Tuesday is our day to get to Holland, where we’ll spend three nights and two days. To get there from Bremen we have to change trains in the crossroads town of Osnaburck. Rather than spend eight consecutive hours on trains, we decided to schedule a two-hour layover in Osnabruck in order to break up the trip.

Our hope was to have lunch and make a couple of phone calls during what would be early morning at home. (Obbie needs to call his mother to wish her a Happy Birthday.) After walking for half an hour toward what looked like the center of the city, we found a place to restock on film, but we couldn’t find any place to eat.

So we went back to the Bahnhof and ate there. Osnabruck was a town that left us largely unimpressed.

On the train from Osnabruck to Amsterdam, we suffered from the same problem we’ve had with most German trains. Our non-smoking car was filled with smoke, since the smoking section was in the same car on the other side of a glass wall. Opening the window helped a little, but not enough to be worth putting up with the train noise from outside.

We were in Amsterdam tonight only long enough to change trains. Amsterdam is big, crowded and expensive. Haarlem is a much smaller city (but not small by any means) about 15 minutes away by train, and trains seem to run back and forth every 10 minutes or so. We have reservations at a place called Joops InterCity Apartments, which we’re told is a 10-minute walk from the train station.

From the train station, we were told that Joops was behind a big church on a marketplace. We found a small plaza and saw a steeple toward the right, and thought it was the marketplace with the big church.

It wasn’t. We had taken a wrong turn and got lost. It took us about half an hour to find the office for our hotel.

Our room is in another building around the corner from the hotel office, and it’s one of those “toilet and shower down the hall” places. The room is big and comfortable if not overly fancy, and it costs the equivalent of about $40 per night. Breakfast is not included.

Our room is less than 100 meters from the “big church” we were told to look for. It’s a grand cathedral in an expansive central square. At about ten after nine – about half an hour after we’d settled into our room – the church bells started ringing in a “ding-dong-dong” pattern.

This sounded very nice for about the first two minutes, but it went on in the same repetitious three-note pattern for about half an hour. The sound never changed, but our perception of it went from quaint, to strange, to weird, to this-is-gonna-be-a-long-night-if-this-doesn’t-stop. Fortunately, it stopped.

Many people come to Amsterdam for the coffeehouses, which are not to be confused with coffee shops. You go to a coffee shop for coffee, you go to a coffeehouse for something else. What many people don’t know is that there are coffeehouses in many Dutch cities, and we’ve already noticed at least two here in Haarlem.

Establishments that sell cannabis are forbidden from selling alcohol, so there’s a segregation between the drinkers and the tokers. We don’t see any evidence that alcohol or hard drug addiction is any kind of a problem in Holland. We’re told that dealers of harder drugs are dealt with harshly, and users are dealt with compassionately: treatment instead of jail.

Late tonight we were walking around our neighborhood in Haarlem, looking for a can of beer to take back to our room. We couldn’t find one.

The Dutch seem to know what the Americans need to learn: that compared to alcohol and tobacco, cannabis is a relatively harmless and benign substance from a public health and safety point-of-view. Where cannabis is more widely tolerated and available, it diverts people away from more problematic and addictive drugs such as tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and opiates.

But cannabis use encourages free thought, and THAT is the commodity that America’s ruling class is trying to eradicate with its “war on drugs.”