i amsterdam

in what turns out to have been a celebration of our relationship, last thursday g and i jumped on the 07:25 train from gare du nord to amsterdam central for a few days of cavorting in the dutch capital.

who thought we could get a really cheap place to stay at the last minute? me. who ended up staying in an overpriced hotel because there was no room anywhere else? we did. we stayed at hotel adolesce just south east of the centre, and once we got over the price factor, it was a damn good place to stay. we felt more at home in our room there than we do in our shitty little apartment in paris that we continue to evolve new and previously unknown levels of hatred for.

anyway, you know those loser tourists who go to amsterdam for the first time and they just want to get stoned and then stumble around the city like fools? that was us. after a bit of research on the net, it seemed that the best joints in town were being sold at a place called het ballonnetje, (roetersstraat 12), so off we went. the dude at the counter pulled out a menu with the different types of joint you could buy on it and asked us which ones we wanted. after about 30 seconds of careful consideration, i realised that i had no fucking idea what any of it meant. g's face betrayed similar confusion, so i swallowed my pride and said 'i'm sorry but we're a bit amateur...what are the differences?' at which point he launched into a small marijuana-afficionado monologue that left us none the wiser, so we just randomly picked two to be done with it. when he pulled out the first baseball bat-sized joint (with its own plastic carry-case would you believe), i thought 'WTF?' and said that one would be more than enough.

after climbing up into a treehouse that we found in a park to smoke our joint, we decided that it all simply wasn't enough. the old adage 'moderation means stopping just before it gets fun' seemed pertinent. so off we went to coffeeshop basjoe (kloveniersburgwal 62) for their highly-reputed slices of cake, which we split in half and gobbled down with some surprisingly delicious iced coffees (these only took ~30 minutes to arrive. i believe the problem was that the waiter couldn't work out which side of the cup to put the coffee in).

the beauty of amsterdam's criss-crossed canals was something quite unexpected for both of us. the city had such a friendly and laid-back feel to it, and the dominance of bikes and pedestrians made it feel like a city built for people (rather than cars), which i love. remembering our canal cruise in copenhagen (which was a bit of a highlight in the otherwise dull (as dogshit) danish capital), we hopped onto a boat near central station and off we went.

i place a very high premium on oral hygiene and can gag at the sight of food stuck between someone's teeth or dirty tongues and the like. and so i realised that the cake was working its magic when i had an incredibly enjoyable conversation with a charming lady on the boat that was so fucked up that she was literally foaming at the mouth, with saliva dripping down her face that she would occasionally suck back up. even now my stomach turns to think of it but at the time i was quite literally captivated.

we spent the rest of the day wandering around looking at the pretty city and devouring dutch specialities: bags of fries drowning in mayonnaise, and raw herring with pickles and onion. yum!

on both evenings that we were there, we headed out to explore the nightlife, but were thwarted in our attempts to have a wild time by the lack of...nightlife. apart from the prostitutes in the windows and the young, straight, drunk and drug-fucked tourists hanging around the centre of town, the many gay clubs and bars we visited were on the boring side of the spectrum. perhaps we've been spoilt by the packed clubs of le marais in paris? or perhaps the netherlands have liberal soft drug laws because there's simply not much else to do...?

now i'm not sure about you, but in my mind denmark and the netherlands are so close geographically that i was expecting the people to look quite similar - and given that the dutch are the 2nd tallest people in europe, i was very much looking forward to some big beautiful boys to stare at. the danish men are so hot there's not even a word in the english language to describe it. you feel like your brain is going to explode just from looking. the dutch, however - and this was the shock - were extremely average, perhaps even slightly deformed. it got the the stage where g and i were convinced that we were on the set of yet another harry potter film (god forbid).

and that's about it. we hired bikes and rode around the streets and parks of the city, we took ferries out to nearby islands, and we checked out a bit of art while we were there. we both fell in love with amsterdam and its positive vibe. at the end of the day, what could be better than being with someone you love in a beautiful city and spending two days just shitting yourself laughing? not much :) peace!

big s in the city of lights

i do not labour under the delusion that only i know the 'true me', and that others can only ever understand a sub-total reality of ondrej that is privy to my own perception. how can 'i' exist anyway, if all of my thoughts are just a temporary chemical flux in a bunch of neurones? and how can the thing that is doing the perceiving also be the thing that is to be perceived, particularly if there's no real reference point? in contrast, if i meet someone at a party and talk to them for 5 minutes, how can they then not know me? who, otherwise, have they been talking to?

i think it is difficult, if not impossible, to perceive yourself in any relevant way, and if you then go and isolate yourself on a different continent, well...then your brain just goes and eats itself and you've got no fucking idea.

and so it was my great pleasure that my favourite sister in the whole world came to visit for a fortnight from japan. if anyone out there has any valid conception of who i am, it's her, and now, one week later, i'm fully reaping the benefit of her visit. i've been de-fragmented, re-booted, cleaned out and recharged, and now i'm grounded, motivated, and skimming ever so gently over the quagmire of european living.

what did we get up to? not much really. we ate macarons, we visited some parks and funky parts of paris, we spoke english, we picnicked, we ate macarons, we played petanque, we field-tripped out to the french countryside, we did the obligatory kiss of oscar wilde's tomb in the pere lachaise cemetery, and we ate macarons. in fact we didn't do much at all, but it was good.

iva's coeliac, and with all of its baguettes and pains de chocolat and what-not, paris is not the most friendly place to go gluten free. neither is it great for vegetarians, and when you combine the two, you either eat in a supermarket or not at all. and so it is time for me to confess that during iva's visit, g and i fell from the green tree of vegetarianism into the blood-red river of animal slaughter below...and it was good. g in particular came back with a vengeance, and seeing him lose himself in a juicy steak, i feared that he might start baying at the moon. maybe it was having two saskas in his face all the time that drove him to the edge.

and that's all there really is to say about that. for those of you out there with siblings, i hope they're as cool as mine. (though in our heart of hearts we all know that they're not, and that's just the way things are.)

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