My Holland High
What do most people think of when they think of The Netherlands? I think the answer is most likely a lot of drugs, a lot of coffee shops and a lot of window-friendly hookers. That’s what my first ideas were anyway. But The Netherlands excited me! As a child, I spent nine months in neighbouring Belgium because that’s where my Mum’s from. She made explicit instructions to my grandmother, whom I was living with, not to take me to “that horrid place across the border”. And she never did. But by the time I was 19, I was backpacking and, like most people who satisfy those first two criteria, I wanted to get high.
I was in my apartment in Paris, where I was working and studying, when my friend from Australia sent me a message telling me his plans to travel and see Europe. Although I was excited, I was too tired from late-night cram sessions to care an awful lot until I realised his arrival corresponded with my mid-semester break. This flipped the tables completely. Fuck. Yes. So we planned and articulated our strategy, and from there decided to road trip from France to the Holy Grail that was Amsterdam. It turns out my friend organised his trip to conincide with a national holiday in the Netherlands known as Koninginnedag (but for anybody who hasn’t got a tongue that flexible, it’s just called Queens Day). The gist is that Dutch people dress up in orange (The Netherlands’ national colour), get drunk, party on the canals, do drugs and celebrate kind of pointlessly over the fact that their country is still a monarchy. But this was a big one, as the Queen was handing over the monarchy to her son, meaning it was the first King’s Day in forever.
After driving through France and Belgium, we finally arrived at the University of Utrecht, about half an hour outside of Amsterdam, where a friend of ours was studying. The day came, and I was ready to have a hell time – when in Rome, I suppose. I had my first joint at 8 that morning, followed by another eight throughout the course of the day. A bag of mushrooms on top of that and the deal was sealed. I. Was. Stoned.
At first, it was great – the usual stuff where everything you see is funny, you find it hard to give a shit about anything and are just having a good time. And that’s when it started: the thing that changed my mind about drugs and the Dutch nation forever. Everything sort of came to a halt. All I could hear was that static noise you get whenever you have a bad signal on your TV. “Whatever”, I thought to myself. Something different, nothing to panic about. Then everything really started to twist me up. My heart started beating heavily and the sea of orange of people overwhelmed me more and more with their extreme radiance and revelry with every passing second. I entered freak-out mode. The clock stopped ticking and I was tripping like no tomorrow, and for those who are reading this, it’s not a feeling you want to experience twice.
But just when everything sort of started to seem like I couldn’t be further away from the planet Earth, I discovered I was yet again incorrect. As my friend directed the stumbling mess that was me to the train so I could go home and sleep off my trip, I saw it. It was round table, perfectly circular. But this table was different: on it was a sort of bulls-eye design, the kind you see on a dart board. On the outside circles of the dart board were a pod of snails. I as witnessing a snail race – a herd of gastropods surrounded by crazy Dutchmen screaming at their shelled investments to be the first to get to the centre, winning them a maximum of probably 3 euros. But to make matters even weirder, the races were being conducted by midgets. That’s right – little orange dudes, probably 10 of them, yelling in Dutch, grabbing my hand and trying to convince me to place my loose change on some super-slow bug. And that’s when I entered the point of no return – the black hole.
About a day later, I woke up in my apartment in Paris, having learned from my highly amused mate that I had slept the whole day’s car trip from Holland to France. Confused as to how one person can physically get that high, I closed my eyes and thought to myself, “No-one can know about this.” But of course, it was way to funny not to reveal.
The point of this story to travellers: Go to Holland!! It’s beautiful, it’s rich in history, it’s central to the rest of Europe, and most importantly its fun. You take from it what you want out of it, like any place you might go on your journey. Just because a great stigma of drugs and being totally out of it surrounds this place, by no means suggests that you have that kind of time. However, I hope my story can be a cautionary one, and allow it to emphasise how the ideal of having a holiday high can get the best of you.
