The law and how it is ignored
I met up with Laura this afternoon at the Blue Tea House in the Vondelpark, just in time to get under the sticky-outy roof bit before it started to rain (complete with thunder). Little Sara was there as well, peacefully sleeping through everything.
It was then a nice surprise when we were joined by a former co-student of Laura’s, Eduardo. We had stayed with him and his girlfriend a few years ago in Barcelona, and now he is over here with a bunch of blokes for his stag weekend. I didn’t actually know they had those in Spain, but well, yes, they do.
Without thinking anything of it, the boys soon had a bunch of beers that they had brought themselves cracked open, which conveniently avoided the queue at the bar (as well as being much cheaper). I knew that this would cause a problem sooner or later, but when a woman from the bar came to complain I just explained that this was “completely normal in Spain” and that they didn’t know any better. Of course that is total nonsense (probably) but it got us off the hook. The boys had in any case bought three bottles of wine from the bar, so it would have been nice of them to let us away with it. That is not the Dutch way, unfortunately.
Regarding Dutch ways of thinking, I was quite curious about how the recently-imposed smoking ban was being observed. When it came in in Scotland a few years ago, people just seemed to pretty much accept it immediately. Here though people have a strange way of interpreting rules: for example, hash is of course “sort of” legal, even though it is not at all officially. Clear?
Well, of the three bars we ended up in this evening, people were still smoking in two of them. Perhaps this was just coincidence, but perhaps a sign of how things will turn out in the long run. Of course, if and when the owners start getting huge fines things might change quite quickly.
