There is a sense of excitement in the air; I am sitting in a café flaring with colour from the thick layers of tags and graffiti protruding from every crack and crevasse. I am accompanied by two close friends; each of us occupies a worn and beaten armchair. We were all contemplating the adventure that potentially lay ahead. If I’m honest, at the time, we had no idea what we were searching for on this journey, all we knew was that it needed to happen.
Leon, Caius and I (Alex) had begun our journey a day earlier at Victoria coach station. We endured a 14 or so hour journey on a bus, with what I can only describe as a sewage malfunction and several strong contenders for world’s most irritating children. We had arrived in the narrow and secretive streets of Amsterdam. After a short wonder through the first row of maze like streets, following from the Central Station, we found ourselves within the Hill Street Blues, an Amsterdam coffee shop paying homage to the graffiti scene with names written on the wall from pilgrims, travellers and graffiti writers alike from all over the world.
A thick mist filled the stale air, the odd psychedelic flow of smoke rolled out into the room from the copious amount of joints lit around the cramped hovel of a space. Three large hiking bags lay around us strewn with bungee cords, rope and crudely held together. Looking back, I’m amazed that we ever made it a mile down the road without something going wrong.
On my bag I had attached a battered or ‘well loved’, Dean acoustic guitar I had picked up in a charity shop before we had left London. The frets had rusted, with cracks appearing like a strike of lightning through the varnish on the body and neck. Caius had also got his hands on an old guitar from a family friend. I was really happy about this, I don’t know what I would have done without music on this trip, I can honestly waste hours tinkering on a guitar.
I sat in the far corner of the room, with my back to the wall, next to the only window, all in all a pretty good spot. Before long we had begun to speak to a couple of guys sat next to us in similar battered old armchairs. We soon found out the three were ‘Dam’, veterans from Dublin, with a taste for good hash and foreign beer. They seemed like outgoing guys who shared their knowledge of ‘coffee shops’, to visit whilst we were in town.
Although we never swapped names, our new friends were helpful in pointing us in the direction of the only affordable accommodation on our chosen budget… a beautiful local park (Vondel Park). I suppose , in a country where it’s perfectly legal to eat a box full of hallucinogenic mushrooms, it’s a good idea to have incredible parks full of strange little hills and exotic flowers surrounded by crooked and twisted giants of trees that loomed over the entire scene.
Whilst attempting to float in the general direction of the park we had picked up a small group of German students who were determined to enter their first trip experience surrounded by the sounds of guitar music, so they joined us for a time. A bluesy guitar riff echoed into the warped landscape with the screeched pitch of a harp ringing in the sunset. Eventually the group decided that their journey must continue into the night and they left us seeking the strange happenings Amsterdam had to offer.
We headed down to a small stream running through the park. Next to it, an ancient looking tree towered into the sky; we decided this was as good a place as any. I sat with my back up against the tree between two roots which had twisted and contorted themselves from the ground and rolled a final joint for the evening before unwrapping my blanket, placing my guitar under my feet and trying desperately to fall asleep in the chilling wind in the night sky. Not long after getting settled I ended up having to take a walk to warm up. My nose led me across the park until I came across a barbeque filled with cooked chicken. After a couple of minutes waiting, taking advantage of the heat from the dregs of the coal and still no sign of another person in sight – I couldn’t resist the temptation and took a piece, I only took the one and whoever cooked it was actually a really good cook, if you are reading this, thank you and sorry, I was hungry. After my midnight snack I retreated back to the tree in a final attempt to fall asleep for the night.
Who knows what tomorrow is going to bring.
Until next time
Alex Shaw
