Two memories stick out-
* Some big tenement in Hamburg, Germany...I have no idea where it was exactly, but it was a big cluster of huge rundown tenement buildings that were about 25 minutes walk from a train station. What happened was I had been buying heroin a few times a week, generally to help deal with hangovers (so that I didn't 'lose time' overseas feeling all shitty)...it was no problem as open-air dealing was very organised, you'd just jump on a train that went in a loop through the inner city and get off when you spotted your shady-looking Turkish tout, bing bang boom, you're back on a train speeding away.
The problem was that I didn't know that heroin was sold from like 5-7am, but by about 8pm 95% of open-air heroin dealers would go home...being replaced by crack dealers. So I'm wandering round with pretty limited German (it was good enough to travel but I didn't know enough slang...and 80% of the conversation would be slang), getting on and off trains as I keep having the same conversation with different turks- Crack? No, got heroin? No. After about 5 stops I'm about ready to give up and just go get drunk when these two sorta punk/goth looking speed freaks get on my carriage. Me being a tourist/native English speaker and them being on speed made striking up a conversation incredibly easy...when they got off I tagged along and just as the train pulls away one of them asks if I wanna buy some speed or roofies (flunitrazepam)- of course I do! I get a gram of amp putty (because it was SO cheap and amphetamine paste is super novel for me) and half a dozen roofies then ask if they know where to get some heroin at this time.
And for a tip of a few euros plus obviously hanging out with them (hanging out with friendly German woman- oh no!
) and sharing they absolutely did know where to get some smack (as is always the way- no one can get any...unless you're offering to hook us up
). Being young, arrogant and intoxicated by the presence of foreign women & gratuitous cleavage it only occurred to be that this was a kinda terrible idea when I was wandering down a completely unlit street lined with groups of young, drunk Turks getting smashed on a Friday evening...we were some of the only white people there and were speaking mainly English. Eventually we turn into this tenement building, there is only one enterance into the courtyard- all the rest have been blocked with trash, furniture & shit- we walk past cracked out hookers looking for johns and people openly shooting up. The girl who I gave the money earlier split off and went around a corner while I waited with the other chick.
It only took about 3 minutes for her to return, 5 at the absolute most...but fuck man, those were some of the slowest minutes of my fucking life. I felt like I was in a fucking nature documentary...only I was the baby gazelle who has been separated from the herd and has only just looked up and realised that it's surrounded by a pride of lions with multiple packs of hyenas waiting in the wings.
Then again, I did it for the story and I got a story alright. The (probably 99% imagined) 'danger' of the situation mainly served to make the whole experience better.
What Neversickanymore said about it being really strange being in places where literally thousands of junkies- homeless and not- hangout it fucking surreal and more than a little freaky. I haven't been to that square in Athens, but there are places like that all over Europe- if you ever go to Switzerland go to the Swiss national parliament, the parliament complex is in a large very pretty park that is completely open to the public- local junkies call it 'needle park' as it is home to literally hundreds of junkies. There are people shooting up in plain view of the offices of MPs in parliament...which is kinda fucked, but that alone probably has done a lot to encourage Switzerland's more liberal & experimental approach to dealing with their heroin problem.
There are many awful places like that all through Italy & Spain too..simply too many to name, there are several in every Italian town and city...junkies haven taken over numerous ancient sites. There's a sort of romantic irony/justice to that I think.
anywany, story 2:
* A shanty town on the outskirts of Beijing, I'm not sure of its exact name as it officially doesn't exist and thus isn't on any maps, nor is there any signage or anything like that. It's by a small lake which is horrifically polluted, it's so polluted that it's actually a liability- the water is completely useless it's so toxic, but it presence makes people sick when it rains as it floods.
The reason this place exists is because there are massive perpetual traffic-jams going both in and out of Beijing on all the roads- it takes a truck a minimum of 2 days to physically get from the outskirts of Beijing to the main concentration of industrial parks within Beijing proper. If it is particularly busy or there are crashes or traffic is being slowed or diverted or a million other things it can take up to 2 weeks for a truck to get into Beijing. This means that there I a constant chain of tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people stuck 'on the roads' between point A and B. They need places to eat, drink, get laid, gamble, whatever- pass the time as well as actually
live while stuck in this bizarre traffic-jam-purgatory where they can get away with only moving their truck 100m a few times a day.
I was there because I had heard about this place and I wanted to see it myself, so I arranged to go along in a truck that was coming into Beijing for a friend of a friends company. When I got there I found that a great deal of the restaurant and shit were all run by Uyghur's...and in addition to fucking mind-blowingly awesome sorta Chinese-inflected Middle Eastern/Turkish food the main thing I think when I see heaps of Uyghur's is 'there is hash around here'.
So after a couple of days of hanging out at a couple of Uyhgur places and getting to know a couple of young guys who worked as waiters at this BBQ place I asked them if they smoked hash? Of course they did and when one of them finished work I met him and he took me on a motorbike further into the shanty town, away from the trucks & commercial buildings into the 'housing' which was made out of all sorts of wood and heaps of corrugated iron. Eventually we came to this fairly large dwelling that had a couple of pigs out the back (so they were pretty well off- pigs = money)...meaning the whole dwelling stunk to high heaven of pig shit. I had to breath through my mouth the whole time and even then I nearly coughed it was that pungent. My friend knocked on the door and he went inside to talk to him...I looked around and once again noticed that there were a lot of sets of eyes on me...I'm probably the only white person who had been there...after about 10 minutes I was invited inside. We sat down on the dirt floor and he picked up a big tea can, turned it upside down and pulled open a hidden compartment in the bottom and took out a plastic bag which contained a bunch of smaller plastic bags...he had two types of hash and only sold ~7g blocks. I bought one of the lighter stuff (in China I consistently found that the lighter the hash the better- they make Moroccan style hash, it's very dry and turns into a powder when broken down...it's not at all like sticky green hash which is more common/popular.
There ya go- experiences like that make me appreciate New Zealand, it may not be as 'exciting', but I like everything being very low-key and relaxed...it's nice.
Oh and a couple streets of bourbon in the wrong direction NO gets pretty shady as well. and shit anywhere in the wrong part of milwaukee, not joking that shit get real hard quick. Mexico city, where ever I was in oakland, detroit, parts of chi town, and the list goes on.
