Ah Amsterdam... Part 2

So after having met a porn goddess, an earth dwelling angel and then being punch lined to death by a store-front hooker, I found myself wandering back to the hostel from the train station as all sensible forms of public transportation ceased to operate after 12:30 AM... For a city that has such a good public transport system, I found it odd that it all seemed to shut down, leave a few buses which I had no plans on boarding lest I end up in some remote part of town to be captured and enslaved in an underground clog finishing factory. Lost among all of that excitement, I even forgot to tell you that I had visited a sex museum. Seriously...

Upon my return to the hostel, I ended up meeting a couple of guys who were from the States and had been back packing throughout Eastern Europe before arriving in Amsterdam. They suggested I join them to check out the area around the hostel and partake in some of the allowances afforded by the liberal culture... I figured it would be a good way to meet and get to know some new people so I figured why not. As a testament to the quality of the Canadian product, I would have to say from what I remember from those hazier days that our homegrown is a spot better than the local fare sampled to me on that night. At any rate they were a couple of cool cats and we made plans to hit up a few sites later the next day.

As it turns out I ended up spending the first part of the day exploring the museums on my own as the other two had already seen what I was planning to the day before. Eventually I ended up at the Van Gogh Museum. I had hatched a plan well before hand to see the exhibit in an enhanced sensory mode. I figured when in Rome... So in due time a fungal fantasy became an artistic reality where colours melded and images entranced and almost 4 hours passed by. The Van Gogh collection itself was spell binding, but there was also an additional exhibit by an artist surnamed Maxwell. His style, dark carnivalesque images with dark coloured bases, accented with sharp, bright colours and that only added to the entrancement.

After a nap back at the hostel, my body having seemed to have been returned to me in my sleep, I set about trying to find Pete and Jay. Forward thinking would have seen us exchange room numbers the night before so we could find each other at the agreed upon meeting time. As it was though, that wasn't the case. To make things even better, the hostel had 5 floors with about 5 rooms on each floor. I didn't exactly feel like knocking on each door to find them. I picked the forth floor and ran into a big group of people, who from some of their t-shirts, were from Texas A&M University. We exchanged the typical hostel questions of where we were from and where we had been and how long we were staying. Then I explained that I was looking for 2 other Americans, but had no idea which room they were in.

Normally this would have been rather awkward, but one girl, Megan volunteered herself to find them for me and went about knocking on the door she guessed Pete and Jay were staying behind. As it turns out there were two American guys in that room, but not the two I was looking for. In the end, I gave up looking for them and was quickly adopted as an honourary Texan and pseudo Long Horn for the night. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as this lot was a laugh a second pretty much. We ended up across the road at an Italian restaurant and I don't know how the waiter didn't lose his mind serving us. We were easily the loudest group in the joint and even broke a few decorations during the course of our dining. The destruction wasn't limited to inanimate objects as a couple of the girls actually managed to injure themselves while eating and telling stories. I swear, it was one of those things you just had to be there to witness.

We eventually met up with Pete and Jay and had a few beers in the main square of the bar district. I was shocked to find out though that the bars in Amsterdam all closed up around midnight. I figured that was a touch odd for a city with the reputation it did. It was suggested that most people are so stoned / spent that there really isn't any point for the bars to stay open past midnight. As it turned out, there were clubs still open into the wee hours, but seeing as how none of us were club people, that did us no good. We ended up calling it an early night having consumed a reasonable enough amount of alcohol during the course of dinner and in the square to see us off to dreamland in a happy state.

Ok, this is getting a bit long so I guess there will a part 3 coming up shortly.