Arrive: 21 April 2011
It doesn’t take me long to decide that there is no way in hell that I am spending Easter in London. For some reason festive holidays by yourself is just not appealing. So it seemed like a pretty obvious delineation that the most appropriate place to enjoy some chocolate would be Amsterdam.
I arrive at the Hans Brinker Hostel on Thursday afternoon. I’m not going to attempt to wordsmith my way around describing what this place was like, best you just check out the photos. From a marketing perspective though, pure genius. I never thought you could promote dirty and unhygienic rooms as immune system enhancers.
I met my tour group shortly after arriving and bunked up with some fellow Aussies from down south. Overall the group is great, a tasting plate of from right across the globe. With just enough time to grab a bed and change into some fresh clothes, we head out on our first pub crawl for the weekend.
It’s probably in everyone’s best interests that I don’t delve too far into the nights events (may have something to do with me not remembering them), but lets just say we did Australia proud on the drinking front.
After waking up, figuring out where the hell I was, taking two aspirin and drinking some water, I boarded the bus and headed out to the tulip fields. To begin with, I wasn’t too keen on spending four hours, hung over at a flower farm but it didn’t take long for me to realize that this was not just any old flower farm.
How can I explain the tulip fields? Imagine Claude Monet and Andy Warhol got together one night, dropped some LSD and decided to join artistic forces to create the most abstract landscape paining the world has ever seen. Then times it by a million. The hours flew by in whirl of windmills, clogs, cheese and strawberries, all topped off with a hint of hay-fever and before I knew it we were being herded back onto the bus for our last night on the town.
I’m not going to lie, the schedule for the night looked pretty daunting. It included dinner and a live sex show. Firstly, no one likes to eat a big meal before sex. And secondly, I’m not too sure if a live sex show is the appropriate way to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But peer pressure reared its ugly head and before I knew it, we were all tottering off into the bowels of the red light district.
2 hours later…
It actually wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, more party tricks than live sex. Overall I was pretty impressed with some of the unique skills the ladies possessed. Not too sure how they came to realize they had these skills, but I guess that if you are ever in a situation where you need to peel a banana with no hands, they would be of use.
Lessons learned in Amsterdam
- The girls in the windows look much friendlier than they really are
- Coffee shops don’t actually sell coffee
- The place is rife with German bachelor parties. The language barrier is just not thick enough.
- Never drink from the labeless bottle with a pouring nozzle on it. Just because it looks like it has alcohol in it, doesn’t necessarily mean it does.
- Bicycles are more dangerous than cars.
