Amsterdam

The first discouraging sign was the weather. It had been beautiful from Istanbul to Budapest, fickle in Germany, and when I got off the train in Amsterdam it was pouring rain. I never knew the extent to which climate determines the personality of a people - and where there's not much sun, they don't smile. It rains a lot in Holland and the Dutch are reserved almost to the point of dourness. When I got to my hostel - really a budget hotel - I found at reception a tired-looking monotone youth who acted much put out that I'd interrupted his computer time. He took from me the exorbitant cost of my stay, gave me my keys and the house rules and returned to his techno.

A little later on I was sitting in the joyless lounge of the hotel fucking around on my ipad when a group of people came in. One of them was a friendly young guy from the Pacific Northwest named Andrew. We started chatting about the usual shit - where ya from, where ya been - when the man behind the reception desk came out and started shutting down the room. At 11 pm. That's it, I thought. I'm changing hostels.

We were remarking on how lame this closing of the room was when Andrew said they were going to a bar anyway. With them was a Ukrainian girl who lived in Amsterdam and was showing them around. "Would you like to go to a bar?" he asked me. I said I would. I went upstairs to change and would meet them in the lobby.

We were outside the front door about to leave when he addressed me.

"By the way, we're all rolling."
I looked at him quizzically. "What?"
"Or at least we will be soon. She hooked up some MDMA. Just wanted you to know what was going on in case we started acting weird. We put it in the water."
He was holding a half-full plastic water bottle.
"Oh," I said. A moment passed.
"Unless...you'd like to join us?"
I looked at the bottle. Another moment. Then I took the bottle unscrewed the cap and drank two huge gulps of the chemical-flavored liquid.
"That'll be enough," said the girl.
"Good. Let's roll."

It was a strange and motley patronage assembled at the club we entered. A group of ten or so Asians, some dancing awkwardly while the others sat at a table behind a velvet rope. I took them with no further basis to be nouveau riche Chinese. A Dutchman overdressed in a poorly matched coat and tie talking to two women. Tourists like ourselves. And standing in front of me at the bar were the strangest customers of all.

The first was a woman wearing a kind of corset made of what looked like black rubber. It covered her chest but left her back and shoulders bare and these were covered in strange tattoos. Hieroglyphs and arabesques and foreign words. All black ink on that pale skin. She was talking to a tanned woman with long hair and tight jeans each the same color of deepest black. This one wore a hot pink tanktop and was so, so thin that as I watched her sway rhythmically to the music she was like a snake charmed to dance entirely upright.

The Ukrainian girl seated next to me gestured at them. "Prostitutes", she said.

To top off this bizarre milieu the bartender was a dead ringer for Lindsay Lohan only she had a wax face. I was in a delirious state of heightened observation. I found myself rubbing my arms and chest just for the sensation of it. I redoubled my attention on the surreal scene before me, all of it scored and striped by the red lasers of the clublights and dreamily obscured by smoke from a machine.

Along with the two whores already described two more were congregated at the bar around a man who was obviously their pimp. He had olive skin and oiled hair and I placed him in his early twenties. He was well-dressed. He wore a Burberry sweater. The pimp would in turn hold the girls to his side and whisper coyly in their ears and then he would shove them away. There was one whore who was the least attractive of the bunch, tall and fat and ugly, who stood apart from the rest of the girls doting on the pimp. Pensive. Like an outcast. Watching this group interact I reflected that when you see a pimp in his element you're looking at a low form of life indeed.

Soon more whores had seeped into the club and they'd taken to dancing on the bar and tabletops with their perfect bodies, their distorted faces. At this point I wondered aloud whether we were in an outright brothel but the local girl assured me we were not. She said she didn't like it either but that it was a Monday night and everywhere else was closed.

We drank and danced for a while and then moved to another club for one more beer before calling it a night. I got into bed and passed out.

