guidos in amsterdam

an uplifting tale about not getting sexually assaulted by two random dudes in 2008

this is a heartwarming story about two guidos with a heart of gold i randomly met 16 years ago when i was in prague.

it was december 2008. i was in my sophomore year of college, and had taken out a $10k student loan to do a semester abroad. that loan took me seven years to fully pay off (three of which were exclusively comprised of interest payments), but it was worth it. i just finished my final exams and had ~10 days to kill before my flight back to the states. i spent this particular evening with friends at radost fx, one of the only vegetarian restaurants in the city that also had a very fun nightclub attached to it. my colon was permanently blocked the entire 5 months i was in prague due to the extreme sausage culture there, and radost was one of the few restaurants i could patronize without feeling like a cement mixer had unloaded directly into my ass. my favorite thing was to go for late dinner at 9, and then head over to the music club around 11 to drink & dance until the wee hours of the morning.

my understanding is this place is still open, and still good.

later than night in the club, around 1 a.m., i ran into two american guys from miami named t*ny and c*lby. after speaking with them for 5 minutes, i knew two things: these boys were were guidos thru and thru and they were best friends. apparently c*lby’s (ex)wife had just cheated on him, prompting t*ny to take him on the bro version of a Julia Roberts “eat pray love” tour around europe. i found this all extremely touching. the thought of two late 20s, newly single all-american guids romping around europe together for two full months—a beautiful sabbatical fueled by alcohol, adrenaline, friendship, and heartache—made me smile.

i offered to show them around prague the next day, but they informed me that not only was this their last night in prague, but they were flying to amsterdam in 4 hours. i said “aw, next time, then.” but we all tacitly understood there would be no next time.

i was bit surprised to hear t*ny double-down with a: “you should come. we’re only going for a night. we’ll get your tickets.”

while my mother did teach me about not getting into cars with strangers, she didn’t say anything about planes. i could sense that this offer wasn’t made for any reason other than because these two dudes were so fatigued from traveling with each other for 6 weeks and were dying for anything, anyone, to switch things up a bit.

my intuition said “it’s probably fine”, and i accepted subject to the condition that one of my girlfriends could come along. in the 1% chance i got murdered, i wanted my friend to leak some info to the authorities or, alternatively, get murdered with me so our restless spirits could make fun of dutch people together as they drifted over the foggy canals. the guys said that would not be a problem, and we all started making arrangements to go. i will say i do not think my friend shared my zest for adventure, but merely agreed to go out of loyalty and concern. in any event, i thank her for her service.

and so, we were off. the four of us left radost around 3 a.m. and hailed a random cab off the street. the plan was to make a quick pitstop at their hotel to grab their luggage, stop at our dorm so that we could quickly pack and buy tickets, make the 6 a.m. flight, and be in amsterdam around 9 a.m.

i hardly ever take photos of anything, but my friend snapped some shots of this one. i am including them in this post for you (as a treat), though i have made a very low effort attempt at protecting the identities of those involved by blacking out the eyes (the windows to the soul).

be warned, these photos are very 2008 time capsule. they were taken with a turnip, and the outfits we’re wearing are heinous even by 2008 standards. you know what’s funny, though: i sometimes scan through pictures of myself from when i was younger and it’s hard to not be a little critical in my old age. i look like shit in a lot of them, my outfits were bad and often askew, like a child who dressed herself without having fully developed motor skills. my make-up was either haphazardly applied or melted off. last night’s eyeliner routinely became this morning’s smoky eye. but ignorance is bliss and back then i oscillated between either being perfectly content with my aesthetic and being completely uninterested by it. i was far less critical of everything back then. i was having a good time.

the body posture of imminent poor decision-making

discussing the details

the entire trip was wild, but the craziest part was actually our cab driver, paul: a polish man who drove us 75 mph (120 kph) the entire way to the airport, took his hands off the steering wheel multiple times to dance when the numa numa song came on the radio twice in 90 minutes, and—i shit you not—pulled a gun from the glove compartment when he was dancing, did a “raise the roof” dance move with the gun in one hand, and chanted “pussy, pussy, pussy!” while barreling down the highway. he didn’t point the gun at any of us, he just kind of waved it around in a non-threatening manner with a big grin that said “pretty cool, eh?” it made t*ny super uncomfortable since he was in the front seat, and he very politely asked paul to put the gun away. the way he asked was so funny: i could tell he was scared shitless but he didn’t want to seem like a pussy about it, so he was like “haha yeah man! but what if we put that thing back into the glove compartment.” but paul either didn’t understand or didn’t care, and he just kept vibing. i made sure to get a pic with this absolute legend before i left.

not anonymizing paul’s face because i know he wouldn’t want it

after we stopped to get their luggage, we stopped at my dorm which had 24/7 front desk staff. at around 10 p.m. each night, this 70 year old czech lady would clock in for the night shift. her job consisted of two things: making sure all the dumbass american kids signed in and out, and angrily telling anyone who didn’t live there to fuck off, the latter policy she enforced with an iron fist.

after about 40 seconds of me trying to convince her to let these two drunk grown men come upstairs with us “to buy tickets”, this woman exited her plexiglass cubicle with a broom and started violently shooing these men out the door while yelling at all of us. at that point, t*ny gave us his credit card and defeatedly told us to just book it, and resigned to waiting in the cab (meter running) with paul while we packed and made arrangements.

