From Africa To Russia

I get up late, there is somehow a new cast of characters in the room now, including a guy from Kentucky who has been living most recently in Austria. We talk for a while, then I go take a shower. The shower is fairly horrendous, dirty, no ventilation, with standing water on the floor with no place to drain. As is fairly typical with hostels, it is a push-button shower, meaning that every fifteen seconds or so you have to push the freaking button for more water. Afterwards, I go out on a walking tour of the city. There are lots of canals, and the general vibe is laid back, laissez-faire. It is still grey and overcast, and a bit cold. I stop at a good-looking little hole-in-the-wall pub and have a beer. A Danish fellow stops in with his woman. He has a buzz cut and facial protrusions (various clips, pegs, metal things). He is a musician and is playing somewhere in Amsterdam on Thursday. We have similar outlooks on music, I find. Death to Corporate Rock. The bartender is a character, looks a bit drunk or addled in some way, he tells me about a pool hall around the corner which I go and check out. Ten euros per hour, and I play like absolute shit. After that I buy a tall Heineken in a supermarket, take it out on the street, sipping as I go (I had thought this was legal here, although I find out later that this is not the case and you can get fined for it). I stumble upon a park, and sit down in the grass to watch the ducks, feeling generally lost and alone. The ducks play with each other, stop and start, dive underwater, cavorting. Then off to a bar around the corner, fairly dark with a nice long wooden bar top but the drinks are back up to almost five euros a beer. The waitress is cute and she has nothing else to do so she talks to me for a while. Then her shift is over and she is replaced by an even cuter girl named Saskia. The crowd begins to grow, as World Cup is on. I am drinking beers at a rapid pace. A guy from Detroit name Tony walks in, sits next to me, starts making a lot of noise. He has a thing for the bartender, keeps saying her name over and over, “Saskia, Saskia…” He confides in me that he wants to get a whore tonight and get a blowjob. He talks me into going out to a coffee shop to get a joint. I wasn’t going to smoke that night, wot with the recovering pneumonia and all, but what the hell, it’s Amsterdam. Then after the smoke, Tony and I go back to the bar. He gets wrapped up in an animated conversation with some other Americans, and as I am pretty drunk I duck out, intending to head back to the hostel. But I find myself walking past the red-lit windows and I know what’s going to happen. I walk past one particularly alluring blonde and like a magnet I am drawn in. She leads me into the room and shuts the door. “Listen, I don’t really want sex, I just want to lick your feet.” She smiles, is fine with it. An easy trick, yeah. So she lays down and I lay down and do my thing, she seems to enjoy it but you never can tell really. Her feet are as smooth as silk, and I never want to leave. I ask her for more time, pull out a wad of cash and give it to her. I am high on her and the pot and all the beer, I lay wallowing in my ecstasy. After a while she gets a call on her cell phone, “You have three more minutes…” she tells me. I finish up, get up and leave, and discover that I am really drunk, wobbly and light-headed. I head off in what I hope is the right direction, which of course turns out to be the exact opposite direction of what I wanted. After a long wander I eventually find the hostel again, go upstairs and collapse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.