The 24 Hour Relationship (Part 2)

A long day’s journey into an Amsterdam night.

If you haven’t read Part 1, you can find it here:

In Part 1, I met an American girl while waiting in line at a hostel in Amsterdam. I loaned her money to pay the hostel, we left our bags behind the desk and now we wanted to explore Amsterdam.

Part 2

“So, where to?” she looked at me expectantly.

I looked in both directions. Most people were going to the left. “Let’s go this way.” We took off to the left.

Just as the hostel clerk promised, there was an ATM at the end of the block. Jenny put her card in the machine, took some cash out and paid me back what she owed me.

“What do you feel like eating?” she asked.

About 20 feet further up the road, I saw several people standing in front of a store front. The sign above the store was in English, The Kebab House.

“Let’s try that,” I said decisively.

We stood in line, she bought me a kebab and we found an empty table outside on the sidewalk.

We had just sat down to eat when suddenly, a woman a couple of tables over yelled, “My bag! My bag is gone. It was just here!”

The lady was probably in her fifties. She was sitting alone. From her accent, she was most likely American.

“What did it look like?” someone asked her in English.

“It was a blue bag with a pocket on the side. My passport and money were in there! My plane ticket!” she wailed.

Everybody looked around their tables but it was obvious the bag was long gone. The thief wouldn’t have stayed around. A couple next to the lady try to calmed her down and advised her to go find the police.

“I feel sorry for her,” Jenny said once again facing me.

I nodded. I wondered if she was thinking about how she had left her passport lying around earlier. I did not bring it up.

“Going to the cops won’t do much good. They have more important things to do than track down a bag stolen by a street thief,” I quietly told Jenny so the lady wouldn’t hear me.

Jenny didn’t reply but just looked sad.

“So, what are your plans this afternoon?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I wanted to go see the Rijks Museum. And, then maybe the Anne Frank House,” she said.

I had planned to go to the Van Gogh museum.

Instead, I lied, “That is where I wanted to go too. I love Rembrandt!”

“Well, sounds like we have our second date then!” she said.

I stared at her while we ate and talked about where we were from, where we had been and where we were going.

She really was quite pretty. Long blonde hair and blue eyes. She was in good shape but not skinny. She was probably a couple of years younger than me.

I doubted she would be interested in me. I was far from athletic and had never really been considered good-looking. In the States, I would have thought she was out of my league.

But here, sitting outside that restaurant in Amsterdam, she actually seemed to be flirting with me as she asked about my life in the States. She reached across and touched my hand a couple of times during our conversation. I thought I might be falling for this beautiful American girl.

This was moving much faster than most of the relationships in which I had been involved. It usually took me months before I would even ask a girl out.

“So, what do you do back home?” she asked.

“I am a high school math teacher,” I answered.

She groaned. “I hated math in school! But, my teachers were not as cute as you!”

I blushed. She really was flirting with me. I didn’t even know how to respond.

“And what do you do?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing really. I quit to go traveling,” she said evading the question.

“But what did you quit doing?” I insisted.

“I was a bartender,” she said.

“That’s cool. I said. I used to bartend too,” I replied.

“It’s in a strip club,” she blurted out.

“Oh,” I said and then thinking that sounded judgmental, "That's cool. I bet the money was good.”

She didn’t respond to that. I thought about a girl I knew back home who used to dance in a gentlemen’s club. She used to tell people she was a bartender there. I didn’t ask Jenny anymore questions about her job.

We sat in awkward silence as we finished our kebabs.

“Let’s see where we are going,” I said breaking the silence. We got out the bus schedule and planned our route.

The afternoon was a blur. By the time we left the Rijks Museum and went to the Anne Frank House, we were holding hands and laughing like old lovers.

As we left the Anne Frank House, Jenny said, “Well, that was depressing. Let’s do something fun to cheer us up.

I really didn’t know her that well but I decided to take a chance.

“I noticed there was a Sex Museum in the Red Light District. My guidebook mentioned it anyway.” I tried to not sound like a pervert. If the guidebook mentioned it, surely it was legitimate.

“That sounds fun!” she exclaimed.

I let out the breath that I had been holding. Back in the States, I would have been way too shy to go to a museum about sex with a girl I had just me.

We hopped on a bus and went straight to the Red Light District.

To be continued.

Look for Part 3 here: