The NIPYATA! Tours an Amsterdam Coffee Shop (Where they don't sell coffee)
Holland: the land known for tulips, wooden shoes, cheese, and of course, sex workers and marijuana. Amsterdam in particular is Europe’s Sin City, and as a result is the location of many British stag parties and drug-induced stupors- perfect for a NIPYATA! Adventure.
I live in Amsterdam, and wanted to take NIPYATA! on a tour of the best that the city has to offer. So on a typical rainy day, Nippy the NIPYATA! head joined a friend and I for a smokey afternoon.
Please excuse the low-quality iPhone photos; my camera broke halfway through this excursion.
Weed in Amsterdam is kind of confusing. Unlike in the U.S., there are no “weed stores” (what we call dispensaries) that sell only marijuana. This is because the substance is actually technically illegal, so there can’t be stores that are outright for the sale of weed. Instead, marijuana is considered a “tolerated soft drug”, so the government essentially turns a blind eye to the sale of it, rendering it essentially legal in places like Amsterdam.
As a result, if you are looking to imbibe, don’t look for a dispensary. All you have to do as you wander through the city is find one of the hundreds of store fronts that contain the words “Coffee Shop”. These are the places that you can buy weed (and coffee), and aren’t to be confused with “cafes” like Starbucks.
Thankfully, our NIPYATA! didn’t have the awkward experience of walking into a Starbucks looking for weed. Instead, he cycled with us to a favorite local place: The Green House.
"We visited the Green House - the very coffee shop where Ali G famously interviewed former UK Prime Minister Sir John Major on legalization of cannabis. We might have this fact wrong. The Amnesia Haze is stronger than we expected. The NIPYATA! is now speaking fluent French and we're understanding every word."
Located near Waterlooplein, an area that is fairly close to the city center but isn’t as swarmed with tourists as Dam Square, the Greenhouse is a great place to sit outside and watch the world go by. Just around the corner from where Rembrandt lived and graced the world with some of the finest masterpieces known to man, we bought a gram of Amnesia Haze and sat down to begin our adventure.
While you can buy pre-rolled joints at most of these places, we chose to roll our own while sitting outside of the shop. Nippy was actually our greatest ASS-et (get it? He’s a donkey?) in rolling the joint: it was a typical windy day, and the cavity of Nippy’s head gave us a place to store the weed while we crafted our smokable masterpiece.
After rolling, we lit that shit up and sat back to smoke, chat, and talk about life. My friend brought her dog along, and once we were good and high we sat laughing at the tiny wiener dog trying to play with a huge stick and attack pigeons.
"Angsty wiener in the background. Also speaking French. Amnesia. Haze. Muy. Fuerte."
Our NIPYATA! loved the coffee shop’s offerings, but there was one negative to the adventure: there was no food, and Nippy was getting hangry. The Stay Classy Burrito NIPYATA! made it very clear that he wanted a burrito, so we made our way to the Dutch version of Chipotle before Nippy got too mean.
After our pit stop, we biked back to my apartment because it was too cold to eat outside. We ate our amazing burritos and started watching some TV when I realized Nippy had gone missing!
"Nap-yata. The nerve of that guy."
Turns out that imbecile had the nerve to sneak off and crawl into my bed for a post-smoke nap. I had to wake him up and kick him out so I could get some rest for the following big day of weed smoking and jack-assing around Amsterdam.
Overall, I think our NIPYATA! had a great time on his first tour of Amsterdam and is excited for the many adventures to come.
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