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June 24, 2005
Amsterdam: Day One
This has taken me forever to put up. There was so much to tell, I had to leave it for nearly week just to forget enough stuff to make writing the rest down seem doable.
Six of us attended the stag weekend. Code-named for handy reference, they are: the Admiral (whom we’ve discussed before), and (named for passing physical similarities to RTE ‘personalities’): Joe Duffy (the stag), Charlie Bird, Derek Mooney and Marian Finucane1 (this should be fun).
We arranged to meet in Dublin airport almost three hours before the flight, in the hope of getting a drink in; whatever else we’ve heard about Amsterdam, getting good Guinness doesn’t seem to feature. But it doesn’t work out and I find myself stuck in traffic in Donaghmede, already a half hour late, with Marian Finucane’s ticket in my pocket. I can picture her quietly fretting despite Derek Mooney’s reassurings. Sorry Marian! But I arrive and we check in fantastically quickly using the shiny automatic check-in machines. Best invention ever.
I’m not the last to arrive either: the Admiral gets there twenty minutes later. Perched on his back is what appears to be a giant red rucksack, stuffed to the gills with God knows what. He’s also brought along a quite impressive digital camera and I realise that I may have taken the stag part of stag weekend slightly more seriously than everyone else. All I’ve got with me is a shoulder bag, some spare t-shirts and some sunblock. I even refused to bring my mobile phone, explaining to my bemused sweetheart that it wouldn’t survive a fall into the canal. She agreed with this analysis but wondered aloud if maybe I was taking this ‘cutting the cord’ idea a bit too far. Not being able to text her, she explained to me, was not a licence to sleep with hookers. Damn!
Everybody else had their mobiles with them, so clearly my images of pushing each other into canals were from my school trips, and not what a bunch of almost-thirty-year-olds do to each other, no matter how much they’ve had to drink. Ah well.
We get on the plane after hurriedly gulping down a pint in the airport bar. Joe Duffy decides to continue his campaign against sobriety by buying us all cans of Grolsch on the flight. This is the first drink I have ever had on an airplane, reader, and I am twenty-nine tomorrow. I have been doing something wrong.
Bonerjam
When we arrive I am slightly confused. When I left Dublin I had been too warm in just a tshirt. Surely Amsterdam should be baking? Instead, Amsterdam and Dublin appear to have exchanged weather conditions for the weekend, and it is overcast, cold and occasionally drizzly. I make it all the way from Schipol Airport without complaint but when we finally reach the streets of Amsterdam I plead with Marian to lend me her spare jumper. This causes some difficulty. Marian’s spare jumper is emblazoned with the Bohemians FC logo. I’d made the mistake (at Marian’s birthday, in fact) of pointing out how on the Bohemians official scarf, the lettering could be read as ‘Bonerjam’. If, y’know, you squinted and tilted your head slightly. I thought I was so clever with this observation that I’d happily repeated it to Marian several times since, she being a devout Bohemians follower and owner of the scarf. And now here I was, shivering, pleading for the Bohemians jumper to cover my goose-pimples.
I’d just like to make it a matter of record that Marian Finucane is the kindest, most generous, most forgiving person in the world ever, and that I managed to not say Bonerjam more than two or three times while wearing the jumper.
We arrive at our hostel. Our hostel turns out to be an Irish pub, Nelly’s Inn. It possesses the most fearsome staircase I’ve ever seen. It looks almost designed to make drunk people fall over. But Nelly’s is also one of the latest-opening pubs in Amsterdam, so we are very happy. We dump our bags and go exploring.
Pop-up advertising
You know when you’re in work, and you’ve tons to do, but all you’re actually doing is messing about on the internet? And how sometimes the internet betrays you by popping up windows advertising crap you don’t want, usually when your boss is passing by as you hastily minimise the browser window? And how the worst pop-up windows, which only ever appear when your boss is actually standing at your desk, are the unpleasant ones with unlikely sex scenes on them? Amsterdam’s like that. You’re pointing out some interesting wildlife to Derek Mooney, he starts laughing, and you turn back to see you’re pointing at a shop selling sex toys. Or a gay porn cinema. Or a club featuring live sex shows, or a shop specialising in love dolls, or, well, I think I’ve given Google (NSFW, I’m guessing) enough to go on for now. You get the idea.
