My Experience of Amsterdam

On the eve of the New Year just passed, I spontaneously decided to book and travel out to Amsterdam for a few days with a friend. Having little in the way of communication between us, there was much the possibility of ending up out there on my own. I didn't, but I feel my time there would have been much the same, regardless, though, perhaps, I would have saved a little money.
Anyway, whatever transpired across those few days left an impression on (though really, within) me, and I recorded some thoughts as best I could:

My experiences of Amsterdam have been many things.

The initial excitement of a lost traveller; the interest in the city’s novelties, which soon became tedium, and more.

On the eve of the New Year, the city centre was a chaos. Fireworks lit every road and sector of the sky. Smoke, blinding flashes and explosions were as ubiquitous as the people who flocked to the city for the single night. There was a freedom, a liberalism that bred anarchy, unfamiliar to myself. In London, such behaviour would seek attention from counter-terrorist groups.

A grenade (which was really a flare) was thrown out of a crowd, landing in front of me, and in my utmost apprehension of another incapacitating light and hot, burning phosphorous shredding through my flesh and clothes; I ran, my head tucked under arm. But there was no danger. Not this time. I had seen fireworks dropped and misfired in close proximity to others- all very real and dangerous, but no one seemed to care.

But then, the chaos was not real. It bore the illusion of swift change- the wind boomed with the approaching storm; it was a ferocious sound, unlike any I had heard before; it emanated with a live pulse like the booming of a great beast. It was the noise of the encroaching end, the behemoth Fenrir come to devour the world and there was fire and screaming, then, with the coming dawn, everything had stopped. The people filtered out, the crowds dispersed and the rare brush strokes of the wild had ceased to become apparent. Order had returned.

My companion and I had walked a great deal, taken by hook of the city’s own spirit and in that time we travelled, we witnessed a single and secular act of absolute poetry.

The noise of three pairs of wheels (how people love to cycle in Amsterdam) turning in a symmetrical unison was heard. The sound whizzed like a gentle breeze past your ear- with its own music and metronymic rhythm. As they approached, they rang their bells, for fun or love or just because- I can’t say. Their bells rang to the rhythm of their wheels; each a different sound; a different note and all perfectly in time.

Finally, they spoke. In order of appearance, I believe through distorted memory, in a range of soft and melodic voices that completed the compilation. These beautiful women (for they were, regardless of their fleeting visage) with their machines and backed by nature. That they should be there to play their song to only us on the deserted, late, streets of Amsterdam… The incident was a most perfect, natural scene of something passing.

Greater than the everyday observance.

It could have all been reduced to an arrangement created or modified by the mushrooms I had ingested; that art should befall two strangers, but my appeal to Dionysus compels me to have faith in that it was something so much more divine.