It was about midnight and we had no further plans. Yet we had two days til’ our flight back to Riga. Trying to decide where to go next, we considered taking a bus to Düsseldorf, or Essen, or Köln or ... at some point we noticed a bus to Amsterdam and decided to go to Netherlands instead.
We arrived in the Central Station of Amsterdam around 15 minutes before 3am. Some girls from United States were on the same bus and none of us wanted to pay for the hotel that night so we decided to find an open bar instead.
As weird as it might sound we didn’t find any, except one – San Francisco. We were all with big backpacks, the place was crowded but the bouncer let us in saying „Don’t forget to tip the bouncer who let you in”. Sounds reasonable.
San Francisco seemed a really great bar, full of very different people. I loved it. As far as I understood it was supposed to be open until 5.30am but at around 4am when nobody was moving their asses after a nice notification that the bar is closed now, the bartender shouted „Get the fuck off!”. Independent of the wording, it was still a polite announcement. You just have to love this place! And I’m pretty sure I’ll get back there at some point.
It was 4am, all the bars and cafeterias seemed closed and it was quite cold outside – so we decided to wait for a bit. Well, 2 hours to be exact until the first places open up. I can’t really sit or stand too long in any one place (well, couldn’t say that to the 10-hour bus driver in Morocco, but that’s another story) so I walked around the place while my friend and the two american girls were sitting on the stairs of some house and trying to get some sleep. During one tour in the town a guy shouted from a bicycle if I can offer him a cigarette – I did. He said thanks and asked if I’d like to buy some cocaine. Well, dejavu, for a moment, except for the weather, it seemed like we had never left Morocco.
At 6am we found the first open bar. I had a beer and my friend had a shot of vodka, just to get warm. We thought it might look weird to the bartender ( well, not that we’d care but ) but minutes later the regulars started to crawl in and started ordering beer as well. We had found a great locals bar with music I’d usually not like to listen to. Yet, it fit well to this place and I still think it was a great local bar. But maybe it’s just me – I just love bars!
An hour later the American gals wanted to go to Barney’s Coffee shop. Hmm yes. Not a too good idea to go to a coffee shop in Amsterdam, so history keeps quiet about the experiences there.
But afterwards, couple of hours later we found probably the crappiest hotel during our whole trip to get some sleep in. And we slept pretty much the whole day and night. After all, during the first night on the streets of Amsterdam we probably saw most of what there was to see – Red lights district, San Francisco and Barney’s Coffee shop.
The next day, back to Germany, Weeze.
Continued in next post...
