A short anecdote for you all from my recent weekender to Amsterdam.

After a wonderfully vague weekend of brain cell culling spent in various coffee shops, I find myself sitting on a bench in the Amsterdam international airport waiting to head back to London.

I’m not sure if you all remember/received my email about the last time I visited Amsterdam, but basically end up so stoned before I left that I literally had to be escorted to the airport because I couldn’t have found my way there by myself. This time I did slightly better. After one last visit to a coffee shop (once again) I made my way I out there (with a constant feeling of déjà vu) without to much trouble.

One thing I did remember learning from my last trip was that regardless of how stoned I was upon leaving the coffee shop, by the time I was on the plane taking off, I was starting to come back to reality and could only think of how good it would’ve been to have picked up a bit of hash cake to munch on for the flight.

This time I did it properly. Not only did I pick up a bit of hash cake, I also brought a joint to be smoked out front of the airport.

Its a strange feeling smoking a joint at an international airport. Being in Amsterdam you know you can do it without fear, but the nature of the beast is that regardless of how much you keep telling yourself its alright, the paranoia of being stoned just keeps kicking in. After years of smoking joints on the sly, there is always that niggling doubt in the back of your mind saying that this just can’t be right. When you combine all this with the usual paranoia associated with travelling through customs at airports, you can’t help but feel that surely it’s only a matter of time before you feel that tap on your shoulder and hears the words “What are you smoking there, son?”.

Joint smoked without incident, me and friend, proceeded to step 2: go in to the airport and, just before going through security, chow down on the hash cake. According to my well thought out stoner calculations, this should keep us going until we landed in London and would be able to spark up the next joint.

So here I am, red slits for eyes, sitting on this bench in an international airport, with a piece of hash cake in my my hand, feeling somewhat paranoid, but still managing to giggle like a school girl over the whole affair. I look up and see the following site, a site that in my stoned state came to me just like Moses coming down the mountain with the 10 commandments held aloft in his outstretched hands….

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bc_melbourne/1068310398/