On my last afternoon in Amsterdam I am sitting not in a cafe or a coffeeshop but in the garden of the house we swapped ours for. It's been raining much of the day, but the sun just came out and voilà it's sunny again. "Dutch weather," I've been told, "If you don't like it, wait a minute...it'll change." I'll probably go out again later, just for one last walk around town, but for now it feels good to just sit in the sun and ponder how cool it's been to live like a Dutch person for three weeks.
It's really been a gas. I've liked it a lot. Walking, cycling, taking the bus or the tram, figuring out the best markets to shop at...it's been an "immersion course" in what it would be like to live in the Netherlands. Life could be worse, lemme tell ya. The Dutch, from my point of view, have a pretty civilized lifestyle. I walk anywhere I want in Amsterdam, at any hour of day or night, and have never once felt my olde martial arts internal beeper go off to warn me I'm entering an unsafe neighborhood. I *love* the whole bike thing, although I'm not yet convinced about biking in the winter. For those curious about the less sattvic aspects of Amsterdam, they're still here. Coffeehouses where one can buy and smoke grass still proliferate, and contrary to rumors I heard before coming here, people still sit there and smoke it. The "It's nothing but atomizers" rumor was a rumor. Interestingly, the coffeeshops seem to be inhabited pretty much only by the young and directionless...the Dutch counterparts of Jay and Silent Bob, except that unlike those two Slacker Emeriti, the Dutch slackers look as if they get laid from time to time. One of these slackers told me the answer to the koan posted by Curtis a while back about the...uh...proper alchemical blend of herbal products sold here. T'would seem that the mellowest, happiest herbal experience one can have comes from a place called Barney's Greenhouse, and is appropriately called "Laughing Buddha." No shit. It won the Cannabis Cup in 2003. 'Nuff said. But on the whole I wasn't drawn to the coffeeshop scene on this visit; I would have to write it off as uninteresting, the same way most Dutch do. And I've been there, done that with most of the museums and tourist attractions here, so mainly I just walked around and sat in cafes, the better to watch people walk by. There are some really interesting people in Amsterdam. And I mean that as a compliment. On my recent visit to Houston, stuck there for a week waiting for a visa, I think I saw a total of six people I considered interesting. Meaning that they had a lively "bounce" to their auras, and looked as if they could hold up their end of a conversation. In Amsterdam I see six interesting people per minute. Or more. Men, women, old, young, doesn't matter. It's like this place just seems to grow (or attract) interesting people. And the women are To Die For. I dare not go into detail here, or Edg will have the villagers after me with torches and pitchforks. So you must trust me on this, and in this one instance, you can. Amsterbabes rock. If I were the drooling lecher I am sometimes portrayed as being here on FFL, my collar would be soaked with drool at all times when I am in this city. Instead I have yogically limited my enthusiasm to just walking around with an enormous grin on my face, as if I had died and mysteriously ended up in the Bardo Of The Bounteous Babes. And yet. Amidst all this local color and local bounty, if I were to look back on the most fun I've had on this particular vacation, it would have to be sitting in front of my computer with my young friend Maya sitting on my lap, watching "Shaun The Sheep" with her. You don't ever really "get" Shaun The Sheep until you've seen him through 18-month-old eyes. I now have. Several times a day, for three weeks. Loved every minute of it.
