We talk to Katinka and agree to meet her back in front of the station. It's now mid-afternoon, and to put it subtly, the station is now quite a scene. Like something off a grainy television news broadcast in the 1980s. What a difference a couple of hours at the park can make. Amsterdam had been a ghost town when we'd first arrived early this morning and now this. It seems as though every Dutch nationalist in Europe is now gushing into the city via the train terminal it seems. Pouring out of the main gates towards the city center. An orange mass with no end and no beginning, bustling by with a commotion of chants and cheers and vuvuzelas. Orange smoke rises from flares held high amongst all matter of banners and signs and pretty Dutch girls on shoulders. Amsterdam police stand idly by, trying to look professional and not as ecstatic as the rest of their fellow countrymen. Why? It's in the job description, I guess. They're still all smiles though. I mean, after all, under those uniforms and silly hats, they're still Dutch. And man, let me tell you; the Dutch are among the nicest people you will ever meet, ever. Should you chance to meet them that is.
Katinka picks us out of the crowd and rides up to us, smiling of course. Brief introductions, hugs (at this time, I somehow manage to drop the sunglasses I'm wearing and at the same time step on them, but that's not really important). Katinka's English is perfect, something about as commonplace in Holland as a bicycle. Katinka's bicycle, on the other hand, is a piece of shit. A smart buy, she tells us, as most of the nice cycles get stolen. Since we don't have our own bicycles, Katinka takes us on a metro line that shoots us right down Van Hallstraat, her street. She lives in the northern outskirts of the city where all the buildings look the same. Same number of stories, four (or maybe five). Same faded brick facade. Same doors. Same windows. Same strange hook at the tippy-top of each window column. When the bus slows and stops at our stop, Katinka makes a bee-line for one of the dozens of identical doors on the block, and we follow. She lives with her sister in a third-floor flat that can only be reached by navigating a rather skinny and curious case of stairs that coils its way around and up, past other flat doors and seemingly random short ledges in the ceiling. The stairs are short and steep and have many sharp corners, and it dawns on me that it must be impossible to move anything bigger than a chair into a flat this way.
"That's what the hooks outside are for," informs Katinka. "When we are moving, we move the big things - couches, tables, beds, things like that - we hoist them up with pulleys."
I know at this point, I'm shit-tired, both from walking around in the stifling heat with that heavy pack on my back, and from just a general lack of nourishment and proper hydration. And we're still kinda high, so that whole pulley system blows. My. Mind. Her flat follows in step with the stairway. One skinny, tall hallway that runs to the back of the building. Two small bedrooms. A quaint living room. The kitchen is actually in the hallway towards the back, with the refrigerator, the sink, and the stove all pushed into one wall before the back patio. The bathroom's just as intriguing. The shower, sink, and toilet all share the same, small tile floor. The only thing distinguishing the parameters of the shower is the presence of a simple shower curtain cutting the room in half. Again, my mind; blown. It reminds me of the bathrooms on Mike's sailboat back home, except now they aren't in a boat setting, they're in a house setting. I guess if you live on a boat, this probably isn't all too exciting, but on the flip side, the tiny palaces we call bathrooms in the US would probably rock your socks off. And I bet bidets would just make your head explode (messy) or implode (impossible, but at least not that messy), or whatever better conveys a sense of shock and awe.
It is that mindset that we have currently found ourselves in. So we smoke another spliff out on the back porch past the kitchen. It overlooks a central courtyard of the building complex surrounded by about a hundred units just like Katinka's, and there is a netting that hangs down from the top of the building to the bottom so that when you look out, your eyes first focus on the netting before adjusting to the backdrop. I assume it's to keep trash from being flung into the courtyard, but it also gives the place a caged feeling that might very well agitate a claustrophobic. There's not much about the flat that would appeal to a claustrophobic, come to think of it. However, none of us are claustrophobic, to my truest recollection; we're just stoned, so we soak it all in. The audacity of the moment, we relish it. Back in California, our friends are trudging along. Mike's cranking out some summer school classes in Santa Cruz, Taylor and Dylan and Kam are all busy at work in the City, each week their eyes looking always to the weekend, towards some base excitement and thrill at the end of each weekly tunnel to gun it through. That light that we're all running towards in our lives. Grant and Max and I are basking in it. Under that glaring gloom of cloud-cover and behind the jailhouse netting, we're basking in it with a spliff fiddling between our fingers. We're a mere five days in and smiling high at the sheer length of this trek before us.
