You don't have to put on a red light.

"Not quite the Jazz Age euphoria I was expecting." - Marc Hauser

Amsterdam is for amateurs.

If this shatters your travel dreams, or insults your personal judgment from your own experience, My apologies. Well, not really.

This isn't the post for the full Tourist vs. Traveler analysis, but all you need to know is that Amsterdam is claustrophobically saturated with the former, while I consider myself decidedly the latter. Paris was stricken with the same problem, but the city itself was diverse enough in its neighborhoods and nuance to accommodate this, to give refuge to those who seek a little more than the mainstream. Amsterdam is a circle. That is what it looks like on a map, and walking its streets is a loop of coffee shops, canals, garish tourist souvenirs, and rows of bicycles on endless repeat.

That's the setting. As for the cast of characters. As I was checking email on my laptop after checking-in, two guys at my hostel used the only public computers in the building to listen to techno music videos on YouTube and write down the lyrics. For forty-five minutes. This was followed a few hours later by a conversation a girl from Spain had with a 28-year-old World of Warcraft-obsessed guy from America. A guy that is terrified to go anywhere that they speak anything other than English. Luckily Amsterdam and Paris still fit this for him, but he refuses to go to Spain. "Its just so tough because everything's in a different language." Contrast this with an excerpt from a conversation I overheard in Lithuania: "Oh, South America.... to do South America right you have to go for at least a year." Two ends of the spectrum. Tourist and traveler.

This guy in Amsterdam, he's been here for 3 days, by his own admission hadn't seen any of the city or its sights yet, and he spent today lying awake in his bunk for hours, waiting for 3 British guys he just met yesterday to wake up because he didn't want to walk around on his own. He'll cross an ocean, but walking those last few hundred meters is too much to bear. I don't get it. Last night with that girl, he talked about how much he wanted to go to Prague.... how he heard that you could live there in luxury on 10 or 20 dollars a week. What's his source.... a Lonely Planet from 1993? Do people really think the world's just that simple, that there's still some undiscovered-yet-completely-tourist-friendly magical city in Europe waiting for America to rescue it from squalor? This isn't rural South America or South East Asia. If you expect your money to go an absurdly long way, you're going to have to travel just as absurdly far to reach it. And every inch of it will be outside of your comfort zone.*

Back to those ever-napping British guys, the Jonas Brothers wannabes in my room, they're wearing those matching fake silver necklace and bracelet links they sold at the mall by the inch in the late '90s, wearing them without any irony. Velcro shoes. Those canvas cinch belts from 7th grade. They stayed out last night to a pretty normal hour, about 130, saying 2 o'clock would be quite generous... and so they slept in today. Until 5pm. Fifteen hours of sleep in a city they've never been to, never seen any more of it that you can't already see on a dorm room couch while playing Gran Turismo or Madden, no more than you could see from an ambiguously-damp sofa in a frat house garage while fighting the stale smell of weeks-old spilled beer. These are your options for smoking buddies in Amsterdam. If I had my own friends along with me, some of you guys reading this, I'm sure I'd feel differently. Not much as you'll see, but a little.

If you're coming here for the liberal stance on drugs, just understand that you're coming for that: the stance, not the substance. Coming from the West Coast you can take it for granted that you live where Oregon, Hawaii, and Humboldt County crop is easy to come by... how much better do you think it honestly gets? I only smoke on rare occasions, but if I'm going to, I expect it to be damn good. The lesson of Amsterdam is that mere legality and prevalence does not ensure quality. No, this isn't the Mecca to travel to for an amazing high. This is the Disneyland of Drugs. Fear and Loathing in Frontierland.

Amsterdam's other trademark. I didn't get a hooker (tell me no one actually expected me to get a hooker...), so I can't supply any first-hand insight, but I can relay a story I heard from a girl in Estonia that instantly became my favorite on the trip. This is how her friend that was backpacking relayed it to her, so I'm paraphrasing mostly, except for the last line, which is indelibly etched in to my memory. "After traveling for a few months, and not having any real luck, I thought I'd treat myself to a hooker in Amsterdam. Most depressing sexual experience in my life. She was barely 16 and so emotionless about it. She just laid there, and the more bored she seemed, the harder I tried, and I got really frustrated and wanted to impress her or make her feel at least something. So I went to switch positions, and she just said in this monotone voice 'That will be 25 more Euro,' ..... so I just lost my erection and left."

This is the Amsterdam of reality. Give me Bruges, give me Manchester, shit, give me Vegas. Or just give me a train ticket to my next city: Munich. Oktoberfest. Now this I can guarantee will be another amateur hour, a shit show waiting to happen. But somehow I feel like the chicken dance will make it all better.


*On a quick tangent, this is where I mention my gratitude to one of my best friends in the world, Kelly, who is traveling that absurdly far distance to see me in Thailand. I'm sure it will be pretty far outside our comfort zones at times (especially when we do the bungee-jumping I inexplicably agreed to). But I don't want it any other way. If you want to travel countless miles to live the exact life you left behind, go to Sandals, go to Disneyland. And I guess, sadly book a flight for Amsterdam.

Rotterdam and Amsterdam:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104587&id=35804394&l=21f1fa4d5f