Once actually inside I managed to take in my surroundings while a girl on reception made me a booking for two nights. Unfortunately I was only able to stay until Friday morning, as after that the place was fully booked until the following Monday. This is how it is in Amsterdam, the population of the city nearly doubles on fridays with English tourists coming over for blowout weekends. I said that was okay, and made a mental note to find someplace the next day rather than go siteseeing. My room was a comfortable 4 person deal with bunk beds. I was the only one in the room at the time I checked in, so remembering all the schoolboy advice I used to get about taking the top bunk so you wouldn’t get pissed on, I made sure to take a top bunk. I took and shower, changed my clothes and headed downstairs.
The Flying Pig communal guest area was a reasonably big space with a bar and pool table and mounted television in one corner. There was music being played from a stereo system behind the bar at a level low enough that you didn’t have to shout to be heard, and the place positively reeked of beer and weed. So far Amsterdam was living up to my lofty expectations. It was around 7.30pm by this stage and the place would have been about half full with people. I took a stool over by the pool table and was asked if I wanted to join in for a game with another Aussie guy, a Canadian, and some bloke who I thought was French, but I couldn’t tell for sure. Over the course of the next 2 hours I just kept to beers, deciding better against smoking anything while I was drinking. I’d had enough nights back home where after a big drinking session I’d hooked into some bongs with the boys and ended up puking my guts up for the next several hours. There was even a rhyme about it, but I sure couldn’t remember how it went, just that the end part was about lots and lots of puking. The worst incident I had I still remembered when years ago I’d pulled a mates girlfriends friend, and narrowly avoided drenching her in semi digested beer foam, which was me hooking into weed after a night out at the pub. Needless to say, after this near accident, she wasn’t all that keen to get together with me anymore. So I’d learned from that, and made sure to not mix the two in large quanitities; smoke heavy, or drink heavy, but not at the same time.
Yes well, somehow I got all caught up in the excitement of being in a new place with a new future in front of me, and decided to let my hair down. When the Aussie guy passed a scoob my way, I gave him a smile and said, “Yeah thanks, don’t mind if I do. What is this stuff anyway”? I asked him out of professional curiousity. I wasn’t any stranger to smoke, but back in Bris-vegas where I lived, the quality would vary quite a bit depending on where it came from and the season.
The Welcome to Amsterdam. Do smoke too much! The story of my first day and night! by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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