Amsterbeth

Photos From Chandra's Less Than Surprising Birthday Party

 

Lots of picnic food and cute kids running around.

 

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Wonderful, Inspiring, Kick Ass

I can't stop listening to the new Gnarls Barkley album "The Odd Couple."  "Going On" and "Run"  are two of the best songs I have heard in years. I am obsessed with both of them and I have no choice but to listen to them over and over and over a hundred times or more until I am sick of them.

 

Yesterday, my friends and I went to the summer outdoor Awakenings festival.  

When I was a little girl, I used to love the movie Fame for the scene where all the high school kids poured out into the street and danced there and on cars...miraculously choreographed but still. I used to eat Skittles and pretend that they were some sort of Red Shoes-inducing kiddie speed that forced me to keep dancing until my face turned flush.  I used to dream of communities of people running wild--to something or away from something--didn't matter. Maybe I was a mustang or an antelope in a former life. I always used to have this anxiety about no longer wanting to do the things when I was permissibly old enough that I was too young to do at the moment. Thank god for prolonged adolescence.

My friends and I rode our bikes about an hour outside of amsterdam to this enormous outdoor area. Like a tribal call we could hear the pounding "oomph oomph oomph" from a couple miles away.   We parked, walked through grass and some trees and found ourselves under a clear blue sky among tens of thousands of our fellow techno music lovers.  There were several tents that were each as big as some of the biggest night clubs I have ever been in. Each featuring a particular type of electronic music: hardcore, house...the standards.  My friends and I all roamed around..sometimes together and sometimes off doing our own thing. Some of us dancing. Some just hanging out. The headliners that night were Dave Clarke and Ritiche Hawtin.  The light show was transcendent.  The Dave Clarke show was outdoors after dark and had a laser display that looked like fast-motion clouds like you'd see on TV just before a serious storm.   It was bliss.  I just don't understand how anyone could not love or appreciate  electronic music for all its diversity and beauty.  God Bless the DJ.

Best of all, because the festival started during the day it ended early in the night, around midnight. We rode our bikes past all the cars stuck in traffic, ringing our bells as smugly as one can ring their bell on a crappy dutch bikes. I was home and in bed by 1:30 a.m.    This morning I am drinking what is now a daily ritual of a yogurt, prunes, apricot nectar, citrucel, flax seed and milk smoothie. Over the last few months my stomach seems to have rusted. I also took three Advil before bed last night to relieve the pain in my tortured knees.  So much for prolonged adolescence.

Yesterday, I was witness to a Dutch phenomenon I will simply call "Look the Other Wayitis."  On the bike path to the festival, I heard a scooter coming up behind our little caravan.  I instinctively looked behind me as I would normally do to gage their speed and so to move further to the side to let them pass. But instead of hearing the Doppler affect of their impending approach, we heard the sicking sound of a spinout. The driver didn't make the curve and he laid his scooter down on the sandy shoulder. We all stopped, but I was the only one that turned around to see if they were ok. They were extremely slow to get up. The guys seemed to be ok in that sort of shocked way that people in more serious accidents seem to be ok right before they pass out. They were both bleeding. The passenger worse than the driver. I asked them if I could do anything for them and they didn't seem to know what to say. I gave the guy the napkins I had in my purse that I was saving for when the toilets at the festival inevitably ran out of toilet paper. He thanked me and I caught up with my group. One of the dutch guys we were with asked my American friend Chandra if I was a nurse. She said no and then has asked why I stopped to help those guys. She explained to him that it was "just what you do."  

I think I read in "Undutchables" that the dutch will often not stop to assist a person in trouble because they wouldn't want to embarrass them by stopping to help them, thus calling attention to their difficult situation.  

Toward the end of the night Chandra and her Dutch boyfriend, David, and I, and everyone else within the immediate proximity of us, saw a guy totally out of his mind on some chemical or combination thereof that was causing him to walk around in circles, sort of smiling, sort of stumbling, definitely rambling and definitely in trouble. Everyone took a good look and kept walking by.  We got him to sit down. He put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands but he was so out of it his elbows kept slipping off the tops of his thighs. Chandra predicted that he had ingested some sort of drug that body builders take. She and I sat on either side of him to help prop him up while David went for help.  The guy started to convulse mildly.  When David returned to us, alone, he said he described the symptoms to the 'first aid" guy who said, "aw, just give him five minutes and see if he comes out of it." The guy was drooling by now. A slow and steady stream just like our chocolate lab used to do sitting next to the dinner table waiting impatiently for scraps.  The guy hadn't opened his eyes or moved in 15 minutes except for the steady twitching and fluttering.  Finally the aid  people came and hoisted him up and away on a golf cart.  The entire time we sat with the guy at a picnic table, not once did the other people at the table offer help, ask what was wrong, or do anything other than go about calmly eating their overpriced chicken shoarmas on cheap hamburger buns.   I'm not making any judgments or assumptions about why no one else seemed to be interested in helping this guy. Just stating the facts as I saw them. I'm just glad we were there to help.

