Oktoberfest

Finally, I get to see what the big stank is about. I am leaving tonight for what I'm pretty sure will prove to be a fruitful weekend of beer drinking and intelligent decisions. I just found a hotel yesterday which is pretty awesome (I'm guessing they don't call it Hotel Nymphenburg for nothing...or maybe they do because they are German and that could be a very common name there having nothing to do with fornicating). Anway, I don't have to sleep in a compact Euro car like I thought I would. It should be good times.

Reflections on Amsterdam

1) If you crossed a snooty British person with an angry Ayatollah and put said person into a service situation, you would get better service from this fictional human than 99% of Dutch customer service reps I have come across...the exceptions are a gay Dutch bartender and a Chilean waitress...so I guess she isn't an exception.

Dutch customer service blizows. When you are not being ignored you are being yelled at.

I have never gone somewhere before and offered to put money in someone's pocket in exchange for them retrieving something for me and had them get angry with me. Until I went to the corner restaurant and tried to order some soup. Or went to the coffee shop and asked for a menu...or waited in line for 20 minutes for my bike to be fixed only to get to the front and have the guy say it is 4:30 and he is closed for the day and I must be crazy for offering to give him money at this time of night.

2) Amsterdam is a pretty town, best seen by boat...preferably by dinghy and using a tourist map to get around the system of canals.
3) Dutch girls...or should I say Amsterdam girls put the "c(o)unt" in country. They are frigid ice queens.

4) Biking is sweet. biking blackout drunk at 3am with a thing of takeout noodles in one hand is not intelligent. No one wears helmets here on their bikes which is cool with me...however, I have seen some ridiculously stupid shit when it comes to people carrying babies around on their bikes. The most recent one being a guy riding his bike and simultaneously carring his baby zipped up in his hoodie. The odds on that baby making it to 3 years old are really stacked against him.

5) It is really fucking expensive...especially when you are paid in weak ass dollars. I was wondering why I spent so much money in one weekend so I refrained from blacking out one night the next weekend. I learned that I had been spending 8 euros per beer. That's the opposite of cool.

6) Amsterdamers (Amsterdamites?) and Dutch people in general speak English at my proficiency level. Possibly better. Dutch is basically like their own secret language they made up just to piss me off. Every other sentence I swear I know what they are saying and then they throw in some word with ten too many vowels and a pirate sounding "aarrrrr" and I am thrown for a loop once again.

7) It is the least private city ever. You can walk around and peer into people's living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms at all hours, day and night. I can look out my front window and see directly into another apartment which never bothers to close its drapes. Too bad it's the home of some old couple.

What I Have Been Up To While Not Posting II

- drinking
- smokin (snortin, shootin - not really these two but I like that part of black sheep)
- buying a boat
- not smoking cigarettes
- spending euros, that's right, plural
- living in the former attic of an apartment building
- trying to get rid of the massive amount of change in my pockets at all times
- buying a bike
- walking up three flights of death stairs followed by one flight of ladder stairs four times a day
- trying to shop for food for myself again
- contemplating buying a european carryall (man purse) for all my change
- buying a "tobacco" smoking device
- being cold in august - dutch weather sucks
- staring at my computer too much
- planning a trip to poland
- cruising the canals in aforementioned boat
- getting the shittiest customer service of my life
- constantly being amazed at how dutch people speak better english than 90% of americans (possibly including myself)
- watching american football (we bought the extra sports package with nasn)
- getting scoffed at by ice queen dutch girls
- trying to hate this song. I haven't succeeded yet
- not doing laundry for 4 weeks
- planning where I will sleep at oktoberfest (probably in a rental car shared with three other people)
- deliberately buying the gayest sounding item on the menu at the coffee shop
- trying to stop listening to this song. probably played out in the states by now.
- riding my bike in the shitty dutch weather
- meeting with cartoon-like japanese executives
- planning a trip to stockholm
- getting stoned (not in the middle ages sense)
- binge drinking in moderation (only on the weekends)