Getting our fix
-------------------
Me and Vee are addicted to garlic and it's been a while since we've had any. The priority of the evening is to score ourselves some cloves. We wander up and down, but curiously, mostly up, looking for the precious white stuff. I'm getting delirious with hunger and the hills are annoying me and I whine:

"Here! Look, this pasta place has pasta with garlic sauce. Let's just go here..."

But Vee is already next door with his nose pressed against the window. He looks a bit like one of Pavlov's dogs.

"It's...a GARLIC RESTAURANT!"

Within three seconds we are inside "The Stinking Rose" and loading up our garlic bready buns with lashings of aioli. I order a blueberry margarita and slurp it down a bit too quickly. I declare that it's really weak and blah blah blah on about how it's impossible to get a decent margarita these days. However, ten minutes later I can hardly focus my eyes or formulate full sentences and have to retract my previous statement.



We move from our romantic little window table-for-two to a large booth for four, where we lounge and loll on red leatherette seats in a tequila-ed up state and are generally silly until the uber efficient waiter brings us our bill. Without us asking. Which is something they do in the US and I know why they do it, but it's still very strange. I think about American tourists in Amsterdam, patiently waiting for their bill, not getting it, plucking up the courage to ask Marloes-the-waitress (who is busily having a ciggy outside or texting her mates or picking her nose) for it, then still not getting it for another twenty minutes, then getting it slapped down on the table with all the finesse of someone killing a fly.


Barflies
----------
Once our garlic and tequila cravings are quelled, we meet Tim at a nearby bar. It's supposed to have good live bands. The bar does indeed have a live band, although I am not sure how good it is, with a crazy-looking woman playing the piano and singing Blues songs, accompanied by a drummer and a guitarist. They are all over 50. The place is a spit-and-sawdust type of place and there's one old woman working behind the bar by herself. I guess her husband is the geriatric bouncer on the door who probably can't even see my passport as I wave it under his nose. He nods us in with a slight twitch of the head. The woman behind the bar limps and is obviously in pain. She has some sort of rudimentary back support tied around her waist. It actually looks like something she made herself. But she whips the tops of bottles with the kind of efficiency that you only get when you've spent the last 40 years doing it. I sip my extremely weak Corona, which is half the strength of the stuff in Europe, try to calculate how many I would have to drink to actually feel any effect, and watch the poor old lady carry six beers in one hand as it's more interesting than watching the crazy lady band.

On the Road
-----------
We soon tire of the band bar and go to what turns out to be the only bar that I actually like in the entire trip, Vesuvio, which is located on Jack Kerouac street. I like it even though the first voices I hear inside are Dutch. Those Cloggies get everywhere.



Tim orders a local 'steam beer' which tastes like cardboard that has been soaked in rainwater for a month. There are many things the yanks do very well, but making, serving and drinking beer is absolutely not one of them.



I take the crappy beer back to the bar for him and tell the guy that it tastes awful, fully expecting him to shrug and tell me where to go. But he takes the pint, pours it away and asks me what I want instead. Now that's what they mean by "The customer is always right".

Toilet tradition
------------
On one of my trips to the toilet, I notice what it is that's the weirdest thing about American toilets. It's been bothering me since I arrived. It's not the shape, which is more like the toilets in Japan than in Europe, or the fact that the water swirls the opposite way...it's that the opening that the water goes down is really, really, really small...ahum....sorry, I digress...

Waffely versatile
----------------------
We retire back to "Hotel" Amsterdam and sleep like coma patients for several hours. We wake up to the smell of the 'free breakfast' we had been promised wafting through the large cracks between the wall and the doorframe. I'd tried to cover up the cracks the night before with an elaborate system of coats and towels because I thought that someone would obviously spend the entire night peering through the cracks into a dark room to watch me sleep. I am sure I once read that tequila induces paranoia.

We bounce downstairs to the basement in search of food and are instantly reminded that we are in a hostel. Breakfast consists of a waffle machine, an enormous jug of waffle batter and a queue of hungry and hungover student travellers, clutching plastic plates and forks, trying to work out how to make waffles. Firstly, I don't like waffles, not because they are Belgian but because they taste like lard, and secondly, there really isn't that much in this world that I want badly enough to queue up for it. I find a lonely,random mug on a shelf, try to ignore the fact that it's probably been gummed by some student from Birmingham and not washed properly afterwards, pour some coffee and add some powdered creamer. A very sunburnt blonde Australian boy wearing ripped jeans and those irritating rip-off Brazilian flip-flop things on his feet sees me shaking the white stuff into the coffee and bounds over, points to the white powder and says,

"Ahaa, do you know what that is?"

I tell him it's powdered creamer but what I really want to say is "Logically speaking, what do you normally put in coffee that's white, and doesn't always come in liquid form and is not sugar? I'm surprised you made it to the end of your street, Bruce, let alone halfway around the world."

The coffee tastes worse than you could ever imagine coffee with powdered creamer tastes. In fact, I would probably swear that I've had better coffee on KLM. We decide that our hostelling days are over and go and get ourselves uber strong espresso and some grub from a nice little cafe round the corner.

...