We would leave in the beginning of July and return home in mid August. 6 weeks in total. We had all our gear, all our courage, we graduated and got ready to leave. We each figured we could do this on a $50 a day budget. So we each brought about $2,500 in cashiers checks with us. Before we left, I was pressuring Ryan to break up with Michelle for our trip. She was a tall blonde in her late teens or early 20's. He didn't want to, so it was up to me and me alone to hit on girls.
We landed in Heathrow, and the weather was overcast, typical for London. We would be staying in London for 3 nights and we had a hostel already reserved. It was expensive, something like $30 a night for this hostel and it was sort of close to the center of town. We needed something set up for us when we arrived, because we were traveling without any prior knowledge of how to set up accommodations, etcetera. We had our travel guide's and we had maps of the city. We got on a bus and traveled to our destination. From there we walked probably a mile or two with our gear to the hostel where we checked in.
We stowed our gear and went to a couple bars to get drinks. We first stopped by Harvey Floorbangers and then we went to another random bar. I think that is how England talks shit about promiscuous women. I wasn't sure yet, I was still learning about European cultures. We learned the drinking age was actually 18, but nobody carded us anyway. We also learned that Budweiser is an imported beer overseas and very expensive, while beers like Newcastle and Guinness are considered domestic and are very cheap. Our trip had begun!
We went back to the hostel to sleep and get some free food. It was several dorms, with about 20 people in each. I saw a few attractive girls, and was curious to meet some, to see if they were any different from the girls in America.
The next day we went walking around the city and through a few parks, ending up at one of Freddie Mercury's old apartments. There was graffiti all over the walls saying things like "we love you Freddie." During the course of our day, we met a couple people our age who told us about and where to find a club called, "It's a Scream." We walked there from our hostel that night and had a great time. I was introduced to Red Bull and Vodkas, which we drank all night. Ryan was on the dance floor trying to grope women which I found gross. I danced and met people all night. We had so much fun we went back the next night too.
Our time in London was up, and we had our channel tunnel train tickets reserved from before we left. So we took the train under the channel, through pastures of France to Brussels. There they stamped our passports for entering the European mainland and we got on another train to Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, we left the train station and needed to find a coffee shop. We hadn't smoked in about 5 days. We found a cool spot and we got some pot called "Cytral." Over the course of our 10 days in Amsterdam, we would create a numbering system of 1 to 5, for the quality of the weed and hash we tried. We would end up trying over 20 different kinds and buying over an ounce during our stay.
We got some food, which consisted of french fries with mayonnaise, and then we found a random hostel. We were at that hostel for a night and we heard about the best hostel that people had ever been to called the "Flying Pig." Ryan and I left early and managed to get accommodations for 1 night. They were still checking people out so we left and walked around the city. We stumbled upon these stores called Smart Shops. If coffee shops sold weed, Smart Shops sold ecstasy, mushrooms and other experimental drugs. Cocaine and meth and heroin you still needed to find a dealer on the street for. We bought 10 grams of these long stringy black mushrooms for something like f50 guilders, which was equivalent to $25 American dollars. We stopped by a few bars to get a bite to eat, at least one coffee shop and went back to the hostel after noon. We were staying in a four person room with two other girls, who were cute.
The girls and us were at the bar. They told us about a Tribe Called Quest concert that was happening that night. The four of us took the mushrooms and a few other people came along. We never did find the concert, but we walked all over the city tripping on mushrooms. We gave up after midnight and went back to the pig. The four of us were in our room smoking bowl after bowl, imagining we were on the French Riviera. We all got tired and I crashed out in my bed with one of the girls.