Katinka is not high, nor does she smoke even. She tells us that most Dutch citizens don't actually, and that it's seen more as a tourist attraction. Something you do when you're fourteen, but now it's just more of a novelty. Maybe more so for her. Katinka's in graduate school on the road to receiving two masters degrees. Insane. That must cost a fortune. "And you're working too?" I ask.
"No, just school right now."
"That's insane. So your parents are paying for school?"
"What?" She's genuinely shocked. And then there's that look in her eye of vague recollections becoming less vague, like someone remembering a funny joke. "Aha, that is right, haha! You Americans pay so much money for schooling! This is crazy! No one pays for school here! It's free." Oh, the devils of socialist society. "The government gives me money to live while I'm a full time student as well so I don't need to work."
I can see my father sitting in the back of my head telling me it's not all whistles and rainbows. Don't think for a second their country's not facing a big ole' mound of debt as well. And their unemployment, why it's higher than ours is. Really? Truth. But hey, we Americans aren't ones to talk right? And what've we got to show for it? World presence? I guess. As Katinka's goes on in perfect English about all the gleaming pillars of Dutch society, one can't help but think of the alternatives. So we're both in debt, sure. But everyone here in Holland is super smart. Everyone speaks two or three languages. Katinka told us we'd be hard pressed to run into a Dutchman or Dutchwoman that didn't speak English fluently. And so it is. There's not one episode of a language barrier in Holland. And for the first time in my life, I truly feel like a stupid American.
It's sort of something that just slaps me in the face. We meet up with a bunch of Katinka's friends on the lawns out in front of the bar where we're going to watch the Final. A canal runs between the lawn and the street, and we walk up to a group of five or six Dutchies talking Dutch, drinking beer. They're all smiles, dropping their conversations, introducing themselves in their polite English, casually. There's the small talk attributed to excited young foreigners meeting, talk of the game. They talk to us in English and to their fellow countrymen in Dutch and they don't miss a beat, back and forth, to the point of almost nonchalantness. Well, as nonchalant as one can be before watching their national team compete in the World Cup Finals.
The experience unfolding around us easily puts all American sports gala events to shame. Practically all of Holland is in Amsterdam for the game, donning varying amounts of orange attire. The entire city is orange, and the lawns and surrounding bars are packed, sweating orange. To my effort, I'm sporting my trusty orange flannel which seems to suck the sweat out of my pores. Max had bought a bright orange shirt with the national emblem on it, and somehow, somewhere found this dutch maiden's cap with fake pigtails and orange ribbons. And well, Grant has his mustache. We fit right in, squeezed between a couple of Dutch girls on the stairs in this packed brick warehouse bar with a hundred other Orange fans. Spain's national anthem plays, and then Het Wilhemus, the national anthem of Holland. It's in Dutch, shocker, I know. So we don't know any of the words, which is a bummer. That doesn't mean we don't sing our over-heating heads off at full volume, trying to keep tone in the beginning before just shouting ecstasy and exultation headlong into the thunderous, drowning chorus of an entire nation together as one. In the bar, our mix-up, our little charade, is a drop of rain in a hurricane. It's everything that sport ever is, or has been, or ever will be hopefully. They show helicopter footage of Dam square and the massive expanse is covered in an orange blanket two million strong, so dense, so thick that the whole thing, from the air, has the appearance (to a drunk American) of some miraculous orange singing garden at the palace of the King. It's beautiful. Exciting to the point that my hairs all stand on end, and like a flower I feel it suck in that thick intangible hanging heavy over Amsterdam, walking hand in hand with the hot summer afternoon, the smell of spilt beer and sweat and passion and joy and an incredible anticipation, the likes of nothing I think I've ever felt before. The anthem finishes, but everyone just keeps singing to full lung capacity. By this point, Max, Grant, and I are just jumping and jumping, holding on to our beers and each other's shoulders, yelling, "jaaaa, JAAAA! JAAAAAAA!" through chokes of ecstatic laughter. The players jog to their positions and for the life of me I can't remember who's kicking off. Like it matters. There's a silence as the referee raises his whistle hand. We all look at each other. Our faces are dripping with sweat and beer. Grant's and my hair have been reduced to wet mops. Even Grant's mustache is sweating. Max's lush, plush locks are heavy with beer. We don't seem to mind. Pure joy cakes our faces, like little kids on Christmas morning, only drunk. That's what it feels like anyways. Drunk Christmas morning (not to be confused with hungover Christmas morning). And already things are beginning to sway, yet, miraculously, we each manage to catch the other two dead in the eye at the same time. Hands tighten on the shoulder and we nod in agreement. "Good call, guys." And the whistle blows.
