Amsterdam's Daylighter(s)

A narrated travel-journal of a Dutch journey involving commercial discovery and the 'magic' of feeling qualitatively less devilish.

A fun travel-philosophy portrait, perhaps to retire with, inspired very loosely by the unusual 'journal' oriented American film Slacker (Richard Linklater). Thanks so much for reading, 

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I'd been wandering around South Jersey (United States) after graduating from Dartmouth (New England) with a degree in Cognitive Science and living on my parents' family fortune/property as an immigrant-prince and writing journal entries about the quality of consumerism-consciousness in modern Western civilization. I started to get honestly bored.

So, two months later, I'm on a KLM flight to Amsterdam to take-in some more 'quality' street-traffic/culture photos of new millennium consumerism-culture for my more 'enhanced' diary-entries about the 'psyche' behind capitalism in daily-life. The KLM flight was quite good and the flight-attendants/pilots quite dashing. My name's Amlan Satan, and this is my existential quest to discover 'meaning' in modern commercial imagination/transit.

My hobbies include chess, culinary arts, comic books, and Capoeira (martial-arts styled dancing-acrobatics). I picked up some of these skills/interests at least while in college learning about the 'drama' of human behaviors and the 'photo-shots' behind living life in the modern world. I find myself in Amsterdam thinking about soccer (World Cup year!) and street-fashions. I consider myself a newborn-nerdist of a special 'diary-anthropology' view of world report(s).

When I got to Amsterdam, I immediately took-in the scope and quality of the offbeat differing styles and aesthetics of the iconic Euro-city which had become 'world-known' on the media-stage mostly thanks to the incredible talent/achievement in sports (men's soccer and women's field-hockey), which any fan of modern sports-TV in the United States will tell you might be a 'portal' into what makes the Netherlands/Dutch so simply colored!

I had some street-food (yum) and went to a hash-bar and then to a bookstore to find some cool comics about Superfriends/Justice-League en-route to a toy-store an airport service-person told me about, to find a special number-tile wood-cut slide toy I'd seen in a Dutch magazine on my plane-flight. When I got to the Amsterdam toy-store, I wondered about the differences between Dutch imagination/playspace and American ones. Why do the Dutch call a quarter-pounder a 'Royale' instead of a quarter-pounder? What's so different about Dutch consumerism/intelligence?

Inside the toy-store, I'd noted the colored shelves of incredible and fun and cute and playful and 'user-friendly' toys and items that I might want to buy/keep for my 'anthropological' survey of Dutch consumerism/capitalism consciousness. This is the age of Burger King and Toy Story after all and I needed an Amsterdam 'daylighter' for expositions on the 'nature' of human/social daydreams in this post-9/11 era of continued rampant shopping statistics!

I consider myself a fit-and-sturdy young Algerian-American man of the modern globe and took some Selfies for my Facebook-post about the fun of Dutch consumerism street-research and how it made me 'yearn' for a more street-wise diary view of what makes commercial vanities in Amsterdam so unlike American 'brands' of hot-dog democracy and yet still just as complicated. I thought of myself as a 'fashion-science' model!

DIARY-ENTRY: With this number-tile sliding wood-cut puzzle hand-toy, I can 'daydream' about the nature of sharing-IQ!

That's just about the time I'd meet my mermaid-escort in Europe, a Dutch super-beauty named Esmerelda who happened to be anticipating a very cool Netherlands-Argentina women's national rivalry-matchup in field-hockey which would cast ideations of what makes a #1-2 contest a real media-gem. We went to the game together, after I gave her $100 to simply be my personal 'friend-tourguide' for just one day in Amsterdam. We even fell in love after she fell in love with my nifty pocket-kept number-tile slide wood-cut puzzle-IQ toy. I felt I just had to post her portrait for some Facebook-IQ/commentary about the nature of serendipity in our cheeseburger capitalist dungeon!

ESMERELDA: What'd you make of my 'bohemian' apartment, Satan (Amlan)?
SATAN (Me): Very cool, Ezzy; it reminds me of a cross between San-Fran and New Zealand (inventive).

ESMERELDA: I can't get enough of your little number-tile wood-puzzle IQ-toy, Satan.

SATAN: Well, that's a true human confession to daylight your Amsterdam 'palace' (for discourse!).

I'll never forget Esmerelda and what she taught me about women's field-hockey and/or Amsterdam daylighters. I found her to be the right 'mermaid-guide' in my quest for passion, discovery, journalism, and human science(s). She'll always be that 'random' magical encounter for cheeseburger-escapism in Europe (ha). She was only the 4th girlfriend in my entire life, but arguably the coolest! However, what I really learned during my Dutch existential journey was the quality of street-foods. Isn't that American?

INTERPOL: Blood-diamond corruption today threatens the world gem-exchange(s) and makes terrorism woe!

MOTHER: How was Amsterdam?
ME: I got exposure/journalism for street-flair, passion, toys, sports, and even diamond-news intrigue/danger.

MOTHER: Yes, blood-diamond crime-wave reports are on the headlines in Boston now, sonny.

ME: I met an incredible 'sorceress' while in Amsterdam who shared her 'daydream' of field-hockey excellence with me.

MOTHER: Oh, the Dutch are quite good at that!

ME: Maybe I'd just been looking for a 'reason' to become more discrete.

MOTHER: Good.

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"Money is everything" (Ecclesiastes)