UPDATE: The Black and White Party

Special Agent TR 33, our woman in Amsterdam, reports on the New Year's Eve party contest you may remember from a few weeks back:

"We did indeed win the New Year's party, thanks to all your votes but also at least partly due to the fact that [identity obscured to protect the Leisurely] asked some friends at [a certain computing company] to hack the contest. They disabled the IP address based time limit and flooded the contest with untraceable votes. Heh heh.

So we won-- but it turned out we didn't win a party! Those contest people are such fuckers-- they totally lied about the prize. We only won (supposedly) 3,000 euros worth of Schmointreau, mixers, and the services of a bartender for the evening. So we didn't have anywhere to throw the party and only 1 week to get it organized. Rather than tax our financial resources to their ultimate limit we did a little under-the-table bargaining with a bar we have ties to here and sold all the liquor to them for their New Year's Party. It worked out pretty well-- we didn't get 3,000 euros for it but we got enough to pay the rent that month, and had enough left over to go on a flea-market shopping spree.

Our New Years was still really lovely-- after we sorted out the liquor drop-off we grabbed a bottle of Absolut (the city was sold out of champagne) and walked up to Nieuwmarkt, this lovely little plein with a castle-type thing in Amsterdam's Chinatown where everyone goes to set off their fireworks. Fireworks are only legal on New Years, but people really go nuts-- it was the most incredible fireworks display I'd ever seen. There were big starburst ones reflecting on the canals and lighting up all around the castle towers. There were also those huge Chinese box fireworks that sound like a dozen machine guns and other ones in strings that stretched for blocks. It looked like someone was fire-bombing Disneyland. Add to that herds of obnoxious teenage boys simply hurling firecrackers into the crowds of unbelievably plastered British tourists. When the Brits weren't being exploded, they were busy climbing around on wet, shaky scaffolding and tumbling from great heights into piles of sodden firework paper and broken glass. I saw one asshole drop his bottle of Heineken and then collapse onto it. His friends were all like, "Jolly good idea!" and they did it too. I should mention Dutch breweries come out with special, XXXL beer containers especially for New Years. Add to that all the semi-legal drugs and it's no wonder so many British tourists look birth defected.

We managed to navigate the chaos safely, although it was quite a video game getting home on our bikes. Everyone set up their fireworks launchpads in the bike lanes, so beneath a steady rain of smoldering cardboard & in between dodging drunken Dutchies and utterly gormless Englishmen we had to avoid little stacks of flaming gunpowder and ubiquitous piles of broken glass. We made it home quite safely, although Michelle became a bit high-strung when some evil child tossed a lit firecracker under her front wheel.

The miracle of Dutch efficiency cleared away all the debris before we even awoke the following day. I must say this New Year's was both the most exciting as well as sober New Year's I've ever spent as an adult-- Michelle thoughtfully restricted our intoxicant intake as she knew we'd have to keep our wits sharp and reflexes unencumbered. Oh yeah--a few days after New Years those Schmointreau fuckers called and demanded photographic evidence of our party so we stole pictures of strangers off the internet and sent them in. Suckers."

We salute you, Special Agent TR 33, for your inventive and Leisurely solution to the "Schmointreau" conundrum!

Posted by hilatron at February 23, 2003 06:00 PM | TrackBack