BUT.
The weed is soooooo fucking good. And the hash. This past weekend I discovered this fact in person, when I took the train with 6 other kids from school. The train ride was good, except for having to wait fucking an hour and a half in this town called Hengelo because something was wrong with the train or something, meaning we got in at 9.30 instead of at 7.00. But oh well. It was well worth it. After meeting up with some peoples studying there, we hit the streets, and then the joints, and didn't stop till we finished the last brownie crumbs Sunday evening on the ride back.
Amsterdam seriously looks like it was built by something Tolkien created. I was discussing this in a coffee shop with one of my friends there, and he suggested it was built by Keebler Elves. I offered my opinion that, at the start of the day, you could probably see these friendly Dutch elves performing their chores and singing a happy jingle in clogs. That's not to degrade the city or its aesthetics - it's fucking gorgeous; pretty much the antithesis of the stark Berlin greys and browns covered in graffiti. But it's so tiny! One alley we walked through was literally like a person and a half wide, and not your fatass American person either. In addition to being tiny though, there's so much character. I'm sure those of you who've been there already know all about this, but the houses lean all crazily because of settling foundations in the swampy soil, and also, there are cranes on every single gable for the purpose of hoisting heavy furniture into the upper floors from the street. Pretty ingenious/elfy.
So pretty much the rest of the weekend we rode bikes all over the place and got high. I bough a gram and a half of hash and like four of weed, all of which we rolled up and smoked, and I was far from alone in purchasing. The bikes were dirt cheap; they cost 20€. And Amsterdam is built for bikes the way L.A. was built for cars, so aside from getting yelled at in Dutch by the po-po for riding in a pedestrian only zone, it was incredibly easy to get around. Centrum is the heart of the city (and as far as I can tell, far and away the place worth spending time besides the museum area), and we pretty much covered the whole thing, plus a good deal of the other parts riding to the Museumplein to see the Van Gogh Museum and ride through the Vondelpark. Though I slept like a combined ten hours under my jacket on a concrete floor in the dorms we stayed in, it was worth it.
Edit: Dutch sounds like German and English spoken together while working up a big loogie. It's very bizarre. "G" in Dutch is always pronounced like a hard "ch," and there are double vowels everywhere. Ouijdenberger grachtenflakken.
And now I'm back here, and have a fucking cold again. It is impossible to be healthy in Berlin this winter, what with everyone in my class being sick off and on, breathing in filthy U-Bahn air like an hour out of every day, and the shitty, depressing weather. Oh, and smoking and drinking. But that's not important. On a good note, the Berlinale is going on - it's a massive international film festival spread across the city, and it's surprisingly easy to get tickets. Oftentimes the filmmakers/actors give talks afterward and take questions from the audience. Last night after a beer we saw this documentary/interview film about this French guy, Michel Vaujour, who broke out of prison like 5 or 6 times, no joke. Really cool. I may be going tomorrow or Friday to see a series of short films. Unfortunately, all of the huge red-carpet premiers are booked solid, but I guess you can still wander down to Potsdamer Platz if you want to see Kate Winslet and people like that.
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