I just realized that I made a bigger boo-boo than I thought in The Netherlands.
I had put my mobile phone in my pocket and forgotten to lock it. When I do so, it manages to send the last SMS (text message) to a non-mobile phone—fortunately it sends it to my home phone number in Germany thus only annoying myself and my roommate who received the same message, translated into a voice message 30 plus times.
It turns out that I made this fantastic maneuver in Rotterdam and chewed up more than 30€ on my prepay phone. Actually, I had started with 15€ on my phone, I was at negative16€, and I didn’t realize it until this evening.
Fortunately I think I was receiving inbound SMS messages once I’d locked the phone, since I got one on Monday, but I cannot help but think that I might have missed an SMS from the bartender at the Gay Palace. I found his picture on their site and have trimmed out the other bartender and posted it on the left for your amusement.
I think that I’ve commented before that I really like men in The Netherlands. The Gay Palace really is a smorgasbord of hot men who I’d gladly marry for love and EU citizenship—with love taking a greater priority. The principle attraction of all the men in the Netherlands is how tall they are—height is always a significant plus in my book and it is abundant in the Netherlands. I would say that I find about 20-30% of the men in the Netherlands as attractive in one way or another, as compared to my 10-20% in daily German life and at the most 5% in the States.
However, there has been one place where I had an exceedingly high hit rate for attractive men. Although I did not really mention it at the time, the men—nay boys—at the Kai Tracid concert in Dresden were really, really, really HOT. I would say that about 70-80% of the guys were my type—tall, funky hair, cool clothes… dreamy. Of course it was a straight environment and I got my ass pinched by a girl (ugh!), so I wasn’t really able to drool too much in public (besides, I was really ill at the time, although I didn’t realize it).
The über-hetero environment of Kai Tracid concerts hasn’t scared me though, and as I promised, I have been trying to see him in person again—and with incredible good fortune, Kai Tracid is performing at DoubleSTRIKE in Erfurt Friday night.
I will be there.
Today I made a point of buying tickets, which I had to pick up from a Thüringen Ticket office in Jena. Tickets were advertised as costing 12,50€, but service fees added another 1,80€—something that completely caught me off guard. 99.99% of prices that you see in Germany are the prices you pay because taxes are added in before items are priced (it’s the VAT approach, not the sales tax approach), and I guess I expected it to work this way for concert tickets, not the surprise “service fee” approach of TicketMaster.
This time I will be bringing my camera and plan on getting at least a few photos of Kai Tracid, and with any luck one with the two of us.
ha ha, adam got his ass pinched by a girl! btw…thanks for all the lovely post cards. are you ever coming back to ‘merka?
I’m not sure when I’m next in Amerika yet… the girl scared me.
🙂