Eurotour Days 6-8 - Amsterdam

We’ve spent the past three days of tour just chilling out in Amsterdam because we couldn’t get any gigs on these days. It’s been pretty nice though. This tour is more of a tour-cum-holiday so we’ve had a few days to properly relax. We all invested a bit of time reading and sleeping and we watched a few films too, namely The Thomas Crown Affair (6/10), Full Metal Jacket (first half 9/10, second half 5/10) and Taken (8/10). As avid Entourage fans, we saw the first season boxset in the room we were staying in and re-lived a bit of that too. I love Entourage.

We did actually leave the house too, believe it or not. Yesterday we went on a boat ride with a guy called Phil so we got to see all of the canals and stuff. We felt pretty British kicking back with a beer and waving and shouting at people. Admittedly the shouting was mostly me. It was nice shouting though, not abuse. That was all well and good until Victor, one of Phil’s friends, chopped off the end of his finger when attempting to stop the boat from hitting the wall as we moored. He basically got his ring finger trapped between the boat and the wall and ripped his nail off. It was quite gruesome but he handled it well. Lee rushed to the rescue and went to buy him a bottle of chilled water. When he came back, Victor had got a taxi to the hospital and the water wasn’t even chilled. But Lee is a thoughtful guy and I drank the water so that it didn’t go to waste.

We’ve also spent a bit of time learning about each other. Tom and Lee are learning that I don’t like people to get things out of my bag and then leave the bag unzipped. One of my top tips to the guys has been to make sure that bags are always done up, then if they get knocked off a chair for example the contents don’t spill on to the floor. It’s common sense but some people need to be told. Tom and I have learned that Lee doesn’t like to be told what or when to eat. It’s just not the kind of thing that you do with Lee. I have learned that I should never take Lee’s directions when in a car. On our journey to Amsterdam he directed me into a wrong lane causing an additional twenty minutes of driving, and did the same thing when we left the motorway to go into a service station. There were two lanes and he insisted that I needed to be in the right hand lane, which actually took us on to another motorway. Once I realised this (and let’s remember that we’d already had one detour which had added substantial pain to our already laboured journey) I pulled a u-turn on the slip road (yes I did) and drove back up the slip road to the service station in the face of oncoming traffic (although there wasn’t actually any oncoming traffic, but there could have been). It was so rock and roll. I did a little skid into the service station too. So the boys were learning that I can be a dangerous driver when it’s called for. 

Other fun things that we did in Amsterdam included going to a really expensive chocolate shop where Rinke could buy sugar-free chocolate because she needed it because she was on her period and she felt sad. It cost about £7 for a bar. I had a bite and it tasted like cardboard. I was just glad that Rinke felt better though because we care for her very much and we don’t want her to feel sad. We also walked around the city and passed part of the red light district. I thought there would be something amusing about it but there really wasn’t. If you haven’t been to the red light district, basically women stand in shop windows in their underwear beckoning you into the shop. Then I guess you give them money and have your wicked way. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so sordid and wrong as being able to buy a woman in a shop window. The whole city has really disgusting dark undertones that made us feel pretty uneasy. 

Anyway, I like Amsterdam slightly more now that I don’t have to worry about driving my car around, but I still don’t like it as much as other places. Today we’re going to find a cigar shop and get some wicked cigars to take back to England. That’s about it. Then we’re finally going to play a gig for the first time in four days.

This is Lee and I in bed.

This is Lee and I on a mother******* boat.

This is a box of Dutch football-themed cream cakes, of which I ate one and a half.

This is peanut butter and hagelslag (posh hundreds and thousands) on toast. I eat this every day for breakfast.