What Playing Poker in Amsterdam Taught Me About Making Friends

After I graduated from college, my friends and I started learning poker. Every Sunday night, we would meet at our friend Joe's apartment and play for a few hundred bucks. It was our weekly routine. For the HBO show The circle in the back, we would order food and, huddled around a small table, we would hold each other before getting ready to go to our boring college office jobs the next day.

Joe was the most enthusiastic of us all (to this day, he still plays well), and his passion for the game rubbed off on me (though not his skills). Although I was never a great player, I liked the challenge it provided, and trying to figure out the possibilities of the cards and how to read people's stories. I read poker books and did everything I could to get better. Poker was an intellectual challenge for me – and it still is an intellectual challenge.

On the US trip that started my world tour in 2006, I stopped regularly at casinos to gamble – and won enough to pay for most of my trip.

Finally, when I arrived in Amsterdam later that year, I got bored of the weed smoking that was so prominent among the people I was traveling with. As much as I loved getting high, I wasn't going to sit in coffee shops all day and get baked. There was a whole city out there for you to see and explore.

So (slightly stoned) I used to take long walks alone around the city. (To this day, I traveled more during that visit than any that followed.)

One day, I passed by a casino. I didn't even know there was a casino.

“I wonder if they play poker here,” I thought to myself. Even though I was on a traveler's budget and hadn't played in months, I thought it might be fun to indulge a little in another country.

I sat at a table full of locals playing 2-5 No Limit (that means the first bet is 2 and 5 EUR). The stakes were higher than I wanted, but that was all that was available, so I bought for less.

When I finally decided to join the hand, the seller said something to me in Dutch. “I'm sorry, can you repeat that in English?” I asked.

I had outed myself as an outsider – and this created a lot of curiosity among the other players. I was young and obviously a backpacker, and they wanted to know how I ended up at the poker table and not the coffee shops, where the other guests seemed to go.

So I told them: I didn't smoke a lot of pot anymore, so I wandered around every day, exploring the districts and museums. And, as a poker lover, I also wanted to do something different.

The two players and I hit the ground running. Greg was an older gentleman with a great sense of fashion who always cracked a joke. The other, Lennart, was close to my age and tall, with a shaved head. He drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney.

Along with the other players at our table, they make me feel like I'm part of something more. So I kept coming back. Poker was our bond, and in those short hours we were together each night, I felt like I was a local too, not just a backpacker hanging out at hostel bars and walking around taking pictures of museums. I was a stranger, going underground and getting to know the people who lived there.

After all, I traveled all over the world to learn about them. As much as I loved seeing museums, taking walking tours, and having short conversations with people I crossed paths with, none of this gave me a deeper understanding of any stop on my journey.

But these players were my guides. They told me about city life and restaurants and bars that tourists didn't know I should go to. I felt like I learned more about Amsterdam that first night than I did in my entire first week in the city.

As a tourist, you rarely interact in deep ways with the locals. You see yourself briefly and then exit to the next area. Getting to know a place – and the people in it – requires spending a lot of time away.

As the days went by, I kept delaying my departure to get back to the poker table. Greg and Lennart often offered to take me out, but I was naturally suspicious of the two guys who wanted to hang out after the casino closed and were asking probing questions. I was young. I was in an unfamiliar place. And the place was always dark and empty when we left. I was worried that they would try to rob me.

So I declined their offers to hang out the first few times. As a natural introduction, this was my first experience with travelers, and I was a little wary.

But, in the end, I agreed, as they bore me and they are ordinary people who just want to show the guest something.

They showed me the Oosterpark, which is in the east of the city. It was a small house, quiet, and lined with willow trees, with small ponds with ducks, which the old people used to eat. It was a favorite place for the locals, because they could avoid all the tourists and stoners who littered the Vondelpark.

They introduced me to bitterballen, a bite-sized Dutch meatball snack that looks like falafel on the outside but tastes like a Sunday pot roast on the inside.

And, when I finally went to Spain for a week, I missed Amsterdam so much, I just flew back. They were shocked when I returned to the poker table.

“I thought you were gone,” they said.

“I was but I missed Amsterdam a lot so I came back,” I replied.

Weeks passed. I fell into a routine. I learned basic Dutch phrases from other players in the casino, slept late, and used my winnings to fund endless gourmet meals, museum trips, and marijuana. I walked for hours, reaching the outskirts of the city, trying to get lost in the canals and narrow streets that make Amsterdam so famous – the kind of thing you can do where, in the back of your head, you keep saying, “I could live here,” and suddenly you find yourself comparing neighborhoods.

But all good things come to an end, including my European visa, and it was time to head to Southeast Asia. After two months in Amsterdam, I couldn't live in Europe anymore.

On my last night in town, my teenage friends and I went out to dinner, played poker, and went for one last round of drinks. I told them where I was headed and how long I planned to be on the road. Remember us — something you can't really do if you don't spend more than a few days in one place, or with one group of people.

They also see that fact. They let you know that Amsterdam is more than the Red Light District and tulips and windmills and coffee shops. That's all tourists and backpackers think about when they come to Amsterdam, they say.

Although, by their own admission, they were just guessing. They had never met a backpacker, let alone had a conversation with one. And why would they have one? Backpackers never stray this way, and the locals are busy living their daily lives, which doesn't create many opportunities to meet tourists.

When we parted at the end of the night, they invited me down to Utrecht for my next trip across the continent. Amsterdam is beautiful, they say, but it's not the real Netherlands. There is much more to the country than that.

One knows that intellectually. All it takes is one look at the map to know that Amsterdam is a small part of the Netherlands. But as a traveler, you can often get a tunnel vision of your destination, the walls of which are described by your guidebook and tips from travelers who have come before you.

Only the locals know what the real story is – and until you know one, you never will.

But most of all, Greg and Lennart taught me to trust strangers.

Because I was being watched, I almost missed that opportunity. My new nature on the road almost cost me two friendships.

Since then, I have remembered to give people the benefit of the doubt and trust them more.

Especially, because, a few months later, when I was in Vietnam, Lennart called me to tell me that Greg had been killed in a robbery. Greg used to have a lot of people after the casino closed as a way to keep the night going and, when this was heard, some people came to rob everyone, knowing that they would have a lot of money. In the ensuing confrontation, Greg was shot dead at the scene.

I always think of Greg, especially his warm smile, funny jokes, and friendship. He was never afraid to make friends. He taught me not to be like that.

And it is because of him that I have learned to be a free and honest person on the road. Whenever I'm in doubt, I just think, “What would Greg be doing here?”

The answer is always: “You say hello.”