Friday morning I awoke to a still present smile and one hell of a sore neck! Brett and I said goodbye to Nelson and check out. First we went to the train station so I could get my ticket to Rotterdam. Then after a lunch of fried falafel at Maoz we went to Vondel Park. At Vondel Park we found a spot beside the lake on the grass, and we sunned ourselves while watching cute Dutch girls on bikes ride by. At some point a roaming bar rolled past, about 20 girls sat on bar stools and while drinking they pedalled the bar as one bartender steered and the other served drinks. Not long after that a group of 15 guys passed bye, all but one of them dressed as monks the other dressed as a nun. I love this park.
Later that day as my train pulled into the Rotterdam train station I was immediately amazed by all the modern buildings and skyscrapers I saw, after great difficulty I found my hostel; as I walked up the stairs to reception I was appalled at how dirty and run down the place was. On the second floor I walked into one of the shabbiest and most tired rooms I had ever seen. To my right were two stained and tattered couches in front of two sad TVs. On the sagging cushions sat a few guys entranced in video games. In front of me was a bar that wound its way thru one side 0of the room, it was stripped of its brass and the wood was nicked and splintered, above it on the back wall hung a cracked chalkboard that read in scribbles chalk “beer: 1 Euro, soda 1 Euro, aww **** it, everything’s 1 Euro.” To my left were a few more old chairs and unstable tables, in front of a wall of air-leaky windows covered in black all-covering curtains. At the largest table on an unmatched motley set of chairs lounged about 6 people whose hands secretly hide cards behind a forest of empty glassed and bottles. The old wood floor was scarred and warped and parts of the walls desperately clung on to old red lead paint. Around the room were nailed about 30 different coat-of-arms that terminated on either side of a dirty rack of antlers that were hung directly over the bar; strung from tines was a placard: “reception.” As I stood dripping sweat in front of an un-tendered bar with all my bags not a person gave me a glance and the only noise was a scratchy set of speaker playing an old unknown Elvis tune and the beep beep of Super Mario. Time in a room full of people stood still.
After seemingly an untold amount of time a guy at the head of the table to my left broke free, shouted out loud and slammed his cards on the table. Glasses and bottles quaked and clanked, looking up and noticing me for the first time he walked slowly behind the bar, fiddled with the volume of the Elvis song and sauntered up to the bar. “Beer?” he asked in a Dutch accent. “Uh-no, maybe later, I need to check-in.” he looked down at a mess of papers that were drenched with beer, he pulled them apart and shuffled through them, and yelled something in Dutch, a blonde girl in a red satin shirt came over and they argued back and forth. Finally in a stack of papers over by the stereo they found my reservation. Up creaky stairs I encountered a door that reminded me of the screen doors on old abandoned Kansas farmhouses. In a large room I picked out a bunk bed that was least cracked, worn, stained, and stinky. Changing into a dry shirt I looked around: in one corner was another bar and in another corner a pool table covered with plywood and atop it a sleeping bag. The room was full of communist looking steel bunk beds that swayed in their middles from lack of support. On two beds by the door sat two guys quietly strumming guitars and smoking. Two beds over from mine two people slept. A lean Scandinavian blonde girl slept wrapped around the arms and legs of her boyfriend: his left arm was draped over her bare chest and a few misty rays of light from a skylight alit upon their soft snoring faces. They both looked like the serene youth of a Botticelli painting and they seemed filled with a kind of strong quiet peace that made the shabby walls shine and the humid hot heat not a burden (but a friend). If ever Dorothy fell asleep in a field of poppies surely this now was her.
I took up my journal and pen, and went downstairs to write. At the bar I found the only bar stool in the whole room and ordered a beer. The same old unknown Elvis song from before still played and the room time knew not was as it had been.
As the sun set outside (though you couldn’t tell for the black window shades) some Dutch guys arranged some chairs around another old table and one of them asked me if I played poker. Missing the weekly game with my friends back home I put 5 Euro in the pot, sat down, and took a sup of the beer that was set down in front of me. As five of us played I got to know the guys a bit, they were all students of the local university and not travellers. I found out that this hostel is really a big building that about 30 local fraternities and sororities share. They hold sleep-overs and parties here (thus explaining the bar in every room) and the run a small time hostel to help bring in money. As we played a few guys went all in and were taken out, and free beers magically kept reappearing in front of me. We continued playing and talking and we exchanged stories, and they recommended some architecture I needed to see in town. Soon the two kids who had been playing super Mario came over to watch, they were backed out of their minds on mushrooms. As me and the only other guy left with chips duked it out we got tired ( I had had 7 free beers) and decided to go all in, he won and I lost my five bucks. But it was all good because I actually came out 2 bucks ahead on beer and more importantly, I had gotten the two greatest hands in poker back to back, a four of a kind followed by an ace high straight flush! The odds on each of those hands not to mention back to back are in the hundreds of thousands and were a real feat. On my way upstairs to bed I joined a few of the guys and the blonde in red satin in a free shot (The shot was called shrek and was tasty). What a chill place, I could spend several weeks here.
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