» Have you ever seen a dead body?

Queen's Day Amsterdam
I can't remember how long ago this exactly was. Must have been a few years by now. For those who don't know, April 30th in The Netherlands is massive celebration called Queen's Day. Ostensibly we are celebrating the Queen's mothers birthday, her mom since it’s in April unlike the Queen's which is sometime colder. If you ever happen to visit Amsterdam at the time you will witness thousands of orange cladding men women and children swilling down gallons of Heineken and selling their junk on the street. Good times are had by all.

Well that is obviously not true when you consider the prompt for this tale. As my friends and I roamed around the city, I slowly realized that this area happened to have many black people. Slightly surprising for as culturally and ethically diverse as Amsterdam is, a white person is rarely in the minority at any given point, except a rap concert or the like. This part of course had the best music, so we stuck around for a while and danced on the street with the rest like the drunken fools we were. I slowly starting noticing a correlation, the closer you got to the center, the fewer people were dancing. Then I noticed the ambulance, then the rubbernecking crowd gather around, and then finally the white cloth covering with only a hand protruding. I suddenly didn’t feel like dancing, no, no not at all. It was an odd site to see, a dead body lying and the ground, however if you glimpsed around, the still remaining large crowd was bobbing to the rhythm of the music.
(Fri 29th Feb 2008, 20:53, More)