Accidental Tourist

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/

I completed another pilgrimage over the weekend, that of the trip Amsterdam. Going to a Coffee Shop in Amsterdam and smoking a big reefer has been something very high up on list to do ever since I was a young stoner back in Wodonga.

I did have all these wonderful plans to be a perfect tourist while I was there. To do things like take lots of photos of me smoking big-arse joints and send this email from an Internet Cafe while actually smoking a joint. In the end however, I just did as I always intended to do - got too stoned to be able to actually be able to make them happen. Instead I write to you now from London, with just a whole lotta vagueish memories of my weekend in Amsterdam.

It definitely proved to be everything I had ever built it up to be, plus more. My main goal was always just to go there and smoke pot legally but I also managed to find a city that was genuinely worth spending some time in.

The thing I managed to keep harping on about the most while I was there was the whole bike concept that the Dutch have got going there. I’ve never seen so many bikes in my life. The city centre was such a better place to be there any other city I’ve seen just because there was no constant cacophony of traffic, car horns and screeching tires. I was the way a city should be. I’ve always been a big bike fan and I’ve finally found somewhere that shows the benefits of everybody just cruising around on a treadly rather then trying to cram thousands of cars into a small place.

I could go on about the usual tourist things I did, like coffee shops, museums, red light districts and sex shows, but I won’t bother. Go there and see it for yourself, its worth the trip.

The only thing I’ll mention was my last hour in town. I had to leave two friends at a restaurant to say goodbye in private, so I thought that a trip to a Coffee Shop to smoke one last joint was the best way to kill some time.

One tourist shot I did get was of the place I happened to be right next door to, called ‘Coffee Shop Ben’. Strangely enough I just had to do the honors in there : )

Given that I was about to leave the country I decided to roll all of what pot I had left into one last joint, which proved to be one of the largest I’ve ever rolled, without any exaggeration required. I love to tell you that I smoked every last toke of it, but I can only say I had a fair crack at it instead. Still, by the time my friends came to get me they found a gibbering mess that could hardly spit out the words “I’m as stoned as a motherfucker. Please, I need your help to get me out of this country ‘cos I’m too stoned to even remember which country I call home right now”.

Thankfully, I had the odd favour or two in hand, so two hours later and a somewhat spaced out and paranoid journey through Amsterdam and International Customs later, I found myself escorted to a seat on a UK bound plane, wishing that I had been straight enough to think about buying some hash cake from the Coffee Shop to consume just before we got on the plane to make the trip home somewhat more entertaining : )

I’ll just have to remebemer it for next time.