After getting used to that we discover we’re in something of a Chinese quarter. We find a Dim Sung restaurant warning that we will eat as much as we like in an hour, for a mere six euro fifty. On Charlie Bird’s initiative, we accept the challenge.
We pay the restaurant owner, who uses her wallet as the cash register. We completely fail to follow the advice pasted up on the board about having dumplings as a starter, then rice and meat as the main course, but no-one seems to mind. The food is excellent. While we eat a cat wanders in and out, receiving pettings from the patrons.
After eating we cross the road to enter our first pub of the evening. The beer arrives in half-glasses (not pint glasses) and is much nicer than we’re used to. We’ve deliberately sought out a pub full of Dutch people, to satisfy ourselves that we’re getting the ‘authentic’ Amsterdam experience, which is a priority for the Admiral and Joe Duffy. As it’s their first time here I’m not sure how they can tell what’s authentic and what’s not, but I’m easily led.
I dare you
Then the Admiral plays his trump card. On the flight he’s been very busy: while the rest of us were having our beers, he’s been sketching out dares for us all to perform, one per round. We are getting merry enough to be okay with this idea, and we all submit one dare of our own as per his directions. I try to be kind with mine (“Start a rebel singsong in Irish, or, if you don’t know the words of any rebel songs in Irish, perform the complete ‘Tie my Kangaroo Down, Mate’ in the style of Rolf Harris”) but, as it turns out, not everyone is quite as inoffensive.
Joe Duffy, Stag, has to go first. His dare asks that he ask a Dutch person to translate the numbers 1 to 10 into Dutch, and that he then returns to our table and recites them as if it were a real live NASA countdown. This is quite handily accomplished by virtue of buying three very friendly Dutch lads some beer. One comes over and recites the countdown with him, for moral support, and we wonder if perhaps this perfect stranger is a better friend to our stag than we are.
Next is Derek Mooney, who has to stand outside the pub and invite Dutch nationals in to see the live sex show. He thinks about this and uses his single refusal, which he is entitled to do, but that obliges him to do the next dare, which is to… order a round wearing no socks or shoes. Well played, Derek! We go to our next pub and he dutifully buys beer barefoot. He then starts enjoying himself and forgets to put his footwear on until we leave, and we kick ourselves for not doing cruel things to his un-guarded socks and shoes.
My dare comes up. I have to haul my top over the my head and recite some Beavis and Butthead line about cornholes. It is very easy and I thank Marian Finucane profusely for it. But then the Admiral captures it on film for all eternity and I realise I will never enter politics.
Then Marian gets my dare, which he finds nicely easy, and we all sing along. Charlie Bird goes to the funny tobacco bar to buy some funny tobacco which I try but don’t get very far with, except for a coughing fit or two. According to the cognoscenti it’s quite poor in any regard. I am having none of this and buy some substantially more expensive funny tobacco and they all approve, saying it’s much better. The coughing is not noticeably different on my part.
It’s Charlie Bird’s turn on the dare front. His dare is… weird. It seems to involve going to the bathroom then returning, wearing your underpants on your head. Instead, he buys a round and we get sufficiently drunk to forget the whole thing.
After that, things get very interesting for drunken people (i.e. very dull for sober people). We traipse around, going into more pubs for occasional drinks, buying waffles from streetside vendors to munch on (why aren’t these delicacies available so readily in Dublin on a Friday evening?) being startled by yet more sex shops, and, annoyingly, being constantly offered cocaine. I appreciate that, as a group of young drunken tourists, dealers must think we’re a ready market for cocaine. But at one stage we are offered cocaine five times in ten minutes. Fortunately refusals or outright ignorings don’t seem to offend.
Your insistence on dancing on the bar is restricting our beer intake
It gets very late and we wind up in a hideous bar called Teasers, with the slogan ‘Beers and Babes’. They have no beer beyond Heineken, which we’ve had previously in other pubs. But even in our drunken state we don’t appreciate the strange chemical aftertaste of this particular Heineken; that and the fact that there are no other women in the bar (other than the waitresses, whom we wish would dance on the bar less and serve beer more) leaves us cold. The only bar we didn’t like during the whole weekend, of what must have been about twenty.
Then it’s back to Nelly’s for a final drink. At this stage we’re comatose, basically, but we only stumble up the intimidating staircase at 4 am when they close the bar, delighted with ourselves.
Footnote
1: I’m trying to be funny here; we were all male.
Posted by Oliver at June 24, 2005 02:13 PM
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