Dam Postcards

After standing the freezing sub-zero-degrees cold from 5.30am to 7.30am, holding a hitching sign and being close to tears from the agony of being cold, tired and having the sniffles, a camper-van finally picked us up and gave us a ride to the middle of the A14, where we alighted at this lay-by and realised that we were in the middle of a motorway - so it was either we get a hitch, or.... we die.

I'm in the middle of the A14 Motorway, looking from above my hitching sign at Nic and Will in front, dancing with similar signs to combat the cold and simultaneously attract attention from passing cars...



We finally get to Harwich International Port.
I discover a certain kind of industrial beauty... I previously thought the words industrial and beauty were mutually exclusive.





It's all haze and trips. This is taken in The Rockery - one of the city's famous coffeeshops where (unlike in Sg) it is legal to smoke the dope, stuff yourself with hash shakes and brownies, and get wrecked off your face you might even pass out.




I love how Amsterdam was built with canals running through the city. The city is amazingly beautiful, peaceful, sometimes even gothic... but there's this tranquility there you can't articulate.

Me looking out along the canals...





A glimpse of Amsterdam from mid-levels, where I was in Madame Toussand's Museum.




Madame Toussand's wax museum was such a bizarre experience - we went there slightly stoned. And had to walk through these dark passages. At one point, we thought we saw a wax figure but it scared the hell out of us when it started moving ('it' was actually human) and pointed us in the direction of a dungeon-like looking space, we walked in and it like stepping into an alternate universe with strobe lightning and dry-ice smoke (it was almost like those shitty funfair haunted houses you walk through during secondary school funfairs... except perhaps a more sophisticated version). There was this huge man dressed like a savage and locked in a cage who kept roaring and clawed at us from inside his cage. The girls obviously screamed like a bunch of wusses.. but in all fairness, we were already tripping before, this just made our trip all the more insane.
So after being subjected to that, we were released into a startingly bright room/gallery where wax figures of important people such as Blair, Clinton, the Pope and the likes were all gathered. For a long (and embarrassing) time, we couldn't tell which figures were real and which were not... the surreality of the museum was amazing. Or maybe it was just our minds playing with us. Isn't that an amazing thought?
The most outstanding (and hilarious) incident was when we walked through a part of the museum that said 'J Lo's Dressing Room' and next to J Lo's wax model there was this black dude inside sitting. N (like all of us who thought the figures were all wax) went up to him and said in his face 'helloooooo, who areeee you? What.... are youuuu doing here?' In exactly that manner and tone. After she walked away, the guy got up from his seat and walked over to us and said: "Hi ladies, Would you like to try on some of J Lo's clothes and take a picture?" - he was actually one of the museum staff hired to 'entertain' people walking through. You could imagine the look on N's face. We laughed so hard we couldn't stop.

.....

Holland's national colour is orange... and I met this random stranger on the train named Francois, who is this big dutch guy who was really friendly. We talked for ages about everything and anything, very quickly and very deeply. Films, cities, Asia, relationships, life... Anyway, he explained that Holland's affinity with the colour orange was a result of a French Prince who came from the Orange House in France to Holland... I was absolutely in my element there. No surprises as to why. Aren't the orange windows so lovely and cool?



On the third day, I made a point to visit the Anne Frank museum, stone cold sober. And un-stoned. That would have just been disrespectful. I sneakily took a picture of the very same bookcase that used to hide that secret entrance to Anne's 'Secret Annex' where she and her family hid for more than two years. It was weird and enlightening to have inhabited that very same space where the Frank family were once living. Having done a module on the Holocaust this term (even though I didn't attend many of those lectures/seminars and our lecturer who took us for that was although intelligent, very weird and annoying), what I saw made sense of what I had read.




A picture of Amsterdam before darkness descends...



And finally, after having to get up at a torturous hour of half two in the morning, this is a couple of us waiting for the Stenna ferry to take us back to Harwich, where we began our hitch back.




And thus the amazing trip, in all senses of the word, came to an end.