Windmills and cheese

I was offered cocaine about four seconds after I stepped off the train in Amsterdam. It was 6 a.m. and I hadn't slept the night before. The group I was travelling with had smuggled a bottle of Absinthe aboard the train and it left me nearly delirious. Consulting our "Let's go Europe" book, we made our way to a hostel smack dab in the red light district. We arrived at the hostel, paid 7 dollars each for a bed and headed up stairs. The room looked like an army barracks, I quickly scanned my surroundings for possible threats. Looking up at me from the bottom bunk was a young boy with a tattoed face and a bone through his nose. "Sup?", he said. In the middle of the room was a picnic table with at least a pound of marijuana on it. "Hmmm, don't see that everyday.", I thought.

After sleeping and doing some walking around night slowly fell onto the city and the vibe of the place changed. Red neon lights flickered on in the windows and prostitutes stood and coerced the crowds. "What are we going to do tonight?", I asked Alex, a guy from Austin who I had met a few days earlier in Spain. "Duh, we're in Amsterdam. We're gonna go see a sex show."

So we went to the sex show. The sex show is basically a movie theater with a stage containing a revolving circular platform. Like a play, it consisted of a series of acts. Before I go into that though, let me describe the audience. All young men? Not a chance. Behind us were a group of drunken scot's who would graciously give us play by play coverage the rest of the night. In front of were 7 elderly japanese women. Quite the odd scene.

The first act was just some straight up sex. Nothing too odd here. Act two: lesbians. Act three is where things got interesting. This was the audience participation portion. It consisted of a dominatrix who select a man from the audience, blindfolded him, flogged him for a bit, and then place a dildo headband on him. You can guess what happened after this. Act four was my favorite. A naked black man came out wearing a batman cowl and cape and proceeded to have sex with a quite bored looking woman. The kicker was in the background they were playing the batdance, Prince's song from the movie. Naked batman lip-synced the entire song, thus, multi-tasking.

BATDANCE.