7:45pm – INT – RESTAURANT ENTRANCE
A family of four enters the Pannenkoeken house and waits by the entrance. They are approached by a waiter. He is a young waiter. He probably works at the Pannenkoeken house part time and goes to college where he studies for a less pancake orientated future. For the purposes of this story we will call him Dirk van Pannenkoek. Dirk van Pannenkoek enquires as to how he may assist the family. The family of four requests a table of four since it is what they require.
Dirk shows the family of four to the requested table with four seats and presents them each with a menu (which totals four). English menus are requested and given. Dirk does this quickly and efficiently as he is a well trained waiter.
With the menu’s arranged Dirk enquires if drinks are desired and four drinks are ordered, one each for the family of four. A short while later Dirk returns with the drinks.
7:55pm – INT – RESTAURANT TABLE
When Dirk returns later once more the family of four has suddenly become a family of three. Dirk suggests that he should return when the three have become four again but the family of three insist that they are ready to order. Dirk takes out his order pad and pen and three orders follow, each of which he writes down. He waits for the fourth order for the missing member but no order is given or seems likely to be given. Confused for a moment Dirk wonders if he imagined the fourth family member or if they are a very unkind family who considers someone to be on their own and forgotten when they visit the bath room. Slightly perplexed Dirk returns to the kitchen.
TEN MINUTES EARLIER
My father had spent a good amount of time umming and erring his way through the menu’s selection of pancakes on offer. It seems that no amount of ice cream or strawberry toppings could change his opinion of the pancakes nutritional value so he volunteered to go to the McDonald’s across the street. Shortly after he left the waiter had returned.
8:15pm – INT – RESTAURANT TABLE
Dirk returns with three pancakes for the family of three but something else is wrong now. It quickly becomes apparent that a mistake was made in the order. One of the three pancakes is wrong. Dirk apologizes for the mistake but the family offers to pay for the incorrect pancake anyway. Dirk does not know how to react to the English politeness so he puts the pancake down in front of the empty fourth seat and takes a new order with his pad and pen.
Dirk returns to the kitchen more confused than previously. He is confused by their politeness about the error while they showed such disregard for the missing fourth member (he still wonders if he imagine that). And why had he witnessed the young lady hitting the young man in the arm as he had approached the table.
FIVE MINUTES EARLIER
Even with the English menus the pancakes had a lot of unusual names so it was no surprise when my mother got the names mixed-up and ordered the wrong pancake. When the waiter had returned with a pancake covered in chicken instead of a pancake covered in ice cream the mistake became apparent and she ordered a new pancake.
The unusual sounding names were also the reason I had started making jokes at the expense of my girlfriend and her pancake order. I can be incredibly immature at times and anyone who orders a pancake called, “The farmer’s daughter,” is just asking for it.
“Have you had the farmer’s daughter before?”
“Yes. A few times.”
“So you’ve enjoyed having the farmer’s daughter a lot?”
She hit me on the arm when she realized what I was doing.
8:35pm – INT – RESTAURANT TABLE
Dirk returns to the family of three with the new pancake. He is about to put it down on the table when he suddenly notices something that courses him to pause. The family of three has become a family of four again and the fourth member is sitting with a pancake in front of him.
The confusion that Dirk is experiencing is very apparent on his face. A few seconds pass before he realizes he is standing still, staring at the family, holding the new pancake in mid putting it down motion. The fourth family member smiles at him, looking happy with his pancake.
The cogs in his head are trying to turn. A family of four had ordered four drinks only to become a family of three who ordered three pancakes and then ordered an extra one to become a family of four again.
Dirk puts the pancake down. Dirk wishes the family of four a happy meal. Dirk turns around and leaves. Dirk returns to the kitchen. Dirk sobs in the corner of the kitchen while rocking back and forth.
FIVE MINUTES EARLIER
After a successful trip to the McDonald’s my father had returned. He had sat back in his unoccupied seat and was slightly confused by what looked like a chicken covered pancake we had ordered for him in his absence. Once we had explained the mix up he was less confused than our waiter looked when he returned. My father gave the waiter one of those awkward British smiles as if to say, “It’s alright. This kind of thing happens to us a lot.”
This morning I went on an adventure.
I had not been planning to but as I waited so very patiently for my morning train a strange and curious desire for exploration overtook my legs and propelled them, one in front of the other, forwards. At first I did not think anything odd of this for it is my habit to wonder about, back and forth, up and down, around and around as I wait for any number of things. But this morning the realization dawned upon me that they seemed to be taking me in a single determined direction; towards the end of the platform.
