The City Hotel on Prins Hendrickade is in the middle of the coffee house district. I think its number 134. The Sticks coffee house is a good place to start, small with just one main room and low key music. Buy a small pipe, and twenty dollars of almost any weed on the menu. The "Bartender" there was very helpful when I was there, I had a friend who was in the hospital in Amsterdam and she was nice enough to spend fifteen minutes on the phone finding out which hospital.
Route 66 coffee house is louder and much bigger. I spent an entire evening there watching a group of deaf-mutes playing cards there in the big sports bar room.(big screen tv's all on sports). The top floor had a pool room with a sofa that I sat on for several hours.
Part of the fun of Amsterdam is conversing with citizens of other countries. There was a coffeehouse with the theme of American Indians in which I talked with people from the United Kingdom for a couple of hours. When you converse with Europeans, don't talk about having a drivers license, (Don't say you like to drive to the beach, say you like to go to the beach.) don't talk about owning real estate, how small the living arrangements are in Europe compared to the US, how expensive gasoline is in Europe. If you are munched at 3am in Amsterdam you have to go to an Automat near the Red Light district to find food. If a dutch man insists on showing you how the Automat works, be patient and listen to him even if you know how already, be sure to thank him after (Danke Vall). I saw this same man give the cold shoulder to a drunken Brit who was screaming at him "A KABOB SHOP...WHERE'S A KABOB SHOP!!!" Being well mannered goes far there.
If you buy a subway pass (good on the buses and trams as well) you stamp it the first time you use it before you go down to the subway and the pass will be good for however long the pass is denominated from that point of time.
Be careful of pickpockets, I kept my wallet and passport inside a zipped up ski jacket.
Soft drinks have no ice, don't look for the ice dispenser, There isn't one.
I saw one Peanut tanked Harley Sportster there.
As far as what kind of weed to buy, I wasn't disappointed with any that I bought there.
There was one coffee house that had a bulldog mascot. I conversed with very young Brits there, and had a great time conversing. I made a joke about how my Dad liked the United Kingdom when he was over there being "Overpaid"...It took a moment for them to figure it out but they laughed when they did...and the most humbling thing happened...They and a dutch man who over heard expressed gratitude for my father being in World War II.
When I think of more I will write some more.
The bulldog is shit, crappy chain of dubes. There is a little van goh cafe just diagonal to where the museum is. I swear there sandwich with a heineken sitting out on the patio was a dream. A heineken never tasted so good.
Walk around, have a beer on the outside patios, chat up some nice skanks. I found a lot of the bitches hated the american accent, also found it odd that some bars charges a buck to go to the fucking bathroom. Like this dude said, some of the bartenders are the nicest people. it seems the bartenders love americans when the people don't. This one bartender chick just kept giving me free beer after free beer for no reason. I never thought anything of it. I probably could have picked her up but I wasn't going to hang out in one club until closing.
Also the hookers charge around 50 euro. You can find it cheaper, but damn, just take a look around, you can fuck anything, fat girls, midgets, blacks, asians, thin, tall, short, duo's, you name it.
