Due to it’s latitude, Amsterdam, like many parts of the world, has long days during the summer. There’s nothing like 18+ hours of daylight to induce a touch of gleeful madness. In Amsterdam, on the last night to legally smoke anywhere, a circus giraffe also kicked open cages and freed a number of animals which were roaming peacefully on the tidy streets of Amsterdam. Which no doubt means, that people who’d been up all night smoking (not hard to do when the nights are short, the hard part is finding a bar open at 7 am) who saw 15 camels strolling towards the gracht.
The smoking ban in Amsterdam is intended to curb smoking in public places, like hotels, bars and restaurants. Hanging out in a crowded, jumping, hot, lively, Brown Bar (not a coffee shop) on a summer night can so thoroughly smoke a lass you’ll stay up all night to avoid being spiral sliced and will yellow even the whites of ones eyes.
Even Ireland has banned smoking in pubs, but the tricky bit in Amsterdam is the Coffee Shops, where things other than tobacco are discretely sold and smoked. It gets tricky because tobacco is almost always mixed with other stuff and then smoked. The custom, apparently, is to use an extra long paper and roll up a piece of cardboard to place on the mouth end as a filter/mouth piece then mix tobacco with well, what have you, and roll it up and puff away while quietly sipping coffee or juice. (Booze is sold in Brown Bars not Coffee Shops)
Read the article below for fears of how this is the first step to crack down on the coffee shops of Amsterdam.
Circus escape: Dutch wake up to camels and zebras in city street
The Guardian UK | Tuesday July 1, 2008
Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and a number of llamas and potbellied swines escaped from a travelling Dutch circus yesterday after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage. A police spokesman, Arnout Aben, said the animals wandered in a group through a nearby neighbourhood for several hours after their 5.30am breakout. They were later rounded up by police and circus workers. Aben said people fed some of the animals, but they were tame and nobody was hurt. “You have to imagine somebody rubbing his eyes first thing in the morning seeing 15 camels walking past,” he said.
Dutch smoking ban spells disaster for ‘coffee shops’
www.radionetherlands.nl | By Rutger van Santen* | 30-06-2008
Smokers have been warned: from 1 July it will be illegal to light up a cigarette in Dutch bars and restaurants, but what will this mean for the many world famous ‘coffee shops’ in which soft drugs can be freely bought and used? Many coffee shop owners are worried that the authorities will use the new legislation to clamp down on the industry.
From the start it was clear that the new smoking ban in the Netherlands would apply to public places like hotels, bars and restaurants, as well as nightclubs, sports centres and cinemas. But will it also extend to these coffee shops?
In these special cafés, of which there are more than 700 in the Netherlands, customers are allowed to buy a maximum of three grams of marijuana or hashish. Many customers linger in the coffee shop to smoke a joint and enjoy a coffee or fruit juice.