I awoke the next morning with a pretty good hangover. I ran into the people I'd gone out with the previous night. They were going to a coffeeshop around the corner from the hotel. I said I'd meet them there.

In Amsterdam a coffeeshop is a place where marijuana can be legally bought and smoked. What we call a coffee shop they just call a cafe. To someone used to the caution and secrecy with which the drug is treated by users in the US the novelty of being able to walk off the street, sit down and smoke it, of smelling it everywhere, is strange to the point of comedy. I found my friends and walked up to the bar to make a purchase. A cigarette of pure marijuana cost eight euro. I ordered one of these and coffee and received my item in a yellow plastic vial.

I sat down at the table and lit up and we sat smoking and drinking coffee in our shared hungover daze. There were plans to do a canal boat tour and I asked if I could tag along. Andrew looked at me with a look that admonished me for even thinking I had to ask. "Please dude," he said. "We've been waiting for you."

Being pretty hungover already I decided to just keep going and stay in that night. Andrew and I bought two beers apiece for the ride and I ended up drinking one of his. When we got off the boat I was drunk. As planned we were now close to our next sightseeing destination: the Red Light district.

Amsterdam, with its picturesque canals lined with tall and narrow homes and its ubiquitous cyclists rolling over the bridges and along the banks would be a place well worth visiting on the aesthetic merits alone. But this placid, quintessentially European setting combined with the tolerance for vice makes the city a truly unique place in the world. The Red Light district has a sketchy feeling to it even during the day. Here all pretense is dropped. Prostitutes dressed in but lingerie sit on faux-ornate chairs in booths covered floor to ceiling in red velvet that you step into directly from the street. When a man enters a curtain is drawn and the business conducted right there. Most of the women are old and fat and ugly and they bang on the glass doors of their booths and holler at you in Dutch to come to them. Some though are young and attractive and they do not call but only stare at you boldly and bid you come with their eyes alone. While we were walking around in our fucked-up state the bells of a nearby church began tolling loudly and I asked an Australian girl in our group what she thought and she said she felt like she was dreaming. A dream or a nightmare, I wondered.

After walking around some more I went back to the hotel to crash and recover from the night and day's debauch.

For the first four nights of my stay I was alone in my six-bed dorm with the weirdest girl ever. She was a Swiss national but she was not of European descent. She was tall and had hair of thin braids dyed blonde that went all the way down her back. Several times early in my stay I would glance over to find her staring at me and I actually had to tell her to stop doing this, which she obliged. She was harmless, just weird.

When she found out I was American she perked up and said she was moving to LA. "You wanna be an actress?" I said. She said no, a singer. I thought there was sufficient sarcasm in my voice to deter further conversation but apparently not. She said that night she happened to be singing at a local jazz club. She asked me to come watch her. Sometimes when you're traveling you just have to go with things despite having some reservations. I said sure thing.

I found out on the way to the bar that she didn't have an appointment to sing and there wasn't even an open mic, she was just going to try and cajole her way onstage. This only added to my initial skepticism and I was starting to regret coming. But the errand was partially redeemed when I heard the band play - they were incredible, each man an absolute virtuoso. The downside was that I figured no way musicians of this caliber were going to let some weirdo girl they'd never seen before just stand up and sing with them. What if she sucked? But she asked and must have said the right things because they agreed. And she wasn't half bad.

Her going to LA will be a complete disaster. But that wasn't the point. It had been a fun night and something different. And relatively wholesome.

The rest of my stay finished up quietly. The weather cleared up the day before I was to leave and at last this beautiful city was pleasant also. I was the only witness to a marriage proposal on the Canal Amstel and I gave the couple a thumbs up which they returned. I met a local seacaptain who kept gazing at me with a strange twinkle in his eye and later while taking me to a bar had us stop by his place where I thought I might get trafficked but nothing happened.

I walked around, talked to locals in cafes, read and wrote and drank.

Amsterdam was a highlight. Now I was leaving the Continent. On to London.