Slumming in Amsterdam

I'm at an Internet cafe in Amsterdam... not too much time left, so I'm going to try to burn through a couple of things.

#1 - Copenhagen

Gianna didn't end up cashing in the tournament. After the dinner break, she played hard. She outlasted a lot of greats like Gus Hansen. Then about 10:30 or so, she pushed all-in with AJo and got called with KQo. The flop came an ace, but the turn brough a King and the river brought a really ugly Queen. It was horrible. She really took it well, though. Back in our room she just said what I think is about the truest way of describing that sick feeling that only happens when you get knocked out of a tournament. "I feel like it didn't happen... I feel like I'm still sitting there playing and it didn't really happen."

So after collecting ourself a bit, we decided to go out and explore the Copenhagen night. We asked around and found a cool place to hang. Christiania. It's an old military base that was converted into a hippy compound in the late seventies. Some sort of crazy sociological experiment. It's right downtown in the center of Copenhagen, but you'd think you walked out of a time machine into the center of Haight and Ashbury when the flower children ruled. It's a pretty crazy atmosphere because the police have started cracking down on the area. What was even just a few months ago very free, with Danish hippies selling hash and weed openly on the streets, now has an air of repression. The police have been raiding, they tell us. Every night around 12:30am. Some of the people seemed sad, like they knew they were living in a time and place that was quickly disappearing. Others acted like things would be back to normal after the upcoming elections... but asking around, it doesn't seem like Christiania is going to go back to what it was. It's still a cool dig though, and probably the one place I felt really comfortable in all of Copenhagen.

#2 - Amsterdam

So we almost didn't make it here. There was a problem with the ticket and they were going to keep us in Copenhagen until the 10th when we'd fly back to Vegas and then on back to Fresno. But Gianna begged the airlines to cut us a break, and they did. So we were on a plane on Monday (1/31) back to Amsterdam to spend a week chilling and slumming near the red light district.

Amsterdam is a crazy place. Right when you get out of the central station, there's the smell of weed and hash greeting anybody from the coffeeshops, where they sell it legally. You can pretty much find a coffeeshop within two blocks of anywhere downtown that has about 5 to 10 different strains of weed, scales setup, even a microscope so you examine the goods. Standard prices are about ten dollars for a gram. I don't condone illegal drug use. It's nice, though, to smoke a joint right across the street from a police station and not have to worry about getting hassled.

We lost the first few days in a kind of haze. Then the other day we chilled out with Noah "Exclusive" Boeken. He was on a big high because he ended up winning the Copenhagen EPT that Gianna played in. He got it headsup against Ram Vaswani and took two hours to take the Hendon Mobster down... but he got the job done. Nice going Noah.

We chilled at his flat for a bit, which is a really cool place overlooking a square in Amsterdam. Then we met up with his roomate Justin, his roomate's girlfriend, and another Justin (ZeeJustin from pokerstars out of DC). The plan was to hit a coffeeshop and then go see The Incredibles. But the movie was only showing in amsterspeak, so we skipped it and ended up just chilling at his pad and playing Chinese Poker and another game he taught us called Toi Tee Tai (or something along those lines).

#3 - Five minutes left on the internet clock, so I'm cutting it short. For everyone who's emailed, sorry that I've been out of touch. It's going to continue until I get back to business as usual next week. But shoot me an email and I'll make sure to get to them when I'm back in the states and they aren't charging me to connect. It's pretty easy to get homesick when you're paying five euros for an hour of internet access.