Waking up in Amsterdam!

On Friday night I attended a “dance party”.  As I walked there I thought about things like taking pictures for Todd’s blog.

I’m not so sure now that pictures would be appropriate.  Besides, I didn’t take any.  It was about dancing.  And it was about drinking.  And it was all designed to be overwhelming in a way that a picture can’t describe.  And honestly, it was kind of spooky too.  Because it was also the place the city’s dark side hung out.

The parties Todd photographed were night clubs.  This was a rave.  It was a quasi-legal party, behind private security, deep inside the bowels of a foreign registered boat tied up in the harbour just slightly outside of town.

A factory fishing ship, who’s holds are now dance halls; thousands of guests pour down the narrow metal stairs, leading to ever lower sections and further stairways.  You follow the sounds of pounding music and arrive into a room of bodies.  Everyone sways and moves, the music moves the crowd as a whole.  If you push past there are more hallways, more stairs, and more rooms of moving bodies.  Every room has a bar and intoxicants flow.  Along the way you step on wooden boards covering holes in the gangway.  The only decoration over the refrigeration coils  are camo-nets.  Everything smells of oil.  It’s dark; lights and music hit as one; flashing, pounding.  Spinning?  The hull slopes inward more the further you descend.  “Descend into madness”, you think.

In a word, it was perfect.  Fucking exactly perfectly dead-on to what was expected.  Like a cross between a night-club, a horror  film and a rollercoaster.

And at the end of the night, Thunderdome.  Gone was the private security force that let us in.  They had been replaced by people huddled around burning barrels.  Undead partiers, walking, hobbling, slowly past conveyed the mood. “Morning”.  Not a chipper, hello-day, coffee achiever morning.  It was more like the groaning of the vampire who must regretfully retire to his box of dirt.  There was a shared knowledge that the day was just about to arrive, and other than sunrise, no of us wanted to see any of it.

The first rays of sunlight hurt.  Thankfully I was back at my bike by then.  It was then just a short ride home, to a long day-after.