Amsterdam: Part Two

 

Each day is full of tasty, expensive food. We buy a fried maize pastry and a crispy pocket full of veggies at the Indonesian place beneath Vin’s apartment, where we later return for tempeh and vegetables with boiled eggs in spicy over a box of hot white rice. One lazy night we order pizzas and eat them with creamy garlic sauce. We stop at a Surinamese shop where Vin gets a sandwich and I buy a savory donut type thing. We eat them sitting beside a canal, watching the black ducks dive and resurface. Another evening Vin brings home tasty red curry with tofu and vegetables, and he takes me to an “American” bakery for red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and blueberry muffins. One morning he whips up what he calls a “poor Vietnamese meal,” with boiled eggs and rice and a tasty garlic sauce. We eat it with tangy kim chee. We have Malaysian tea in little metal mugs—it’s foamy and delicious, almost like Chai—and then eat fried rice heaped with chilli sauce.

We buy Asian pears and green apples to munch on with salt and chilli pepper. One night Vin invites a friend over and wraps up shrimp and tofu with noodles and zesty cilantro in translucent rice paper. We eat the summer rolls with a dark sweet and salty sauce and a little hot sauce, too. He takes me to get French fries with Amsterdam’s famous joppy sauce; a sweet, tangy, yellow sauce that reminds me of sweet mustard. On several occasions we stop into a shop for Turkish pizza—a thin pizza, with spinach and feta, in my case, wrapped up with lettuce and vegetables and condiments. It’s heavenly. We follow it with sticky baklava. Another night we buy packets of space cake from a coffeeshop and eat it covered in whipped cream. Once it kicks in, we munch on cold cream puffs and toffee walnut spiced cake. We drink cans of Heineken beer with a side of coke and chat with Vin’s friend Robin about childhood, drugs, moderation, parenting, the future, education systems. We talk about how we’d make new people, differently. It feels important.

On a particularly gray day we stroll to a flea market. It’s cold out and I look half-heartedly for a hat to buy, but nothing seems suitable. Instead I linger on ornate little tins, a beautiful tree tapestry, an adorable summer dress, knitted hand warmers… Across the street is a Hell’s Angels shop and a man and woman are filming it with a big camera on a tripod as a burly old man with long hair rides up. Vin says he’s a leader within the European Hell’s Angels, which in and of itself sounds contradictory and kind of hilarious to me.

I find Adam in the museum quarter, and we take him to New Times, and then visit the Anne Frank house, climbing up narrow stairs to peer at the mostly unfurnished rooms, the grainy portraits, the pages she’d written and corrected in her girlish hand. She’d pasted up photos and pages from magazines on the walls, collages to make the hideout more cheerful. I find her collages somehow haunting. I collage. Later we watch videos, Anne’s childhood friends with quaking German voices and loose skin and distant nightmarish memories. We see the bony bodies piled up. Outside, the moon is full and the black canals glimmer with orange and yellow lights. The windows in Amsterdam are always open. 

That night we stick little pieces of paper with tiny dancing bears on our tongues. The crooked room stretches out and in, shrinking on one side and sloping down the other. Adam paces, scribbling notes all across a to-do list. It’s all about perspective, he keeps saying. Maybe I’m just on drugs, he comments, but maybe in the morning I’ll wake up and be the next Kerouac. We watch polar bears running and sliding through the snow, shimmering white and majestic. We watch schools of fish flicker and dart through dark waters in big baffling choreographies. We laugh at each other’s gaping faces. As the sun rises, smoke gathers in a long beam of sunlight streaming through the window. It looks like a beautiful dragon against the blood red curtains. I peer out the windows and watch as the city shudders and stretches. The last prostitutes finally close their red curtains.

Amsterdam: Part One

Amsterdam is cold and sleepy—gray lays over it, thick like a comforter. The tall, old buildings curl in on each other, leaning close for warmth, folding into each other. Cyclists steam by like schools of metallic fish. In the huge parking lots they huddle together, slumberous silver and rusted turquoise or engine red, glossy black, chipped copper frames. Vin wraps himself up to his nose, saying his Asian blood is too hot for the damp cold that goes all through you. By the ferry, little ducks bob and peck in the damp green-gray water.

Sleepy Amsterdam is full of a million languages, and no one seems to really bother with Dutch. We spend the days strolling through the streets, along and over the glossy canals, crossing tram tracks and bike lanes haphazardly, ignoring the crosswalks with their beeping timer mechanisms. Amsterdam is adorable, quaint, reminiscent of the things that you think of in Portland, or maybe San Francisco. I linger outside the shop windows gawking at the novelty gifts, handmade soaps, woolen hats, quirky t-shirts, pastries, waffles, psychedelic truffles, marijuana lollypops, little glass bongs and grinders with the big triple x across the top. We find a shop entirely devoted to buttons; too cute for words.

At the market there are booths set up with little yellow wheels of cheese, with jars of pickles, with flat waffles and poffertjes—fat pancakes the size of silver dollars. We eat the poffertjes with butter and powdered sugar using little wooden forks as we meander through clothing booths full of colorful scarves and bizarre American flag leggings, Amsterdam caps with tassels and bright green Heineken sweatshirts. As the market begins to shut down, egrets appear and pick at the ice left behind by a seafood booth.

The coffeeshops are dimly lit and sweet-musty smelling, with little nugs labeled and displayed in their countertops, with laminated menus and pre-rolled joints stored in slim plastic tubes. In one shop, an electronic panel in the counter glows pleasantly, displaying the menu on one side, and as the shop keeper weighs and packages the weed in small plastic baggies, the other side displays the weight and price of each strain, tallying up a neat total. People sit at the tables in pairs, rolling spliffs and drinking tea. Vin and I frequent a shop called New Times, with a burnished purple counter and purple candles at each table. We smoke Vin’s long spliffs and sip on English tea, Earl Gray, Moroccan Mint or Rooibos. The third or fourth day we stop by, the man behind the counter hands back our money and bumps fists with Vin. One day, an older man behind the counter is weighing out clumps of hash. Vin asks what it is and the man tells him couscous, handing him a little clump with a friendly smile.

One evening we stop at a dark little smartshop full of glow in the dark posters and metal pipes. The man behind the counter has long hair and shows us a menu of truffles that are rated based on the intensity of the physical high, the energy, and the visuals that each type produces. We buy two little boxes of Cosmic Connection. Back at the house we open them up and contemplate the black clusters. They look like animal shit. We eat them with Nutella, cringing at the acrid after taste. Vin’s friend, a thin blond girl, stops by and sits on his Fatboy bean bag sipping a beer while we watch some show about some nut job living with lions. When she leaves I go to the bathroom and sit on Vin’s strangely high toilet seat; my legs dangle off. I realize my toes suddenly seem miles away and the rug is undulating softly. Back in his room, the deep red curtains are rippling, deep velvety burgundy, the golden shapes on them glowing faintly. We are feeling melty, listening to Gramatik with the TV on mute, watching shadows spill across the African plains in lazy half-fascination. Mostly, my mind fills up. I feel like I can see myself from a strange new angle. I look at my legs stretched out before me. I pull a blanket over my head and watch the white polka dots drift sleepily through the dark.