In the "Bulldog", Tom Waits's hoarse voice mixes with ethnic music, there is a billiard table, a slot machine, and antique pharmacy scales. The clientele looks intellectual - someone reads a newspaper, someone plays chess. No signs of a dive, except a poster on the wall: Mona Lisa with a smoking "spliff" and bleary eyes. There is also a school board on which dishes and drinks are listed in chalk - ganja and hash, cannabis tea and a space cake, psilocybin mushroom and a magic cactus.
Glyuk orders three quarters of a gram of potent skunk weed for himself, and for me a weak joint called "White Widow". For dessert we take orange juice.
Soaked in the canal
Glyuk rolls a joint himself, while I get help from a waitress - she crumbles marijuana with tobacco, rolls a paper, and sticks on a paper filter. We go outside and sit in wicker rocking chairs above the canal. In the quiet water, colorful houses with stepped roofs, the curved arch of a bridge, fancy fences, and lamp posts with bicycles tied to them are reflected. Beautiful!
Glyuk says that tomorrow I won't recognize Amsterdam. The entire city will be colored orange - the symbol of the royal dynasty of Orange-Nassau. On Queen's Day, every Dutchman tries to wear something orange - a jacket, trousers, a hat, or at least socks. Even cats and dogs will have orange scarves tied on them. Between houses, orange garlands of balloons will be hung, street lamps wrapped in orange ribbons, and orange flags will flutter on the roofs.
I smoke a joint the size of a good cigar, but I don't feel a high - my head doesn't spin, my thoughts are clear, my speech doesn't slur. It dawns on me: everything I had previously heard about hallucinations, expanding the boundaries of reality, and altered states of consciousness is complete nonsense. None of it exists. Unlike vodka or port wine, drugs have no effect on a person. People are just afraid to admit it to each other.
I hurry to share the truth with Glyuk, he looks at me strangely and twirls a finger at his temple. Seeing this absurd gesture, I start laughing wildly and just can't stop. Everything around me amuses me: the ringing of a church carillon, a policeman on horseback, a street cast-iron urinal, and the unpronounceable name of the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal. But most of all I laugh at the sight of a pensioner walking three dachshunds and treating them to ice cream one by one. I rock in the chair harder and harder, lean back and lift my legs, then lean forward until I'm almost bent to the ground. At some point, I leap out of the chair as if from a catapult, fly through the air, and plop into the canal like a hatchet.
Oh, the water in Amsterdam is cold! Thanks to Glyuk - he raises such a racket that all the people in the Bulldog run out into the street. In a moment, people take off their jackets, tie them together by the sleeves, throw one end to me, and pull me out with the other. For the rest of the evening, warming myself by an electric fireplace and with a towel wrapped around my neck, I no longer laugh. I sit and mentally promise that I will never smoke weed again in my life. Once I tried it - and that's enough.
All good
So Koninginnedag has come - the day when in the whole country only police officers, doctors, and firefighters work, and all other residents of the Netherlands enjoy the queen's mercy, who pays for every citizen's day off from her own pocket. Crowds of people go to Amsterdam and until the very morning party to funk, trance, and house, hang out in the smoke of smoky coffee shops, and let loose in countless pubs. In short, they throw all problems out of their heads and go on a full-blown spree.
On April 30, Amsterdam turns into one giant flea market. On this day nobody has the right to demand a license - trade anything you like and pay no taxes. Gulping down Heineken beer, Glyuk and I move along the wide street Westermarkt, making our way between stalls with exotic souvenirs - dream catchers from Peru, crafts from Bali, African drums, Turkish skullcaps, Chinese vases, and Russian nesting dolls.
These are all trinkets for tourists, sold everywhere. For something exclusive, you need to look on the big canals, where native Amsterdammers bring out things taken from old chests. Among the spread-out junk - last year's newspapers, half-burnt candles, broken coffee grinders - you can discover truly unique items: a great-grandmother's dress or a collectible porcelain doll, a striking clock or a "Leica" from World War II. Glyuk digs out a bronze door handle in the shape of a mermaid, bargains with the owner and pays five euros, and I find what I had long dreamed of - a navy peacoat with wide lapels and anchors on the buttons, which I get for free.
What touches the most is that children participate in trade on an equal footing with adults. Boys and girls bake cupcakes and cheesecakes, mix lemonades and fruit drinks, bring their goods out into the street and offer them for one or two euros.
And the city is already in full swing, the carnival is noisy and revelry is raging. Near the National Monument, a clown with painted lips and a huge nose hands out inflatable orange crowns to passersby. We put on headdresses made of balloons and become the same as thousands of people around. We move on, winking at girls and sipping Orange Bitter from the bottle.
How to see the queen
Trams and buses don't run, rare taxis barely move in the dense crowd filling the streets. But along the canals go on motorboats, punts, pedal boats, and homemade vessels. You'll see all kinds of watercraft - a boat shaped like a Dutch wooden shoe, a craft made from an old car, and an ordinary bathtub launched onto the water.
They wave to us from some barge: come here! Gluck and I squeeze into the dense crowd of people huddled on the deck. There are many people, it’s even unclear how everyone stays on the floating platform and no one falls overboard. We stand pressed against each other, drink wine, dance a little, sing songs at the top of our lungs, and set off smoke bombs with poisonous orange smoke.
Then we somehow find ourselves on Dam Square, where a giant television screen is installed, showing everything that falls into the lens aimed at the crowd. The camera moves and picks out an individual from the general mass. An amusing cross-section of society – here is an anarchist anti-globalist wrapped in a keffiyeh, here is a respectable father of a family with a child on his shoulders, here is a rocker girl in a black leather jacket with studs, here is a couple of demonstratively kissing gays – all of it the size of a building facade.
Then on the huge monitor, with all titles and regalia indicated, appears Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard, Princess of Orange-Nassau, Princess of Lippe-Biesterfeld, Princess of Montfort, Duchess of Limburg, Marquise of Veere, Baroness of Breda. A youthful woman in a fashionable hat and with a bouquet of flowers shakes hands with the residents. She laughs infectiously, casually kisses old people and picks up small children. “Now you understand why the residents of Holland love their queen so much? And the rumors that she may resign next year and abandon her subjects are complete nonsense.”
...On the morning after the holiday, I wander through empty and deserted streets. The wind plays with crumpled cups and scraps of posters, like a heap of autumn leaves. Columns of cleaning machines pass by me, and detachments of street sweepers march with brooms on their shoulders. For a whole day they will deal with tons of garbage, clearing the fabulously crazy city named Amsterdam.