Amsterdam "trip"

This past May, I took a longly anticipated trip to Amsterdam. It was a trip I had dreamed about for years, and the second I had enough cash to do it, I was so there. I was travelling with my best friend, his parents had treated him to the trip for succesfully completing his first year of med school. We didn't have a plan, just plane tickets and bank accounts full of money. We hit the coffeeshops, and tons of them. About three days into our trip, we decided to go for something stronger. That's what I love about Amsterdam - the people are so great and pretty damn tolerant. We stopped off at the nearest Smart Shop and bought a quarter of Mexican shrooms (sorry, I'm not that technical, I don't know what strain they were). The city tripped us out enough just being baked, so we headed back to our place.

We were staying with some guy - we didn't know him, but he was nice enough to rent us a room in his apartment. The weird thing was, he had two hamsters that he let run free in his place, but that's another story.. I'm kinda a pussy when it comes to shrooms - I absolutely can't stand the taste of them. Back home, I would grind them up and stuff them into empty gel capsules from the health food store and that was just perfect, but we weren't that well prepared. We made tea instead, brewed the entire quarter into 3 cups of tea. We sat out on our balcony overlooking a grassy terrace with ponds and stuff, drank our tea, and let things happen.

About twenty minutes later, I started feeling a little queasy so I headed inside and layed on the bed (a huge king sized waterbed). I closed my eyes and lay there for awhile, when I opened them again, my entire world had changed. I was suddenly grinning ear to ear, staring at this painting that was on the wall. I don't remember what the painting was actually supposed to be, but half of it was blue and the other half a tan colour. I was laying on the waterbed, so naturally the blue started to look like the ocean. I could feel the breeze blowing on my face and in my hair, I could hear the seagalls, and I could smell the oceam. I was floating..

My buddy came in and lay down beside me, I hardly noticed him. This is where my trip really took off... I felt so intensly happy and everything I was seeing was so amazing. The air became three dimensional and geometric, and circulated around me in kaleidoscope shapes and colours. It's so hard to describe something in words that you just have to see for yourself, so I'm probably undermining everything all to hell. I couldn't think; I tried so hard to form conscious thoughts, but I was thinking, seeing, and feeling a million things in each micro-second that it was impossible. I remember my buddy moaning beside me, mumbling something about how he surely was going to die. I think I wanted to speak to him, but when I opened my mouth to talk all I could do was giggle. I have tripped many times before, several times very intensely, but never before was I incapable of communicating in some fashion with my fellow trippers.

I just layed there for what must have been a few hours - my buddy wandered in and out from balcony to bed. Images flashed through my mind, images of stuff I had never seen before, and images of things very dear to me. I laughed, I cried, I babbled nonsense.. My heart felt heavy with sorrow and grief, then soared with bursting joy and happiness. It was the most emotional trip I have ever been on. I felt my stress literally melt away, as I cruised along in my most revealing journey of self-discovery.

I eventually regained some sense and was able to sit up and talk to my buddy. I started to explore the room and soon found our stash. We had several bags of different kinds of weed, and I decided it was a good time to smoke some. I couldn't roll a joint, but I tried damn hard. We smoked the end product anyway.

My buddy decided he needed to take a piss. Panic choked the breath right out of my. The apartment guy's wife was home, and I was scared for us to come in contact with her. I couldn't fathom what she might think, I couldn't remember how sane normal people thought. My buddy didn't understand my paranoia, but I wouldn't let him leave the room. I couldn't justify myself, all I knew was that she was on a completely different wavelength and that our two worlds could not come in contact with each other. I sat in the corner in fetal position, shaking with fear as he headed to the door. I pleaded with him one last time not to go, but he went anyways.

When he made it back okay, I wept with relief. I think things pretty much started winding down at this point, we finished off with the standard mushroom trip of cool colours, tracers, and breathing walls/floors, lotsa laughs and weird thoughts. I enjoyed this part, not that I didn't enjoy the rest of it, but this was a welcome change from the intense overpowering emotion I'd felt for the first phase of the trip.

The trip ended rather suddenly, coming full circle back to the queasy feeling. All of a sudden, my vision was clear and things had returned to normal. My guts churning, my mind and vision still somewhat cobwebby, my buddy and I sat back to contemplate the trip.. He'd apparently had a horrible trip full of evil images and negative colours.

All in all, it was great. I felt absolutely exhausted afterwords, but felt so good. I felt like I hadn't a care in the world, and as with each trip, I felt changed. My buddy wanted to get some more a few days later, but I didn't feel ready yet to embark on another such journey. Even now, months later, I think it would take some mental prepping before I would be ready to take shrooms again. I'm only 19, but I did alot of drugs when I was younger and although I cherish each experience, I think I need a little more time to recover between trips.

Drugs can be a wonderful thing, but they do change you. I like my attitudes and thoughts about things, but they're so completely different from someone who's never tripped before. I feel quite priveleged in a way; I know things they haven't yet discovered....