"Amsterdam, you are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first."
The fog's hanging low and drowsy on the not quite stiflingly flat Dutch countryside. At 7:14 pm, the heavens are shrouded but the sun's peeking through still high off the horizon. High humidity lends to a vibrant green backdrop for the first leg of the train from Amsterdam to Copenhagen. Curiously, I feel like it also contributes to the angelic glow of those fair citizens of the Dutch capitol, a glistening on the skin more realistically attributed to a thin layer of sweat than divine resemblance. But as the train pulls into the first new station and the departure from Amsterdam weighs more concrete on the mind I can't help thinking that the latter might be more involved than the logistics of the possibility would have you believe. The glow seems to emanate from their core, through and through, encompassing body and mind. Even in the aftermath of such a heart-wrenching turn on the Final pitch, the emotions were somber for less than a day, and the team received a hero's welcome home, complete with canal-diving Dutchmen amidst streets flooded in Orange and a 2-hour set by Armen van Buren for hundreds of thousands of Holland fans in Dam Square. Intellectually proficient and overwhelmingly fluent in English, their view of us must surely be one of childish amusement, interestingly ignorant, and physically inept. From a relatively brief stint in their lovely city, one couldn't help but notice a severe lacking in sloth and general unattractiveness. A vast majority of the women are intimidatingly beautiful, all with form-perfect bodies to compliment varying degrees of bashfully cute bone structures. As a chance American (from Berkeley no less) explained to us while trying to recruit us for a bar crawl, "All they do is eat cheese and ride bikes." He had in fact moved to Amsterdam after falling for one of these angelic beasts and dismissively mentioned three-way birthday surprises before emphatically suggesting that we find ourselves a reason to move to Amsterdam as well. With time only putting more distance between the city and me, I begin to dwell on his advice with increasing regularity.
