Dear Readers,
Most people find they have more free time in the summer - I have the opposite problem. A combination of a new workspace, a summer class, a graduate assistantship and some sweet (paid) ghostwriting assignments are going to keep me very busy for the next five weeks. There may be a vignette here and there but please don’t think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth! Your favorite travel “glimpses” will be back in no time.
MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE! I love you all…
"It’s not being an unenthusiastic traveler to recognize that familiar touchstones give us a needed breather on the road, the better to help us dive back, with gusto, into cultures not our own."Daisann McLane, National Geographic Traveler (via katznjammer)
“Right, so now I’m just going to go around and give you your roommates and then we will try and make it as easy of a check-in to the hotel as possible,” Peter announced as we got onto the bus. The Heineken Factory loomed bright green and red in the distance behind us.
Roommates. I hadn’t thought about who I’d be rooming with on this trip. To make things as inexpensive as possible, I opted for a triple-share room. I was modest enough to share a bed – or a floor – with another person, but the reality hit me right then and there that for the next two weeks, I’d be sharing space with not only one stranger, but two. First, there was Megan, an art student from Michigan. She had good fashion sense, and was laid back, but not looking for anything crazy. Jennifer was from Thunder Bay, Canada, and had arrived that evening in Amsterdam because her flight was delayed due to a severe snowstorm in her hometown. We found her already sleeping at the hotel and didn’t want to disturb her, so Megan and I decided to snuggle in a double bed for our first night together.
I softened at this. At first, when I saw Peter carrying his tray of Burger King over to us I cringed a bit – we were hungry travelers, but Peter should have known better than to ingest such garbage. He was probably one of those really rude, really obnoxious Australian expats that hammed up his job for good tips. But his little soliloquy made him somehow genuine, somehow culturally sensitive. A good person. So now, Peter had proved himself to be a stellar leader. He knew everything about everything, and participated, which was really cool. I’d never me someone who went so far out of their way to make sure everyone around them was happy and having a good time.
The bus had returned to our hotel, so Peter took us back via Amsterdam’s metro system, which ended at the Schippol airport. We waited about an hour for the bus to arrive, but there were various amenities to keep us awake – a coffee bar, a Burger King, a pizza shop. Marc and I sat together and shared some fries and chicken nuggets, comparing the Burger Kings of Canada and America to each other. Peter dropped by with a tray.
“Do you mind if I join you guys?” we waved him on and he took up a seat at our table.
“You know, I just can’t believe some people,” he began to tell us. “I was on line, waiting to order back there and these two people in front of me were getting food. They asked for some kind of condiment, maybe ketchup or sauce or something, and the cashier charged them for it – you guys know that they do that here, right? You have to pay for kethcup. So anyway, these two people were like ‘What do you mean, we have to pay for it?’ and the cashier was just like ‘Yeah, we charge for condiments.’ And the two people were like, ‘Forget it! That’s so stupid!’ and like, threw the ketchup or whatever in his face and refused to pay for their meal and just walked off,” he shook his head. “Like, it wasn’t his fault he’s making you pay for something you should be paying for to begin with. You don’t have to be rude to the guy.”
The final act of the show involved a bit of audience participation. The dominatrix returned, this time with a man in a monkey suit with his penis hanging out. She was the jungle goddess, mistreating her monkey slave, making him do rude things with bananas. The monkey pulled some male members of the audience – Marc and Jared included – to come up on stage and participate in God only knew what. The men paraded around the stage in a conga line, then were blindfolded. The dominatrix peeled the banana and laid on the stage in spread eagle. She held the peeled banana right above her vagina and each of the men were asked to “take a bite.” Harmless enough, yes? All the men braved the front but when Jared brought up the rear, the dominatrix took a new banana and managed to lodge it into her vagina, peeled and all. They removed the blindfold from Jared as he was about to bite down more than he could possible chew.
After a sufficient amount of puffs, the girl positioned herself on the stage in such a way that she was upside-down and spread eagle. Like I imagined she would, she inserted the cigar into her vagina and started to puff once more – from a different set of lips. I burst out laughing, my seat mates sat in shock. Then they too began to laugh. It was so ridiculous, you couldn’t help yourself.
My friend Rob and I used to joke around about this sort of thing. “What if you came across a woman smoking out of her vagina?” we would ponder. “How would it look? Is it even possible?” I was glad that I could bring this experience home to him as proof.
“How do you discover you can do something like this?” I asked Evan and Marc. “Like, how do you discover you have this talent?”
“Is it something you list on a resume?” Marc asked.
“Or what about in a job ad?” Evan added. “’Seeking tall, thin female to perform lackluster striptease for Dutch theatrical company. Must be able to smoke a cigar from her nether regions.’”
I could not stop laughing as my second glass of rubbing alcohol with a slice of lime spilled all over my pants.
“And now, please applaud for the beautiful and mysterious Alexandria, her first night here at Casa Rossa,” the Dutch announcer blared over the audience. A skinny-to-the-point-of-anorexic girl, no older than a teenager probably, stumbled on to the stage. She wore a filmy pink dress and what probably was a blond wig since there was no doubt at her weight that her hair was falling out. She literally looked like a deer in headlights – doe-eyed, mouth hanging open, rosy pink but sullen cheeks, bathed in the lights of the theater. She began a pathetic dance aimed at luring us into her beauty but failed miserably. I hoped that the reputation of Casa Rossa exceeded itself in that they would never take such a risk as to have this girl perform for their audiences but then again, what did I know about running a sex show?
Instead of feeling excited, I felt bad, pitied her, wanted to run her off the stage shrouded in a blanket and scream in her ear “You don’t have to do this!”
A stage hand passed her a cigar; she lit the end and began to puff it.
“That’s it?” Evan asked. We were all very confused.
“Oh no,” I began, realizing what was to come. “Just wait.”
The various acts at the Sex Show were circus-like and predictable; an S&M couple that came down from the ceiling fucking in a sex swing, a striptease dance complete with sequins and hoops of fire, a dominatrix that whipped a male performer into submission before our very eyes. Soon after the Sex Show, which (hopefully) wasn’t making anyone aroused, became a sort of joke. What hijinks will they come out with next? Animal sex? Sex underwater?
Oh no. It was much, much worse.
The first couple we saw consisted of a large woman and a stocky man. Neither of them were smiling as they performed sex in all directions. In fact, at one point in the show, the man began to penetrate his partner from behind. In her angled position, the woman held an expression of boredom on her face, her chin smushed into the palm of her hand propped up on her elbow. Doggy style was my favorite position, and she made it seem like a chore. I began to panic at first – is this really how people had sex?! – but then realized, these people do this for a living, performing every day, sometimes multiple times during a show. They weren’t allowed to climax and not for nothing, but if I was pounding away at someone every night five times a day without delivering in the end, yeah, I’d probably be bored as well. And very sore.
