mushroom. Finally the time passed and we got on a train, just in time to avoid the fly woman, who proceeded to feast on the living juices of some poor girl who had fallen asleep next to us in the waiting area. Or at least that's what it looked like to me.
After a brief stop in the middle of nowhere because of some protest on the tracks or something (we never quite figured out what it was, but there was some sort of strike going on, as there usually is in France), we were on our way. The landscape from Paris to Amsterdam is rather unremarkable; I'm sure there are interesting things to see in Belgium, but you don't see them from the train.
By now my jetlag was wearing off and I started to feel somewhat human, so I knew something bad was going to happen. By now you should know my life well enough to understand why. That, however, didn't stop me from eating the cheese.
At some point -- I think it was somewhere in Belgium -- a couple of tasty-looking EuroChix from some cheese company's promotions department boarded the train and handed out free samples of packaged cheese. Gotta love Europe for stuff like that; it just wouldn't happen here unless you're a doctor and they're pharmaceutical reps. Anyway, since we had planned to be on the earlier train, we hadn't eaten much in awhile and I was famished. So I woofed down the whole package of cheese, which was actually quite delicious. I think there were six jumbo slices in there -- not bad for a free sample.
Too bad it was poisonous.
OK; well, maybe I'm exaggerating. Nobody else seemed to have a problem. But within an hour we were pulling into our destination and I was looking a little on the purplish side with a tinge of green around the edges. I couldn't breathe very well, and I felt uncomfortably edgy and anxious, like I was having a heart attack or something. So all I can think of is that I had an allergic reaction. Don't have them to food very often; probably only a couple of times in my life, but this was definitely one of them. I was sure I was going to pass out, as I staggered out of the train and the station and into the cold, wet air of Amsterdam in the Spring.
Cheese has never bothered me, and if it did, I would expect it to be more of a digestive thing -- but this was definitely tweaking my cardiovascular system, and of course I couldn't tell just how bad it was going to get. As Rachel and I climbed aboard a bus to the vicinity of our hotel, I could barely get air into my lungs and my hands and feet were feeling all tingly. I've often thought Amsterdam wouldn't be a bad place to spend my final days, but I had hoped to actually get to see the place first.
Somehow made it up to the hotel room, which was up about 20 narrow flights of stairs, wheezing and gasping the whole way like it was Machu Picchu or something. I'm sure Rachel was wondering why she had opted to travel with this pathetic invalid as I coughed out, 'I'm not g-gonna make it; b-better go on without me. Save yourself.' Surely she had read what had happened to me in Madrid?
Took some antihistamines. Crashed on the bed for awhile. Color came back. I'd live another day.
Still don't know if it was the cheese or what, but I can't think of what else it might have been. But I was rather sniffly for the rest of the trip, thanks to some unfamiliar pollen or whatever flying around. I don't know what planet I'm from, but I seem to be overly sensitive to this one. Jesus. I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway and instead I turned out to be Woody Allen.
The hotel was a decent little place right in the center of town, above a headshop and a Chinese restaurant that proudly offered 'ALL YOU CAN EAT IN ONE HOUR' for 7 Euros or so. The restaurant was devoid of conversation; all you could hear from the doorway was slurping and chewing, as the patrons tried to cram in as much food as they could in the allotted timeframe. I figured they were probably Americans. I saw lots of people with Canadian flag stickers recently applied to their backpacks; I figured they were probably Americans too.
Amsterdam was beautiful despite the weather, which started out partly crappy in the morning and progressed to mostly shitty by mid-afternoon. the cold and wet were not particularly conducive to sightseeing, so as a result we spent most of our time in the -- ahem -- coffeeshops. If there could possibly be any of you who as yet aren't familiar with this terminology, go ask one of your pothead friends, who will probably just laugh at you. Let's just say I don't generally drink coffee.
Our stay in The Netherlands was thus a hazy one, spent floating and/or stumbling around in a perpetual daze, wandering around quaint cobblestone streets and looking for warm places to hang out. There being a coffeeshop every fifteen feet or so, we managed to visit quite a few of them, striking up interesting conversations here and there that both of us only vaguely remember. One guy looked like a pirate. He kept mumbling incoherently to us, and we acted as though we knew what he was talking about. One time a pair of identical twin females, both rather husky and with crazy big-ass kinky red hair out to here, dressed alike and each looking a bit like a cross between Carrot Top and a Viking, came in and started playing checkers while sharing a gigantic joint. I looked at Rachel, who nodded as if to say, 'Yes, there are two of them. I see them too.'
We decided that it would be prudent to visit some museums, so that when people asked us later, 'Did you visit any museums?' we wouldn't have to say, 'No, we just wandered around stoned.' So we wandered around the Van Gogh Museum stoned -- which was not advisable since they had an Egon Schiele exhibit, and his stuff is just too fucking miserable to look at while high. I mean, I'm no fan of the guy anyway, but with a potentially semi-paranoid headful of Northern Lights, he's just way too disturbing for words to describe. We wandered around the Tropenmuseum stoned -- which was hilarious, because that has got to be one of the saddest, tackiest little excuses for a museum I've seen yet (with the possible exception of the Roy Rogers Museum, on the way to Vegas from L.A.). The current exhibit of note was called 'Het Kwaad,' which means 'All About Evil' in Dutch. And evil it was indeed. Kinda like a haunted house at an elementary school. Amid backdrops made of cheaply-painted cardboard and aluminum foil, there were all sorts of representations of 'evil' from throughout the centuries displayed, from ancient gargoyles to pictures of goth fetish models. Ooh, scary. My favorite was an obviously cobbled-together five-foot mannequin of Darth Vader, complete with black rubber rainboots -- yes, rainboots -- and an undersized head that obviously originated on a much smaller model of The Dark Lord himself. The overall effect was as if Zippy the Pinhead were seduced by the dark side.
Upstairs in the same museum was the Permanent Collection -- a disjointed and confusing walk through Dutch colonial history, with strange wax figures of Dutch colonialists engaging in various indecipherable activities, along with all sorts of items of questionable origin and even more questionable value. There was a life-sized re-creation of what looked like an Apartheid-era African township. No, I'm not kidding. Mistaken, perhaps. But kidding? No. At any rate, it was one sorry-ass exhibit.
Didn't go to the Rijksmuseum. As an artist and former art student, I've seen enough Rembrandt and other Old Masters to last a lifetime, thanks. But we DID go to the Sex Museum, which was mostly anticlimactic coming from a place like San Francisco, but I can see how it would be shocking if I were from, say, Kansas. The real fun of that place was watching everybody else get all giggly and embarrassed at the goofball displays. You just haven't lived until you've watched a middle-class Japanese family pose for pictures next to a giant fiberglass erect penis.
Speaking of erect penises, I guess I expected the prostitutes in the red light district to be skanky. Man, was I wrong. They have certain streets designated for legal hustling, and they're lined with these sliding-glass doors all lit up with various colors of neon, mostly red and pink. Standing behind the doors were some of the most gorgeous girls I've ever seen, all regulated, taxed and supposedly disease-free. I was taken aback, to say the least. Never thought of myself as the sort to consider paying for some action but to be completely honest, I must admit that the thought crossed my mind. Must have been the dope. Yeah, that was it.
Anyway, rather than give Rachel the dubious choice of waiting outside or joining in, I kept my lascivious fantasies to myself.
Instead, we went and found a nice, warm...coffeeshop.
To be continued...
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 2:33 AM
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