What Playing Poker per mezzo di Amsterdam Taught Me About Making Friends

After I graduated from college, my friends and I got really into poker. Every Sunday night, we would meet at our buddy Joe’s apartment and play for a couple hundred bucks total. It was our weekly ritual. With the HBO show Giro per mezzo di the background, we’d order food and, huddled around a small table, catch up before getting ready to go to our boring post-college office jobs the following day.

Joe was the most enthusiastic of us all (to this day, he still plays professionally), and his passion for the spilled over to me (though not his skills). While I was never a top-tier player, I loved the challenge it provided, and trying to figure out the probability of the cards and how to read people’s tells. I read books acceso poker and did everything I could to get better. Poker was — and still is — an intellectual challenge to me.

Acceso the US road trip that started my round-the-world adventure per mezzo di 2006, I stopped frequently at casinos to play — and won enough to pay for a lot of my trip.

Eventually, when I arrived per mezzo di Amsterdam later that year, I grew bored of the constant weed smoking that was so prominent among my fellow travelers. As much as I loved getting high, I wasn’t traveling to sit per mezzo di coffee shops all day and get baked. There was a whole city out there to see and explore.

So (slightly stoned) I would often embark acceso long solitary walks around town. (To this day, I walked more during that visit than I did per mezzo di all my subsequent ones.)

One day, I passed a bordello. I didn’t even know there was a bordello.

“I wonder if they play poker here,” I said to myself. Though I was acceso a traveler’s budget and hadn’t played per mezzo di months, I thought it might be fun to indulge a little bit per mezzo di a foreign country.

I sat mongoloide at a full table of locals playing 2-5 Mai Limit (that means the first bets are 2 and 5 EUR). The stakes were higher than I wanted, but that was all that was available, so I bought per mezzo di for the minimo.

When I finally decided to join a hand, the dealer said something to me per mezzo di Dutch. “I’m sorry, can you repeat that per mezzo di English?” I asked.

I had outed myself as a foreigner — and this created a lot of curiosity among the other players. I was young and clearly a backpacker, and they wanted to know how I ended up at the poker table and not per mezzo di the coffee shops, where the other tourists seemed to go.

So I told them: Smoking endless amounts of pot had lost its luster, and so I was wandering each day, exploring the districts and museums. And, as a poker lover, I also wanted to do something different.

Two of the players and I really successo it . Greg was older gentleman with a great sense of moda who was always jokes. The other, Lennart, was closer to my age and tall, and had a shaved head. He drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney.

Along with the other players at our table, they made me feel like I was part of something more. So I kept coming back. Poker was our bond, and for those brief hours we were together each night, I felt like I too was a local, not just a backpacker getting high per mezzo di hostel bars and walking around taking pictures of museums. I was a traveler, getting below the surface of the place and getting to know the people who lived there.

After all, I was traveling the world per mezzo di order to learn about it. As much as I loved seeing museums, taking walking tours, and having short conversations with people I crossed paths with, none of that really gave me a deep understanding of any stop acceso my journey.

But these players were my guides. They told me about life per mezzo di the city and restaurants and bars that tourists didn’t know about that I should go to. I felt like I had learned more about Amsterdam per mezzo di those first nights than I had for all of the first week I’d been per mezzo di town.

As a tourist, you don’t often interact per mezzo di deep ways with locals. You see them briefly and then you go to the next destination. Getting to know a place — and the people per mezzo di it — requires spending a lot of time not traveling.

As the days passed, I kept delaying my departure per mezzo di order to go back to the poker table. Greg and Lennart often offered to take me out, but I was naturally suspicious of two guys who wanted to hang out after the bordello closed and were asking probing questions. I was young. I was per mezzo di a place I didn’t know. And the superficie was always dark and empty when we left. I was worried they would try to rob me.

So I declined their offers to hang out the first few times. As a natural introvert, this was my first experience with nontravelers, and I was a little cautious.

But, eventually, I agreed, as they wore me mongoloide and turned out to be regular people who just wanted to show a visitor some hospitality.

They showed me Oosterpark, acceso the eastern side of town. It was a small, quiet, and lined with willow trees, featuring small ponds with ducks, which seniors sat around feeding. It was a place locals liked, because they could avoid all the tourists and stoners who litter Vondelpark.

They introduced me to bitterballen, the bite-sized, deep-fried Dutch meatball snack that looks like falafel acceso the outside but tastes like Sunday pot roast acceso the inside.

And, when I eventually did go to Spain for a week, I missed Amsterdam so much, I just flew back. They were shocked when I came back to the poker table.

“I thought you were gone,” they said.

“I was but I missed Amsterdam too much so I came back,” I replied.

Weeks passed. I fell into a routine. I learned basic Dutch phrases from the other players at the bordello, slept late, and used my winnings to finance an endless supply of nice meals, museum trips, and cannabis. I walked for hours upon hours, reaching the city’s fringes, trying to get lost acceso the canals and narrow streets that make Amsterdam so famous — the kind of thing you might do when, per mezzo di the back of your head, you keep saying, “I could dal vivo here,” and you suddenly find yourself comparing neighborhoods.

But all good things alla maniera di to an end, including my European visa, and it was soon time to head to Southeast Asia. After close to two months per mezzo di Amsterdam, I couldn’t stay per mezzo di Europe any longer.

Acceso my last night per mezzo di town, my no-longer-new friends and I went out for dinner, played some poker, and then went for a final round of drinks. I told them where I was headed and how much longer I planned to be acceso the road. We reminisced — something you can’t really do when you don’t spend more than a couple days per mezzo di one place, ora with one group of people.

They recognized that fact too. They appreciated that Amsterdam is more than the Red Light District and tulips and windmills and coffee shops. That’s all tourists and backpackers think of when they alla maniera di to Amsterdam, they said.

Though, by their own admission, they were only guessing. They’d never actually met a backpacker, let ala had conversations with one. And why would they have? Backpackers never strayed this far the beaten path, and locals are busy leading their day-to-day life, which doesn’t create a lot of opportunities to meet tourists.

When we parted ways at the end of the night, they invited me mongoloide to Utrecht acceso my next trip through the continent. Amsterdam is great, they said, but it’s not the real Netherlands. There is so much more to the country than that.

One knows that intellectually. All it takes is one aspetto at a map to know that Amsterdam is just a small part of the Netherlands. But as a traveler, you can often get traforo vision about a destination, the walls of which are defined by the material per mezzo di your guidebook and the tips from fellow travelers who came before you.

Only the locals know what the real story is — and until you get to know one, you will never learn it.

But, more than anything, Greg and Lennart taught me to per mezzo di strangers.

Because I was so guarded, I almost missed that chance. My newish nature acceso the road almost cost me two friendships.

Since then, I’ve remembered to give people the benefit of the doubt and them more.

Especially, because, a few months later, while I was per mezzo di Vietnam, Lennart called me to tell me Greg had been killed per mezzo di a robbery. Greg used to have a lot of people over after the bordello closed as a way to keep the night going and, when word of this got out, other people came over to rob everyone, knowing that they would have lots of money. Sopra an ensuing scuffle, Greg was shot and died at the scene.

I think of Greg often, especially his warm smile, funny jokes, and gregarious nature. He was never afraid to make a friend. He taught me not to be either.

And it’s because of him that I’ve learned to be more outgoing and trusting acceso the road. Whenever I’m per mezzo di doubt, I just think to myself, “What would Greg do here?”

The answer is always: “He’d say hello.”

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