EARTH-WORLD BOOKS "Bummeling Eastern Europe"

Amsterdam

As I pass through the wall to the outside world, I find myself standing on a plaza where trams and trolleys, metro subways and busses, all crisscross, intersect, and meet. The city seems small and tranquil in spite of all the activity that is going on.

I feel lost and don't know where to go. I look around, but I can't read the language. I have heard that one can buy hash brownies in the coffee shops, so I decide to find out if this rumor is true. Suddenly I am approached by this hippie lookin' dude passing out little sheets of white paper. The paper has a map on it showing how to get to a youth hostel, a place where one can bunk with as many as 5-10 other people in a room and share wash facilities and kitchens for about 25 Guilders ($10-15) per night.

I accept the paper and ask him, "Hey, I hear you can buy hash brownies anywhere in Amsterdam?"

It felt really strange asking him this question, especially since the illegality of smoking in the States always has one looking over their shoulder for ' The Man'.

"You can find them in hundreds of places in town," he said, "Just look for any coffee shop. You can get anything you want."

"Can you recommend one for me?"

He recommended one right around the corner called "Coffee Central" and I headed in that direction. As I entered the coffee shop, I noticed two tables to the left and two tables to the right. Across the back was a bar with four stools and two young people were sitting there rolling European joints. A European joint is where one takes some pot or crumbles hashish and then mixes them with tobacco. They mix it with tobacco because Dutch pot is too moist to roll a joint with alone, it wont burn by itself, but also since smoking is such a social thing, one loses less drug when sitting around and babbling.

I head for the back and ask the guy behind the counter (as I casually look over my shoulder), "Do you have any good stuff to sale?"

"What kind of stuff you talking about?"

"You know! Something to smoke," I answer as I shrug my shoulders with nervous apprehension.

"What you want? A thousand? Two thousand Guilders?" he replies.

I nod and shrug again as I sit down at the table. I watch the two people next to me, a guy and a girl, rolling their joints and I think about drinking a cup of coffee. As I sit there the proprietor drops a binder on the counter in front of me.

"What's this? A menu?"

I open the binder and am shocked to see what is in front of me. Everything they say about Amsterdam appears to be true. On each page of the binder are taped between 5 and 10 plastic bags with different sizes, shapes, and colors of hash. Some are the size of a postage stamp, a stick of gum, a credit card, or even a diskette. They are all labeled and priced, and they carry exotic names like, Afghanistan,

Moroccan, Northern Lights, and Mind Bender. I was able to turn the pages 10 times with the same result except that the last two pages carried only marijuana; Columbian Gold, Mexican, Jamaican, and Skunk.

Looking out the window to the side, I watch an elderly couple of about 60 leave the train station and head for the coffee shop. They obviously saw the coffee shop window and are coming over for cake and coffee. This ought to be fun to watch, I think, as they enter and sit down at one of the tables by the front window. They sit there for a minute looking suspiciously around, when the man finally gets up and comes to the back counter.

"Do you have any smoking papers?" he asks, and I practically fall off my stool.

The proprietor hands him some papers and he goes back to his table, pulls out his own stash, and starts rolling a joint. Before long, he and the ole gal are sitting there smoking.

While looking through the book I start talking to the girl sitting next to me and she tells me she represents a youth hostel in another part of town, the "International Youth Hostel". She looks and is a lot cleaner than the dude I had taken the paper from on the street.

"That place on your leaflet is a filthy dive!" she tells me, "Our hostel is cleaner and much nicer. You will like it better there."

Since her hostel is farther from the train station I assume it must be nicer, so I drink a coffee, pay my bill and jump on a tram to Leidseplein.

The central train station 'Amsterdam CS' is at the hub of a half 'wagon wheel' made from concentric circles of canals and streets emanating from its center, and with streets as spokes branching out from the plaza in front of the station. The streets are all lined with many bustling small shops of independent businesses. It seems everyone has their own little store, sort of the way things ought to be, and it appears the society promotes that concept.