they had booked their tickets on something called “sky europe,” a slovakian budget airline that i had never heard of before. i am sure when t*ny offered to buy our tickets, he thought “it’s a 2 hour flight on a budget airline teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy, how much could those tickets possibly cost?” they were €800 each lmao. i had no capability to text or call him and say “mm, these are rly expensive, you still good?” and the thought of walking downstairs and dealing with the security babushka filled me with dread, so i booked them with the understanding that if the charge was denied, it simply wasn’t meant to be. but the transaction went through. we never discussed with them how much the tickets cost, but now that i am old, i know that that charge hit him the next morning like a ton of bricks.

i was tickled to read a press release 10 months after this trip informing the world that sky europe had been banned from landing in vienna due to unpaid landing fees, forcing the airline to operate all of its flights out of bratislava. i didn’t know airlines could be banned from landing in certain countries for being too poor. it’s like the aviary equivalent of getting banned at walmart for excessive returns. i wonder what else happens if you don’t pay your landing fees? do rival airline goons come during the dead of night and break the wings off your planes? sky europe unceremoniously declared bankruptcy later that month, and its final flight was September 1, 2009. RIP sky europe, my spirit airline. i hardly knew ye.

sky europe check-in

the €1600 tickets

for the record no i did not wear these horrible thrift store uggs to the club, just to the airport.

before we checked into the hotel, we grabbed some breakfast and then went to a coffee shop because, predictably, one of the main purposes of their short amsterdam trip was to smoke weed, do shrooms, and (maybe) get into some shenanigans in the red light district. the first tell that these guys were a little out of their element was the amount of coughing they did at the coffee shop, but tbh i was coughing a little too because up until that point, all the weed i had ever smoked had been absolute trash. after we bought the supplies, we headed over to the hotel where we found this tiny santa hat that i begged c*lby to wear ontop of his frosted tips.

i told him he looked like the ikea monkey in this coat

this was really sweet, but also very gay: the guys really wanted to make a video of them doing shrooms together. i have no idea why they insisted on doing it like this instead of asking one of us to film them front-facing the camera lmao. for some reason they felt compelled to link arms and feed each other the shrooms like it was some gay masonic brotherhood ritual.

and it was this moment, as these two grown men intertwined their arms and timidly fed each other tiny nibbles of completely legal magic mushrooms while trying to look cool on camera, that i became 1000% sure that i was not going to get raped that night. the forecast for sexual assault was zero point zero. these were good boys: they loved their moms, they knew how to do a load of laundry, and they stuck primarily to alcohol and maaaaybe a bump of coke every once in a while. psychedelics with a 6 hour trip duration made them nervous, and i do think they were glad we were there to keep them company during it.

after we all did the shrooms, we got on a bus to go to the van gogh museum, and then walked around the city. we discussed the possibility of going to the anne frank house, but decided it would be disrespectful to do that on drugs. instead, we all sat on a park bench and talked about how small we thought the secret annex was, while everyone solemnly nodded and said “that seems about right.”

t*ny stopped to play a game of hopscotch, and i wanted to see if i could fit my body into the womb of the lowercase “a” in the “I amsterdam” sign (i could)

around 7 p.m. or so, i could see c*lby was starting to get a little anxious. i’ve had a bad trip before and the early warning signs were all there. we walked past a movie theater that had a poster for the cohen brothers’ “burn after reading” in the window. it had brad pitt’s face on it, and that seemed to put c*lby at ease. he said “let’s go see this.” i remember thinking it was cool that he wanted to see a cohen brothers movie, and asked him if he liked “being john malkovich.” he had no idea what, or who, that was.

telling my friend she had to answer a riddle in order for me to lift the boom barrier (my leg) and grant access to her seat.

i don’t know if you guys remember Burn After Reading. it’s a pretty lighthearted and low-key film until about halfway through when george clooney finds brad pitt hiding in his closet and immediately shoots him with a gun point blank in the face, at which point the film suddenly shifts from a regular “ha-ha” comedy to a very black “oh no” comedy.

the moment that bullet blew through brad pitt’s smiling face and out the back of his head, my man c*lby started having a full blown panic attack. i remember him saying “oh my god what is happening. that’s not what i thought this was!” while leaping out of his theater seat toward the exit like he was jackie o hustlin out the back of the lincoln continental on 11/22/63. t*ny said “i’ll go check on him” and the two of them disappeared for the rest of the movie. we met them in the theater lobby after the film wrapped, and they assured us that everything was cool but that they wanted to go chill at the hotel for a while.

at the hotel, t*ny made one last ditch-effort to adhere to the “cool iterinary” and asked colby “hey bro, when you feel better do you want to go check out the red light district?” c*lby was straight up like “nah man, i need to be on a bed for a while.” and so that’s what they did.

after seeing this picture and noticing the lack of any mention of sexual tension in this entire story, many of you are probably like “father_karine, are you sure these guys weren’t gay?” i am sure. they were just gentlemen. also, by 8 p.m. the four of us were so tired and out of sorts that i don’t believe any of us lusted for anything other a glass of water and 10 solid hours of sleep.

we went to bed around 10, and said our goodbyes and left for prague the next morning. while i personally had a really fun time, i now understand there is a significant chance that they think about trip this as the time they spent $2000 to have a panic attack and not get laid, and that it might have been better to just get a couple of reasonably priced hookers for the night.

so, at the end of the day, this is really more a cautionary tale about not giving strange women unfettered access to your credit cards and the pitfalls of airline extortion than it is about spontaneous international travel with strangers you meet at nightclubs.

anyway, c*lby, t*ny, PAUL (??): if you’re reading this, thanks for a great 24 hours in amsterdam.