Do not be alarmed dear reader. This was not a suicide attempt on the part of my legs due to wiriness of country wonders and tiredness of long walks on the beach. Nor am I writing this to you from beyond the grave. My legs very much like life and walking, as do I. No, they were not taking me to the ‘edge’ of the platform; they were taking me to the ‘end’ of the platform, the far end where no one goes.
Have you ever wondered why station platforms are so very long and yet trains are so very short? No one ever does but I was starting to. As I got closer and closer to the end of the platform my mind started to question what amazing and wondrous things I would find there. Would it be the home of a monster? An eight legged tentacle thing? Or a troll perhaps that ate railway line bolts?
I stopped and looked back for a moment to see how far I had come. The people, the other commuters, seemed so far away back where I had started. I wondered if they could even see the end of the platform, if they could even see me? For a moment I wondered if I should turn back, if such adventure was foolhardy. But the desire to discover what was at the platforms end was growing stronger and stronger within me.
Slowly, with each step the end of the platform drew closer and closer, until… suddenly… I was there. My toes were at the very edge of the platform world, softly touching the void. I looked out at the realm beyond the platform and beheld…
No matter how amazing the wonders contained within the view at the end of my adventure are there is one thing, one detail which is the most amazing of all. Do you see it? It’s the most fascinating thing. Do you see it yet? Look closer. There. By the stairs. A fiets goot (a bicycle ramp)… How Dutch can you get?
When approached by a drug dealer in the streets of Amsterdam there are certain services you expect him to offer, that being the service of a drug dealer who provides questionable substances such as cocaine, ecstasy and various other things on the police’s no-no list. So I was taken a little by surprise when a drug dealer approached me in the street and offered me Viagra.
There were three things that made this strange. (1) He was offering Viagra. (2) He was offering it while I was in the company of a male friend. (3) He was possibly suggesting that if we were so inclined we did not find each other attractive and needed some help in the bedroom.
The possible attack on my sexuality or my ability to ‘get it up’ aside I wondered what other marital aids he had on offer. “Some aspirin for when she has a headache, sir?” or maybe “How about some candles and some Barry White music to set the mood, sir?”
Did he offer birth control too? “I can see you are a sophisticated gentlemen sir so may I suggest ribbed? For her pleasure, sir.”
How far would his services go? Did he give relationship advice too? “The thing you have to remember sir, is never forget to say ‘I love you’, even for the smallest things.”
Maybe he even did street marital counseling sessions? “Debby, please tell Andrew why you are upset with him and then let’s discuss those feelings.”
Or maybe my imagination was just running away with itself again.
“No thank you,” I replied.
“Maybe later,” My friend said with a wink.
(For more stories about bizarre encounters with drug dealers check out: The Gentlemen Drug Dealer)
“It was a weed plantation.”
It was not the usual kind of text message I expected to receive from my girlfriend during an average working day but it certainly explained the small collection of police and security vans I had seen parked outside our apartment building that morning.
“They broke the door down early in the morning and found over 500 cannabis plants all set up with heat lamps.” She informed me upon my return home later, relaying information from a neighbor.
It also explained the loud banging that had woke me up at five in the morning. It had not been an insomniac handyman doing some early renovation. It had been the police forcefully entering one of the apartments in our building as they carried out a drug bust.
“No one was there though. They don’t even live there. They just use the place for growing weed.”
That ruined my metal image of a tall blond Dutchman dressed like Al Pacino in Scarface, standing in the middle of his two bedroom marble decorated apartment, screaming, “Zeg hallo tegen mijn kleine vriend,” before he opened fire upon the finest of the Dutch police force with a machine gun as they tried to take him down.
“All the plants were two weeks away from cultivation. The only reason they found it was because the watering system had started to leak through to the apartment below.”
That just proves that you should never short change a plumber.
When I had first seen all the activity outside in the morning there had also been a large white van reversing up to one of our apartment building’s exits (the one next to ours). At the time I had thought an eviction was being carried out and they were getting ready to throw some one’s furniture into the van, not 500 plants worth of ganja.
“They were carrying cannabis plants out of the building all morning so the fumes started to fill up the stairwell and apartments. Our neighbor said she has been feeling high all day.”
