Living in a city built around canals, you might expect that at least one or two days a year there would be hot, humid weather, god forbid the weeks/months we experience at the moment. This breeds mosquitoes. Even more so when your town consists of many quaint medieval nooks and crannies, and is prone to experiencing brief torrential downpours even at the height of summer.
As such, you might also expect shops to be stocked with a ragnarokian arsenal of insect death technology. Given the fact that the Dutch spent a significant part of the past three centuries slogging around tropical fly-blown tropical backwaters in South America and the East Indies, I would have imagined their pesticidal expertise to be of the utmost magnitude.
This is not so.
Albert Hein, seemingly the only supermarket chain in existence in the country (although, god bless them they are open until 22:00), boasts a vast array of perfume candles and industrial lavender scent diffusers, alongside a sad assortment of ant traps, but nothing to do with mosquitoes.
The two largest big-box out-of-town home improvement chains, Gamma and Praxis (once one realizes that shopping for practical goods inside what is essentially a tourist city that caters to those shopping for fake porcelain, marijuana, hookers and delicious waffles is not necessarily a simple task) also suffer from a tragic dearth of anything vaguely related to killing insects. They do, however, maintain an extensive stock of lovely plastic illuminated model lighthouses, ideal for garden decoration.
This is problematic, if one has lost inordinate amounts of sleep jumping around one’s apartment during the whee hours of the morning, flailing about with a pair of inexpertly wielded boxer shorts or a rolled-up newspaper, incoherently shouting things from Vietnam War films (“GET SOME! GET SOME! BWAHAHA”) while trying to unleash bloody xenocide on a Luftwaffe’s worth of bloodsucking little bastards.
There are, however, apparently no mosquitoes in Amsterdam. Repeat after me. You are being bitten to death by figments of your imagination.
So I bought a venus flytrap. It’s a start. I’m still jumping around at 3 a.m. chasing mosquitoes, except now I’m doing it with tweezers to feed the evil things to Audrey, the world’s laziest flycatcher. “FEED ME, SEYMOUR!”
I’m now shopping around for one big enough to deal with the pigeons that fly into my room in the morning and crap on my papers.
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