#12 Spend a week in a Dutch coffeeshop

The coffee shops in Amsterdam aren’t your typical Starbucks or kopitiam. Sure, they serve food and drinks too, but let’s just say that your mum wouldn’t approve, unless she happens to have grown up in the West in the 1960s.

Nevertheless, if you can stand the smoke and odour, you might find yourself drawn into strangely intellectual conversations with the patrons, with topics frequently skipping from politics and conspiracies, to science and religion, and back again.

Or they might just ignore you, staring glassily at nothing in particular.

For a less … objectionable experience, you’d probably want to ask a local for a koffiehuis, or coffee house instead.

Text done by Chew V'Ming.