It all caught up with me this week. I've been continuing Dutch habits and been hammered every night since I got back and, accordingly, haven't really done very much apart from eat, sleep and mong out, hence the lack of entries when I have so much to blab about

So these crazy fireworks eh? Bloody hellfire. I had no idea they would be *quite* that loud. It was the only surprise Amsterdam held for me, and it was certainly a novelty, what with it actually affecting my hearing and everything.

I kind of pride myself on having pretty hardcore hearing, I've spent too many nights dancing away at free parties and whatnot right in front of big-*albatross* PAs, and can normally stand much more in the way of aural abuse than people around me, just because my hearing has already been conditioned/mildly damaged by the aforementioned nights mincing away right next to the rig. However.... -

I actually had tinitis as I walked away after midnight, and even had to leg it away from the nearest `bombs` along with everyone else because they were just too much noise to be right next to!

Yup, bombs, that's what I said. They practically were for Christ's sake - the people who do these things, and they are all private enthusiasts I guess and rich ones at that, set fire to explosives and simply drop them on the floor anywhere, near the crowd, they don't care, and they sit there fizzing away, and anyone not quick enough on the uptake soon finds themselves standing on or near a very loud (yet relatively harmless) explosive charge.

Ghost_rider would love all this, what with his Penchant for Pyros

From the point of view of a recidivating tourist ; Dam's square is where the a large part of the carnage takes place, its a big open area in the middle of the city, it is actually built on the Dam that gives the city its name (a Dam on the river Amstel, see?) and is about 300 - 400 feet in diameter, maybe more.

It had a few thousand people on it and in the alleys, canals and streets that lead off it. It would contain a lot more in the way of crowds but in the middle there was, understandably, a clearing that was devoid of any sanity as this is where most of (and all of the larger) fireworks are thrown, in the middle of all the people for communal consumption, as it were.

Into this went the firecrackers, the catherine wheels (none of that fancy `nailed-to-a-pole` business for the Dutch; they just light 'em and throw 'em, and they make their way across the ground wherever they want to go by sheer force of rotation) the `superbomb` bangers that hurt from 50 feet away, the airbombs and rockets are fired flat over the top so as to detonate over the crowd's heads, and anything else anyone can think of is generally chucked into it.

The most impressive though were not the airbombs launched horizontally through the air, or the insanely loud superbombs that were, for the sake of public decency, mostly thrown into the middle of the square; the best of the bunch were some truly gigantic strings of firecrackers.

You know those strips of 100 firecrackers that you can't even get in this country? Well they have bigger ones than that over there and they don't stop counting at 100. Oh, no.

These are about 50mm long by 15mm thick and each one sounds remarkably like a blank round, and only a touch less noisy. Somewhere between a blank round and a PFC cap in terms of decibelage I reckon, out in the open air.

Now, judging from the fact that a 100-strip (they're doubled or trebled up) of these big bangers is about 18" long, then the double layer (at least) string that was all of 35 feet long - maybe more - that they set off at the stroke of midnight must have contained over 4,500 of these little sticks of joy, and given that there were rockets going off overhead, superbombs being chucked in the middle of the vast crowd, and various other fireworks doing their explosive thing at the same time then it was, audibly, exactly how one would imagine a battlefield in a World War.

Mad stuff. But really, really cool, and if I go again for new year's eve I will definitely invest in a hundred quid's worth of those kick-*albatross* firecrackers, they were awesome

Another neat trick they did was to choreograph some of them. We were wandering back to the coach pickup point past a subway entrance on the right and a church on the left, and suddenly the subway exploded and a massive ringing rythym came out from it - once we had retired to a safe distance (the only compliance with English sensibilities we upheld the whole time) we heard that there was an orchestrated rythym in there; somewhere between the drums of breakbeat and a marching band. Most impressive, and probably the very devil to arrange.

Ingenuity abounds in Amsterdam you see, it must be all that herbal inspiration