Amsterdam. What a wonderful place. If I had to design a city, I’d do canals with little boats. I love little boats. Of course, if I did it I would use “boats”. It’s so civilized. Walking over the little bridges spun on Adderall, such a great feeling to be lost in the world…

 

And such an American… I snapped a few photos, sure. I like old things. Like this, for example:

 

 

 

 

 

The big bell in there totally wouldn’t fit through the doorway. So they put the bell on the ground and built the tower around it, then hoisted it up. As I’m taking a photo, all the little bells start going off. Never in a million years would I thought that shit was functional. Impressive! Then a low, regal Bong! sounds the one o’clock hour. It all still works, all that old stuff here. Back home stuff from the 70’s doesn’t even work…

 

 

 

 

It’s great to go down these little alleys and image what the place looked like in the 17^th century with carts and dogs and bushels… you can see that they lost their fight to formula retail. The neon and corporate logo stand out like a Finnish death metal band at Disneyland. You look at it and you’re like “No no no…”. I imagine that when we lose the fight, Valencia will look just like this:

 

 

My last night here I stayed at a shitty little dump of a hotel in the middle of the downtown just to be near the tourist shitshow. I love a good shitshow. And I wanted to see the royal palace. Well, there is a full blown carnival in front of the palace and I just had to laugh out loud. All the gaudy neon and they got full on 6 BIG rides on basically half an SF block. Impressive. But the new disco carnival stuff in front of the old gothic stuff was just a laughable contradiction. And everything was so close together it seemed impossible that is was safe. Bad carnival fung schway...

 

 

 

I spent probably 2 hours just watching and looking. The rides are made WAAAAAAY better than the rides in the US. All hydraulic, all fancy aluminum stuff, very little steel. Their trailer system is different, way better. All the trucks have what appear to be 14” tires. Big trucks! The carneys on the lot were totally carneys. Bless their criminal little hearts. I’ll always have an affinity to carneys.

 

The ketchup here sucks. Bring your own.

 

Chickenjohn