I imagined that a few of our other neighbors had probably experienced the same. I imagined the old couple from 212 having an attack of the munchies while calling each other dude, the normally hyperactive child from 204 being extremely calm as he discovered a much deeper level of philosophical meaning to Sponge Bob Square Paints, the old lady from 234 no longer complaining about her arthritis and the little puppy from 201 suddenly developing a taste for Bob Marley music and dreadlocks.
Now that everything is over there is a big anti-drug sign displaying a cannabis leaf with a red line through it stuck to the window of the former weed growing apartment, declaring that a drug bust recently took place there. It looks slightly like a ‘For Sale’ sign from a somewhat questionable real estate agency of college kids. It’s very nice of the police to put it there but it does not really help us with our plans to sell our apartment if potential buyers see it (unless they are interested in starting their own ‘greenhouse’).
“Legally you’re allowed to have five plants…”
Maybe the ex-owner of the apartment had miss placed a decimal point somewhere but somehow I doubted it.
“…so we were joking that it was a shame we could not have taken five plants each,” she finished.
Joking? Or spotting a hole in the market now that the local marihuana plantation has been taken down?
Angela’s recent story about her run in with a friendly drug dealer on her blog Amsterdamned reminded me of my own encounter with a rather strange drug dealer a few years ago:
I was once approached by a drug dealer who tried to offer me drugs (as his job title would imply). Being a little unnerved by this I decided the best approach was to ignore the man, fearing that any response on my part would trigger a conversation which he would use to reel me in. This did not go down to well with the drug dealer who asked again, this time slightly more annoyed, “I asked you; would you like any drugs?”
Again, I took the silent approach, hoping to avoid the whole situation but this only made the drug dealer more annoyed. “All you have to do is say ‘no thank you’ if you don’t want anything,” he grumbled.
I suddenly felt a little ashamed of my actions and sheepishly responded with, “No thank you.”
“See. Good manners don’t cost anything,” he said and walked off leaving me a little confused about what had just happened. Being lectured about manners by a drug dealer is not the kind of thing you usually expect to happen during a normal day but somehow this drug dealer had just gained the moral high ground over me.
I quickly decided that he must have been a gentleman drug dealer, a man of high standards and moral character. I imagined him returning home at the end of the day and retiring to the study with a glass of 1842 chardonnay, wearing a smoking jacket and sitting by the fire in his favorite antique leather arm chair, surrounded by high shelves containing his many volumes of valuable books (some of them rare first editions). He sits there and he thinks in silence for a time.
A short while later his wife enters the room to give him the evening news paper. She crosses the large room with grace.
“What is wrong Jerald?” She asks him, noticing the frown upon his face as she gives the paper to him. Her voice is soft and loving with a hint of an Irish accent.
“Ah, Barbra,” he replies, his words heavy with the weight of his troubles as he places the newspaper neatly upon his lap. “Sometimes I despair at the apparent moral decay of our society. Sometimes I wonder; when did politeness become such a rear commodity. Are we now living in an age where indifference and apathy are common place?”
“What is it my dear? Did another customer ignore you today?” She asks in her calming but concerned tone of voice, taking the seat next to him and lightly resting her hands on his arm.
He breaks his gaze away from the fire to look upon the face of his beautiful wife. “Indeed they did my dear. I know I should not let it vex me so. After all, I do not mind if they do not desire my services but to be ignored… well… that is simply rude and uncalled for.”
“It is terrible indeed. Good manners cost nothing as your father always used to say but sadly not everyone has be raised to understand this the way you and I have. You should try to rise above it and not let it trouble your mind.” She caresses his cheek to sooth his thoughts.
“You are wise in deed my dear. I will try to do so.” He smiles to her.
“Good” She also smiles.
“I wonder, is little Timmy in bed?” he asks, changing the subject after a short pause.
“Indeed he is.” She replies.
“And did he finish his algebra homework.” He asks.
“Indeed he did. He also cleaned his room, helped the maid with the laundry and recited me a poem, all before tucking himself into bed.” She says with a smile, proud of their young son.
“He is a good boy isn’t he? We have raised him well haven’t we?” He asks, his mind already wondering back to the previous conversation.
“Indeed he is and we have raised him well. I have no doubt in my mind that he will grow up to be a hard working, honest, god fearing drug dealer just like his father.” She responds with conviction.
He smiles proudly. “Indeed.”
(For more stories about bizarre encounters with drug dealers check out: The Relationship Advice Drug Dealer)
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