Coffee Helps

Well. Yesterday was certainly an eye-opener. I’m not entirely sure about Amsterdam, you know. I feel a bit out of my depth. Everything’s very fast-paced and it all feels a bit mad and dangerous, somehow.

It was raining heavily when I arrived, so I didn’t venture very far, other than a short stroll around the immediate area. I’m staying a couple of minutes away from Central Station, which puts me right in the heart of everything. This particular street is chockablock with eateries, “coffee shops” (they really do have inverted commas!), bars and – sadly – tourists. I don’t like it. Maybe it’s a bit hypocritical of me to say that I don’t like tourists, but I really, really don’t! They are noisy and drunk and rude. And when you enter a tourist-infested area, you just know that everything there is geared towards them, and therefore nothing like how it was before. You’re getting an artificial experience.

Anyway, trying to be open-minded, I headed out during a break in the rain and walked quite a long way down the street. It was a never-ending chain of coffee shops, sex shops and fast food shops, with the sickly sweet scent of dope hanging in the air and fusing with the greasy aroma of Turkish and Indian fast food. I don’t know what made me think that it was all a lot of hype – that it couldn’t really all be about cannabis and sex, could it? I observed an elderly man ogling all manner of bizarre sex toys and magazines through a shop window, and sidestepped a dismal-looking middle-aged guy who was loitering aimlessly in a doorway, smoking a joint. Yep. Cannabis and sex. Sex and cannabis. It was rather depressing.

Eventually, tired and bored of the throng of tourists and endless coffee shops (I must actually look to see if any of them do indeed sell coffee!), I decided to employ a trick learned when exploring the Old Town in Tallinn – I picked a random side street, which looked quiet and very Road Less Travelled, and went that way instead. This tactic doesn’t work quite so well in Amsterdam. And so you can perhaps imagine my surprise when I found myself in the middle of a sort of mini Red Light District. Large, buxom women squeezed into skimpy red and black slips. Breasts everywhere. I didn’t know where to look. They sat in their windows with their legs apart, like they were waiting to be bought. Which I suppose they were. Some lounged in the doorways, having a smoke, and made leering noises and exaggerated kissing gestures at any man who walked past.

I don’t get it At All. Why is this such a tourist attraction? People getting high 24/7, half-naked women trying to entice bored businessmen to cheat on their wives? Disheartened, I returned to the hostel for an early night, which turned into a sleepless night owing to all the afore-mentioned drunk tourists outside on the street. You’re only in Amsterdam once! exclaimed an overexcited Brit in a very spaced out voice at one point, no doubt before going off to hire a stranger for sex. He said it in the same way as someone might say You only live once! or You’re only young once!, both of which are true, but I don’t think there’s actually any limit on the number of times you can return to Amsterdam. I expect that the Happy Brit will be delighted when he realises that he can, in fact, be in Amsterdam for the rest of his life if he so desires.

For me, though, his sentence probably rings quite true. I’ll give it another chance, of course, and go see all the things I’d planned to see, but it’s the first city I’ve been to that has made me long to be elsewhere.

Filed under: coffee, contemplation, drugs, Holland, smoking, tourists, uncertainty