Dam Square Please

I just returned to the UK after four thrilling days in the Amsterdam, also known as Disney Land for American college students.  The whole place seems surreal, with red lights marking the streets where one can be enticed by bored-looking women of the night in every window, a smell that's a mix of marijuana and vomit (heavy on the vomit), and the feeling that no matter what you do, there's no need to be embarrassed, for the person right next to you is usually doing something more incriminating.

Waiting patiently in line to buy a drug that's illegal in most of the Western world from a slow moving middle eastern guy wearing a christmas hat and sunglasses at eleven p.m. on December 30th, while he scarfs down pizza without a napkin is an odd feeling.  The coffeeshops lack the warmness of the neighborhood drug dealer, these men are straight business, and they treat you as a customer and nothing more, no offers to watch Dazed and Confused on a smelly couch, no trading, no strange longing for companionship from deviant loners.

Although like the small town American dealer, the coffeeshop proprietors do indulge in the same ridiculous names for what all probably comes from the exact same place.  In fact, to me, though I'm no connoisseur, Purple Skunk, Hawaiian Kush, Jamaican Zebra, White Widow/Jamaican Zebra Kush Cross, Orange Crush, Juicy Fruit, Blueberry Yum Yum, and Tropic Thunder all smell eerily similar...again, it's a business.

Seeing the fuzzy green stuff in a more or less legal environment has made me understand why Amsterdam is trying to gradually move away from it's anything goes image. With the recent outlawing of magic mushrooms and the soon to be true phasing out of coffeeshop toleration, simply put...they're tired of being infested with shady people, and to be honest, I get it.

Everyone seemed seedy, sketchy, or otherwise guilty of something, and it made me feel dirty inside, as if I would never be able to talk to a child again.  The entire week I just wanted to take shower after shower, although don't get me wrong, I had a fantastic time, including the New Year's festivities in Dam Square, which involved a lot of shouting in Netherlands gibberish, giant multicolored glow sticks, groups of middle-aged Dutch women playing Motown songs on saxophones, and the largest display of unsupervised fireworks I have ever seen, (One such cracker ended up finding it's way to a rolling stop underneath one of my friend's who was having too much Dam fun to notice, luckilly it was a dud).  I highly recommend Dam Square to anyone who has had enough of Dick Clark and the same old New Year's Rockin' Eve.  

My New Years resolution?  Demand that if anyone wants to use the words "Legalize" and "It" in the same sentence, white dude dreadlocks, hunger strike, drum circle or not, that they be forced to spend a week in Amsterdam and see if they don't beg to be rescued before it's over.