Joined by those 3 we went down to the bar, had a Heineken (seriously the only beer we drank in Amsterdam and now something I am trying to avoid as a result) and decided to go for a pub crawl around the red light district (our hostel was on the North East corner of it).
The first place we hit was a bit expensive so after a couple of beers and a lot of awkward glances at the couple at the table next to us who were essentially riding one another we moved to another, cheaper place. Here we randomly ran into Sarah and Lindsay from Bruges, who were in the midst of a rather messy looking paid pub crawl and Christophe, who hadn't really said much given his lack of communication options, bought us a round of jager bombs and then shortly after disappeared.
We then moved to a place in Rembrandtplein but the music it was playing was pretty awful so we grabbed pizza slices from one of the ten bazillion late night food places and chilled next to a canal before heading back to the hostel. On arrival, around 3am, I discovered a girl asleep in my bed and, in pitch black, managed to find the single empty bed in the room. Bed incident 2/3.
The next morning we discovered another great feature of our hostel; amazing, cheap food, so after an awesome full English breakfast Tim and I played some pool, had a few beers then went to look for an acceptable cafe to partake of some of Amsterdam's more infamous treats. The first few we found were all playing crappy dance music, which we felt was not the experience we desired, so we kept looking around until we found a place playing some Dub and grabbed a brownie each. After about 15 minutes, and feeling absolutely nothing, we asking a passing waitress how long they took to kick in ("about an hour") and whether 1 each was enough ("definitely"), then promptly bought another and headed back to the hostel to play some more pool and have a few more cheap beers.
After a while, probably about the hour predicted, I started to feel a bit high and then about half an hour after that we had to call it a day for pool as Tim was too high. Tim definitely got hit a lot harder by it than I did and we went back into the bar area where we were joined by Julia and Maria, who I talked to while Tim sat there, too out of it to converse with us.
Midnight rolled around, and we were by this point back to our stable point of just being quite drunk, and then shortly after began the most disturbing incident of our entire trip. A very drunk, as in very drunk compared to us, Welsh girl stumbled into the bar, ordered a beer and started loudly slur-yell-talking to a poor innocent guy standing at the bar for about 5 minutes before she started kissing him then abruptly stopped and came over and set next to us. After a couple of minutes of slur-yelling at us in an accent so thick we had no idea what she was saying she started getting a bit more focused and aggressive sounding to Julia (Maria having gone to bed) and the bartender came over and told us that "you 4 are making too much noise [while glaring at the Welsh girl] so I need you to all leave". We told him that we had no idea who she was or why she was talking to us, but subtly so she didn't notice because she seemed like a crazy person, and so he told her that she had to go. She apparently took this in as she nodded and stood up, so he walked off. She then, right in front of me and Julia and directly behind Tim, much to our horror (Tim picking up on it by our facial expressions and then the... sound effects), in one swift movement dropped her jeans and undies to her knees, squatted on the bar floor and commenced pissing like a firehose, just as the poor bartender walked behind her. The poor guy had to take a double take at a half naked girl squatting on the floor of the bar before bending down to see if she really was doing what he thought she was. I have never in my life seen a face say "fuck my life" as purely as his did. We took this as our cue to leave and hurriedly vacated the bar up to the safety of the staircase where we could check our shoes for... splashback... and spend another hour laughing and questioning what just happened. Ended up going to bed at 1:30 which seemed like the end of the matter.
At around 3am I awoke to someone shoving me and, from the stench of vomit and piss, loud, slurred voice and indecipherable accent realised that the drunk Welsh girl was not only somehow in our room or somehow pushing me but infact climbing into my bed. I told her, in quite simple, loud and possibly explicit terms, to get out of my bed but she tried to grab me then passed out so I escaped and went downstairs tp the reception where the old Scottish bloke working told me "that fooken betch, goo up thar, drag her oot of yur bed and throw her inta hers, its 302 [ours was 301] and if she causes anymore trooble I'm callin the fooken coppers". Armed with this information and threat I returned, woke her and, with surprisingly small difficulty, convinced her to get out my bed, although it was on the condition that I took her to her room, thankfully across the corridor. I got her into her room, a 20 bed dorm, and she commenced yelling about had anyone seen her friend and how she had lost her passport. She then turned to me and told me I had to hold her while she slept or she would come back to my bed. I managed to find her an empty bed and, thank god, she immediately passed out so I left, locked our door, and went to bed. 3/3.
Woke up, said our goodbyes to Julia and Maria and then befriended Alex from Melbourne, the girl who had taken my assigned bed, over tales of the previous nights... excitements and who had the unfortunate job, because I had definitely done enough, of taking the Welsh girls shoes and bag to her room. Had another awesome full cooked breakfast and a lazy morning sitting around the bar reading, playing pool and having a couple of lazy beers (at least until 3pm happy hour when it became more than a couple and less lazy), broken only by me deciding to be healthy and going to a supermarket for a couple of apples and some fruit juice.
At 4 Tim and I went to the "Heineken Experience", which was awesome. A very interesting tour of the brewing process, plus then a 10 minute brewing "ride" followed by a heineken tasting where we learnt the point of head (it keeps the beer cool and from going flat). At the tasting we befriended the bartender so after the rest of the group from the ride moved on we had a couple more free beers with him then we moved through the rest of the tour, which ended in a bar where we each got 2 free beers, counterbalanced by the loud, terrible music and floor so sticky that each step was a trial of keeping our shoes on.
We then went back to the hostel for more beer and pool and ended up hanging out with Alex and her friend David from Canada. Around midnight Alex, quite stoned, went to bed and Tim, David and I went for a drunk wander and found an amazing, cheap chicken burger joint.
Another morning passed with beers and fantastic breakfast then in the afternoon Tim and I went to check out the sex museum, which was very confronting, very interesting and quite obscene. A lot of ancient artistry and implements, a section dedicated to the Japanese, who are apparently quite the deviants and love to draw themselves with whale sized wangs, a somewhat scarily graphic room about fetishes and a lot of straight up porn.
We then went to see about going to the ice bar but it turned out you had to book and we didn't want to wait around for a couple of hours so we headed back to the hostel where we met David and his mate, a big Aussie bloke from Melbourne, had a couple more beers and decided we should check out the red light district and get some food. Ended up getting more chicken burgers and were back in the hostel, ready for an early night, by midnight.
Tim and I, fully aware of our lack of sleep and that we had to be up at 8:30 to checkout, decided to finish our beers and go to sleep. Of course, us being us, 2 minutes later 2 Pom girls, Yasmin and Kim, sat down across from us and starting talking to us. We then had 2 more beers each and ended up going out with them, accompanied by Yu, the 35 year old Chinese hostel manager the girls invited as a joke but actually said that he did want to come.
Yu first took us to a bar that was meant to be really good but was so crowded that we didn't bother so he took us on to a club called "Smokey", which definitely lived up to its name and had a dancing cage accessed by a staircase and hanging over the dance floor and 2 dancing poles, one on a raised platform and one on a bar, all used frequently. The club did 10 jager shots or 4 jager bombs for $15 so within half an hour we had each had 4 shots and a jager bomb and were quite happy. The club was filled with creepy guys, who for some reason kept trying to smell the girls hair and we ended up leaving at 3:30, getting bike rickshaws back to the hostel and then talking with some Irish on the staircase until 4:30. So much for a quiet night.
Woke up at 8:30, showered, checked out and walked to the station for our 8 hour train to Munich, which was excellent for catching up on sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment