My Mumbling Thoughts

This past weekend, Zoe and I quickly packed some must needed items (i.e. toothbrush, clean underwear, iPods, etc...) and headed off to Amsterdam for the weekend. It came at just the right time as well, considering I stirred up a brand new pot of Drama literally right before we left.

We had planned it for a while, even though we didn't tell anybody. We saw a couple of weeks ago that our uni was putting the trip together for a decent price and thought, "why the hell not? Let's get the fuck out of here for a while." Both of us could do with the break away from everything, and boy, was it a break that I greatly needed.

It wasn't a long trip; we left on Thursday evening and returned back to the fast paced life of London on Sunday evening. It gave us two full days to roam the streets of Amsterdam and take it all in. It probably wasn't our brightest idea, but we decided to get drunk before we got on the coach and wanted it to be a full on bender weekend of doing nothing but getting wrecked. I suppose we succeeded with that, but we sure paid for it in the end.

Amsterdam is a beautiful place: the water, the buildings, the clean streets, the whole atmosphere was really surprising to me. It seems a lot more chill and laid back than London. Here everybody is constantly on the go, move, move, move, move! Whereas in Amsterdam, it felt as if everyone was just meandering through the streets, chilling and taking their sweet time. Zoe and I found it to be really annoying at first, but after a while we caught on and found ourselves on many occasions just wandering the streets ourselves, with no exact purpose or direction.

The first day we hit some of the tourist spots and got ourselves acquainted with the area. We arrived around eleven o'clock in the morning and was told that our rooms wouldn't be ready for us until 2pm. We certainly weren't going to wait around until it was time for us check in, so we were skanks and brushed our teeth in the downstairs toilets, put more make-up on our already gross make-up, put on some deodorant and were out the doors to go explore.

We tagged along with this guy we know, Joe, and three other girls that we were sharing our room with. One of the girls, Kim, had already been before and knew the general direction we should be headed in. They decided they wanted to get blazed right away and Zoe and I had no objections. We hopped onto the first tram that crossed our path, and into the town center we went.

You hear things about Amsterdam and figure that it's going to be a crazy, party city, but I forgot that people do actually live there, and work there, and do regular day-to-day things there. Not everyone is sitting on a giant mushroom chair, smoking sheesha and listening to Bob Marley. Although, that would be really cool.

We stopped into a "coffee shop" and smoked a couple of spliffs at lunchtime, then had the world's greatest pizza. If you're a food vender and want to make some serious moolah, I suggest you move your business to the center of Amsterdam. Loads of people smoke and get the munchies, and when you're as blazed as we were, everything tastes so good. It's one food orgasm after the other, and sometimes you're afraid you may not be able to stop eating.

Zoe and I decided to split from our new friends after we ate and do a bit of our own exploring. We found the sex museum, which was brilliant and very educational, found ourselves in the red light district (which was certainly an eye-opener), and eventually bought some shrooms for later in the evening. When we got back to our hostel, it was nearly nine o'clock, and we were well behind our schedule.

Even though we were both absolutely exhausted, we got showered and ready for a night on the town. We ate all of our mushrooms (20 grams each of the Thai shrooms), and headed back into the center. I was feeling a wee bit sicky at first, and was scared that maybe I'd yop all over the sidewalk, and then be classed as that girl that can't hold her drugs, but the feeling soon passed, and for the rest of the night, Zoe and I shroomed all over Amsterdam.

It was quite possibly one of the best nights I've had in a long time. I was determined to find the "happy place" which was this store that we had come across earlier in the day; basically you would just take your shrooms in the store, and then chill in this back area where they had it set up especially for when people were on shrooms. There were clouds on the walls, rainbows, butterflies and all of that nice shit. I wanted to sit in there and let the experience take me over. Instead we just wandered down random streets and found everything absolutely hilarious, even though there were some dodgy things that could have been bad.

One guy came up to us and was swearing, and Zoe just kept saying, "no thanks" to him, and I just walked on by with this ridiculously huge smile plastered on my face. There were times when things would be in slow motion and I wouldn't hear anything, and then all of a sudden I'd be back in "real time." You would think it'd be really disorientating, but really it was just fun.

We decided we needed to figure out a way to get back to our hostel. We asked a bus driver if he went anywhere near a place called, "Zeeburg-something." He said that he did, so we hopped on and had the greatest bus ride ever. Zoe and I were still laughing at everything, and I was so sure that everyone on the bus knew we were on something.

After a while, we thought that we had been on the bus for ages, and why were we driving down by water? Our hostel wasn't anywhere near water. Where were we?

The bus driver shouted that this was our stop, so we hopped off the bus and he drove away. When we looked around, there was nothing. No cars, no people, no anything.

"He dropped us off in the middle of fucking nowhere!" I hollared. And even though it was kind of scary, I couldn't stop laughing.

Zoe and I were running back in forth over all of the streets, trying to read street signs, and looked on the map at the bus stop, which was a terrible idea since everything on the map was in Dutch and moving around.

We were scared, shrooming and lost somewhere in Amsterdam. Great. Just great.

I tried phoning some people that were on our "emergency list" of numbers, but that didn't work. Eventually we found a taxi and tried explaining to him where we live.

"The StayOkay hostel. It's in Zeeburg-something. I can't remember the name. Can you take us there please?"

He agreed and quite literally took us down the street and around the corner. We couldn't have even been in the cab but five minutes. When I looked out, it said StudioK bar. He confirmed with a girl outside that this was the right place, but I just thought that we were having language barrier difficulties, and he couldn't understand us.

It turns out we were in the right place, and StudioK was just around the corner from StayOkay. We walked into the hostel lobby and sat downstairs for well over an hour, laughing so hard that tears were clearly running down our faces. It was so funny. We thought we were in the middle of nowhere, scared shitless, when really we could have walked from the bus stop.

We saw people that we recognized, and it turns out that everyone went to the bar, and we were one of the few people who actually ventured out into the center again for the night. Everything was so funny, and we kept on going over the same conversation again and again.

Me: "So let me get this straight. We're in Amsterdam?"
Zoe: laughing "Yeah."
Me: "And we don't speak the language?"
Zoe" laughing harder "Nope."
Me: "What are we doing in Amsterdam!?"

It was a fucking good time. If I were brave enough, I would have tried to bring some back to the UK with me, but I didn't want to risk being thrown in jail. That would have been bad. And slightly embarrassing.

After we got a decent night's rest, we woke up for our final day in the Dam. We had a nice, hench Dutch breakfast and then headed off to the Anne Frank museum. It was really good, even if a bit depressing. To pick ourselves up though, we just went to another coffee shop and smoked a spliff before we headed off back to the hostel for a nap. The plan was to just rest for a few hours and then head back out to the red light district, but we slept through our alarms and just slept for the entire evening. We were flat out tired.

It was a good time. Sunday morning we left and made it back to London an hour before schedule. I had the best shower of my life when I was back at the flat, and quickly posted all of my pictures and videos on facebook. It was so good and such a nice break. I definitely want to go back again, only this time, I think I'll just spend the entire time on shrooms. Spliffs are nice, but shrooms are totally the way to go in my book.