As I mention from time to time, my Mother was born in The Netherlands where her parents and her sister and her family still live. Over the years we have made an effort to get together every two years, alternating between us going there and them coming here. Now that we are older, I'm pushing thirty three as I write this, the participants have changed a bit. The original set of cousins now have jobs and families of their own. This sometimes makes it harder to get away but has also provided more money to fly people back and forth, since more of us work, and there are more people to fly back and forth, given the presence of spouses and a new generation.
There are a variety of cultural differences twixt their family and ours. We are all kind of jocks but I was always amazed at the intensity my female cousins show toward exercise. The Winter Olympics are just wrapping up as I write and the Dutch speed skaters displayed incredible dominance for such a small country. My female cousins don't skate but they do bicycle and their devotion to working out shows in their beautiful bodies, the pride they take in them and their willingness to freely share them, at least visually.
On the subject of sharing bodies, I know my cousins find Americans rather prudish but I admit it seemed to us that they seemed to spend a lot of time walking around about half naked, and maybe even more than half naked. I was somewhat used to this from my mother who retained a lot of the habits she formed growing up. She would sunbathe topless in our yard and nude on her porch. If she needed to undress or change she would undress or change and the audience made little difference. If one of us encountered her when she was naked she would keep right on being naked until it was time to get unnaked, if that's a word.
Given all of this I was not surprised when we arrived in Delft in the year I turned EIGHTEEN for our bi-annual get together and found that my cousins Eefje and Dieuwke, girls my own age, had taken jobs in one of the kinky clubs in Amsterdam. Basically what they did was welcome people at the front entrance and participate in various entertainments such as wrestling, getting tied up and being whipped. But mostly they handled the entrance and they invited me to come with them and apply for a similar job for the duration of my visit. The only qualifications needed were to be young and pretty, which I flatter myself I was, and to be willing to take your shirt off, which I also was. So next afternoon we headed up the A4 to Amsterdam, about 60km away to visit the club.
The club was right off the A10 in the main part of town, a four story building including dancing, a restaurant, assorted facilities for putting on shows and private, members only, areas where the really serious BDSM activities took place. The clientele included the general public as well as members of the private club. Customers were about two thirds male with a fair percentage of gays. As this was summer there were lots of tourists floating in.
Dieuwke showed me the outfit girls wore at the front door: black boots, black boy shorts, black wrist bands and upper arm bands, each equipped with a metal ring to facilitate tying you to stuff, and a black scrunchie for a ponytail so your hair stayed up to show maximum girl. There was no shirt. I met a few of the bouncers who manned the front door, large hairy guys who all spoke English and were very welcoming. Things seemed fine so we went to see the manager so I could be interviewed.
The interview went fine. As I say there were few qualifications, some of which could not be evaluated while the applicant had her clothes on. I was reasonably personable, reasonably pretty, spoke good English, but nothing else, though that was not a barrier because THEY all spoke English. As I mentioned, one manned (or girled) the door sans a shirt so it made sense that as a part of the interview I would have to strip to the waist. As I expressed interest in some of the entertainments which were done in the nude, like wrestling, sometimes other girls and sometimes boys, getting hogtied by a professional rigger for the enjoyment of the general public and possibly being whipped, I was asked to strip buck naked.
So here I was, just eighteen, five thousand miles from home with three men at least twice my age whom I had met five minutes ago and I was taking off all my clothes. It was Kafkaesque, but we were, after all in Europe and Kafka was Russian. I think. I maintained a pleasant countenance and as much eye contact as I could to show I was perfectly comfy baring my ass, not to mention everything else, in front of three strange men.