I first met the Swede earlier that day. At 4 a.m., he drunkenly stumbles into my otherwise empty hostel room after a night of gambling at the Holland Casino in Amsterdam.

We exchange brief introductions. He tells me his name is Alf. (If you Google ‘swedish guy with long hair’ you’ll get a pretty sense of what he looked like.)

A few hours later, we’re eating breakfast together with an Aussie girl. I’m talking, and he’s not saying a word. He’s just sitting there, blank, eating whatever the mush was that the breakfast buffet at the hostel decided to serve us that morning.

I assume it’s because he’s only had a few hours of sleep.

Later on, I begin to understand that it was likely for an entirely different reason.

Alf is easily one of the most distinctive characters I’ve ever met.

He’s 31, and he’s been smoking since he was 16. Now, still, he smokes regularly, like a senior in college.

Being high seems to be a staple of his existence: One time, when he was much younger and traveling through JFK Airport in New York, he inadvertently brought a bag of weed through customs.

A U.S. Customs Officer with a drug dog stopped him and pulled him aside.

“Where are the drugs?!”

“I don’t have any, man.”

The dog insists that he does, and the smell of marijuana permeates the officer’s nostrils. The officer rifles through Alf’s bag, does a thorough search of his person and opens up his shoes.

Nothing. The officer lets him go.

It’s not until much later on that day that Alf, upon settling from his high stupor, realizes that the dime-bag of weed he bought the day before had been sitting in his front shirt-pocket the entire time. The one place the officer didn’t check.

“If the officer had caught me, I would’ve been banned from the country for ten years,” he says with an awkward smile. With that comment, he shrugs and laughs it off. Laughter seems to be a more-than adequate coping mechanism for him.

He talks with a nonchalance that borders on Zen and his English is heavily coated with a thick, almost whimsical Swedish accent.

His sentences carry little inertia — when you think he’s about to pickup momentum with his thoughts, they are abruptly cutoff with a laugh or a prolonged, “yeahhh.”

He doesn’t believe in paying for public transportation. “Amsterdam is great, because the trams and buses are free here,” he says, with nary a hint of sarcasm. They’re not. Each contains magnetic sensors by the entrances that detect cards (that you must pay for) with a special chip in them.

He corrects himself: “If you’re not from here, you don’t have to pay for it. They never check.” Yeahhhhh.

He’s a consultant, and he travels a lot. He has clients that exist in Singapore, Frankfurt, Stockholm and various other cities throughout the world. He seems content with short-term idea of smoking a ton of pot, and doesn’t seem to be making very many long-term life plans.

He lives in the now, certainly.

And I get the feeling that of all the places he travels to, Amsterdam must be his favorite one.

Our first stop on Alf’s Tour de Smoke is a tiny coffee shop called Greenhouse Effect — it’s run by a few Irish gals, and built to fit 10, maybe 15 stragglers. Almost all tourists.

Alf, eager to smoke, immediately struts up to the counter to purchase his goods.

His face is quickly overtaken by a forlorn expression as soon as the cheeky Irish gal at the counter informs him, “we don’t sell any of that here.”

“What?” he asks, and his eyes dart around the shop, almost certain that they must.

“I’m just kidding, he’ll be able to help you right over there,” and she points to the counter adjacent to where we’re standing. I laugh, and am immediately struck by her cheeky Irish charm.

It’s fun to fuck with high people, I imagine, but Alf is in a very fragile state right now.

“Do you have Wi-Fi?” I ask.

“Just talk to your friends,” she says. She’s right, I should.

Alf plants the glass bong that he purchased from a nearby store in the only corner seating located in the front of the joint.

Once he sits down, he starts breaking up the weed and delicately placing it into the pipe, surgeon-like in his hand movements.

He lights it, sucks in until all of the weed is spent, and blows out a thick cloud of smoke.

He offers the bong to me, but I decline.

After I decline for the third time, he stops offering. This is going to be a solo act, he realizes.

And that’s perfectly okay by him.

And soon, what was once a conversation peppered with intermittent bong rips becomes frequent pulls from the bong peppered with intermittent small talk.

I’m not sure the Irish gal at the front understood just who my friend was.

We spend the next two hours simply bouncing around between various coffee shops in the area — I’m drinking tea or coffee or beer, while Alf is becoming increasingly less and less coherent.

What started as a fruitful dialogue between two strangers devolves into an almost artistic-exhibition of highdom — at some point, I have to start reminding Alf that he has a flight that leaves from the Schipol Airport in X amount of time. He looks at me through the paper-thin slits in his eyes, and nods. Then laughs.

Once it starts becoming dangerously close to take-off, Alf decides that right before his flight he needs to buy fries — in Amsterdam, fries are the food d’etre.

And he gently informs me that there’s another food that he needs before his flight, too: Space Cake.

For those not in-the-know, a Space Cake is essentially a weed brownie — a THC-infused treat that generally has a much more potent high than typical smoking.

Or, in Layman’s terms: Chocolate-coated bong rips for Alf.

Alf decides that he needs to purchase two, one before the flight and one that he can consume during the flight.

I’m in awe. Do you really need that? I think. He insists.

We exchange awkward good-byes, I tell him it was nice meeting him (and in all honestly, it was a truly eye-opening experience) and we part ways.

Still, I’m worried.

“You gonna make it to your flight?”

And he just kinda shrugs, laughs it off and wanders towards the Centraal Station.

But something tells me I shouldn’t be worried, because he’s been here before.

I mean, he’s been doing this for fifteen years for God’s sake.

Part 1 from my travels abroad in Amsterdam and Germany.