Amsterdam at 30

Amsterdam is an amazing city. It is overwhelmingly charming, especially in the rain when the canals ripple and splash and come to life. Its people are extremely happy, tall, thin and blonde, riding bikes over cobblestone streets and sipping great beers in pleasant brown cafes. The city also has quite a few drugs and prostitutes, all of which are legal.

Amsterdam is good place to better understand your age or stage or station in life. With the entire spectrum of entertainment laid there before you in a condensed little city your true self is welcome to choose any swing on the playground. Molly and I are at that unique spot in life where desires are a bit clouded and action is easily thwarted.

The first night we thought about going out drinking but it started raining and we had cable for the first time in months and so we watched two hours of Two and Half of Men where we could chuckle to ourselves without judgement. Feeling like losers (only after the marathon ended and we watched another hour of Chinese acrobats) we decided we should probably go see some prostitutes, so we walked through the Red Light District – Molly surprised by how attractive they were (she’d recently seen a documentary that painted a different visual), me just surprised by tall naked women in general, and then we got some pizza and Belgian beer and strolled home.

The second night we decided we’d do mushrooms. First we went to a brown cafe where we had three wonderful pilsners and dopplebocks and watched all the happy Dutch people shift around the cafe from friend to friend moving chairs to accommodate larger groups as even more friendly faces poured in. When the check arrived we had a decision to make: we could either go get a bunch of mushrooms and run around hallucinating all night or we could watch Bourne Identity which we had just recently downloaded on our ipad. We chose Bourne.

Well rested and content with our many indulgences, we hopped on an early train the next morning for Berlin.