Amsterdam Impressions

This is what I wrote within hours of my extraction from Amsterdam:

After approximately 42 hours stuck on a crowded bus driving across Europe with a bunch of Serbs, I finally arrived into Amsterdam with the crowd and we checked into the hostel.

Eight days later now I have finally managed to crawl out of the cesspit of Amsterdam, in a style completely appropriate for that length of stay in that city. I’m sitting hungover, sleepless, broke, unshowered and wearing the same clothes for the third day in a row, unshaved, and sick as a dog in the airport in Milan slowly getting re-acquainted with my sanity.

Amsterdam was overwhelming, incredible, utterly bizarre, decadent and depraved, stylish, neat, rich, endlessly fascinating in some ways and utterly dull in others, rational and yet illogical at the same time. I guess the simplest way to describe is as the sum of its parts. To me, it seemed like an extremely nice, lovely and old European city that was rented out for a huge sleazy frat party, 27/7, 365. That was basically it. It was all quite confusing, really; I’ve never seen so many different people from literally around the world in one place, and with everyone getting along so harmoniously and in such an environment. Yet everything in Amsterdam is so seemingly problem free, and the international-ism and tolerance stuff taken so far and so seriously, that in the end it all feels only skin deep and rather shallow. Basically Amsterdam is nothing more than a neat old European city with great architecture where people from around the world go to get completely, utterly and totally fucked up. It’s Disneyworld for adults, or perhaps the international version of Las Vegas. Amazing and yet also quite overrated at the same contradictory time.

Now I’m on my way to Prague, finally, and fittingly leaving Amsterdam like a cat who spent a few too many rough nights in the gutter.