Es ist Mein Geburtstag! Es ist mein Geburtstag!, I shout at anyone who passes me, though quite often just down empty streets also. The clock hit midnight at the exact time that I reached my destination Germany city. I'd never thought I would make it this far today and the excitation and satisfaction is too much for me as I shout in joy, pumping my fists, plummeting down the brightly lit roads.
The city gets increasingly more odd as I move through it. I keep asking people for directions to the centre, but no-one really understands my German very well. A few people point me in the right direction, many others blank me, while one tall man with long, greasy black hair, instead just sneers at me, tilts his head back to sip his beer, squints his eyes and says slowly 'You look like a fuckin' paki'... To which I said 'excuse me?', to which, well, he repeated himself. I find this response to my direction-enquiring quite baffling, yet simultaneously very intimidating, and unsurprisingly I slowly begin to pedal away. I then scurry off and think about what just happened, realising that this may have been the first incident of racism I have experienced in my life... though figure it's inaccuracy is what might have made it a more confounding experience than a harrowing one. Anyway, the day that a confused racist stops me from enjoying my birthday would be the day that Richard Dawkins converts to Islam (Here I of course mean the real Richard Dawkins, though it works either way I suppose as the popular science author Richard Dawkins is also a firm atheist), and I cycle onwards deciding to feel quite proud of a level of tan that can cause me to be mistaken for someone from Asia.
Have you ever been in the best mood of your life? In a situation where you are filled with energy, where a smile is glued to your face for so long that it begins to strain your jaw, where you just want to grab every person you can see and vibrantly say whatever the heck you want at them. Well I am in that mood, and lots of people are getting grabbed. A few moments earlier, someone finally revealed to me that I am in Holland, in a city named Armello, which explains why nobody understood me speaking German for the last half hour. This also means I've cycled 160km today, it's also my frikkin birthday and also being in Holland means all the bars are open til 5am, unlike in Germany where everyone I think maybe dies or something at 7pm. The mood I'm in is infectious, and the dutch drunks lining the bars can all tell something special is going on with me, they can tell that with this cat, it ain't just any ol night on the razzer, and they all want to get involved with whatever it is I'm doing. I can't put my finger on exactly how they know that tonight isn't just any night for me, but they do. Perhaps they know because they can see me next to my now well-seasoned, luggage-laden bike, or perhaps they know just because of the subtlest twinkle in my eye, or perhaps, maybe, they know because I'm running around grabbing everyone shouting it's my birthday and I've just cycled 1300km home with only 40 euros. Whatever the reason, somehow they seem to know what I have done.
The table I stand next to never has less than 2 drinks on it. No matter how fast I drink, people keep buying me more. Within 2 hours, I've come to know about 30 different people and we always do a little Jerry Maguire-esque point and click at each other when we bump into each other round the bars. Dutch bars seem to be filled with a lot more older patrons than in England, and seeing how approachable I am, the cougar population begins to sniff fresh meat. A bunch of 35+ aged woman surround me for a while, get me a drink or two and tell me that I must be very strong. I get essentially felt up for 5 or 10 minutes, but don't really mind as I am a sucker for flattery and, if completely honest, sometimes a bit of a tart too.
2 dutch guys that I'd been spending most the evening with beckon me out the bar, promising to show me "How real Armelloans do". We walk past a police car, and suddenly my new companions start acting quite cautious, giving me a nudge as if I should too. The situation slightly reminds me of when I was 14 or 15, when I'd pick up some weed with a friend and would see some police on the street. "Act casual", we'd mumble out the side of our mouth to each other and we'd almost whistle as we walked past the unsuspecting fools, thinking we were probably the coolest people in the whole of london at that point. However, I'm 23 now and I don't act casual for nobody, so I carry on skipping and secretly judge my compatriots a little for being so wimpy around the feds, though also suspect that we are definitely off to go do something illegal and am quite intrigued.
A dark alleyway makes do as the setting for whatever it is these dutch boys are about to do. I'm sure we've probably all been warned by our parents not to follow strangers into dark alleyways, but I'm glad that I decided to disregard such warnings (or be too drunk to remember them) on this occasion. On the way, I'd already half-joked with one of them, "you're not going to rape me are you?", and his reaction seemed sincere enough for me to trust them. They started climbing up some scaffolding, and after a quite complex combination of rooftops, staircases and further scaffolding, we'd got ourselves onto the balcony of one of Holland's most expensive hotels, which lay at the official centre-point of the city. I stood on the very edge of the building and did a Leonardo Di Caprio from Titanic, I'm sure we've all done one for a laugh in our time, but this one was actually (and maybe slightly embarassingly) done quite genuinely... in fact I'm not even sure if me shouting "I'm the King of the World" was even a knowing reference to the film at that moment.
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