The festival's toilets never ran out of toilet paper that night.

Sad, Pathetic, Vomit-Inducing

Glastonbury headlines with Jay-Z (good)  to "appeal to a younger audience" (bad).  Festival also features Leonard Cohen( age: 73)  and Neil Young (age: 97) this year.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080629/wl_uk_afp/entertainmentbritainmusicfestival

 

Music continues to be an abominiation.

Reason 6,316 to love the Dutch

I just asked five of my male Dutch coworkers, all between the ages of 35 and 43, who George Lucas was. Only two of them had ever heard of him. The other three, totally clueless. Never heard of the guy.  God bless them.  

English and Antwerp

Today is the day that the tourist season, at least in my mind, unofficially kicks off. I recall writing something about this moment last year when I think I made a comment about it being so crowded that you can only walk wherever you find a place to put your foot.   Today as I walked out of the gym, for the first time this year, I heard just as much native english as anything else, and most of it American.  What was last year the observations of a newcomer is now merely a seasonal expectation. I find myself  for the second time overwhelmed by what I have gone through over the previous year (and by now, year and a half)  where the annuity of my life now is not marked by a calendar but by the momentous events that seem to reawaken a sense memory on the anniversary of their occurances.

The college kids are pouring fourth like multi-colored frosted corn flakes dumped into a cereal bowl, and I have to admit I'm getting a kick out of them.  Their eyes are bright. They move fast and talk faster. They walk around with an unassuming swagger like they've just been admitted entrance for a whole summer into the world's biggest most expensive theme park.   Thereby in contrast, they also lack the self possesion that European kids of the same age posess entirely.

I took the long way home through the Vondelpark and was overtaken by a young duo whose conversation I could hear far behind me.  American college kids, her voice was excited and too high and too loud, amped up by adrenaline and the current of hormones. The kind of voice you can't control but want to desparately, breathlessly.  The boy was mild mannered and softer spoken. He posed questions as a polite boy would do, asking her what she will miss of home. In her sing-songy post-adolescent nervousness she pondered "weelll......I guess I will miss my friends and my dogs and pets."  His follow up question was "What other pets do you have?"  to which she responded "I have a fish. But if he died I wouldn't miss him that much, well maybe a little." 

As they were passing me up he asked, 'What kind of fish do you have'? LIke, is it a goldfish?" She said "No, it's a beta."   Now they are in full view, although I am facing their backsides because they are walking faster than I am.

His demeanor was as casual as his tone of voice and likewise, her mannerisms and fidgeting were as exaggerated as her own speech patterns.  I had to smile. A young man asks a young girl to go for a walk with him in the park.  He's been told or has read somewhere to ask the girls questions because seeming interested in them increases your chances.  She can't decide if she likes him or not and at the same time is made uneasy by his attention and his eagerness to make eye contact with her at every opportunity.  Certainly on an awkwardly obvious level of awareness they are both self conscious about the fact that they have now been discussing for too long the details of  her pet-beta-fish-ownership-and-emotional-investment-thereof, but neither of them have the social graces yet to quite steer away from it into any other subject matter that will make them more at ease. It was adorable.

She never meets his gaze but exerts a great deal of effort shrugging her shoulders and adjusting her sweater.  Within the next few minutes no doubt he will ask her to pause to take a look at the lovely little lakes in the park and will try to kiss her. She will let him, but will probably secretly hope that it will stop. Or maybe it could be her first kiss. She did not look like she'd been kissed a lot.  But they were both so sweet and so uncomfortable I wished I could have just put an invisibility curtain around them so they could have ther silly little fumbling moment in private.

This past weekend I treated myself to some shopping and an ovenight stay in lovely, beautiful Antwerp. I am frustrated by the lack of availability and selection in clothing in Amsterdam that suits my taste and my budget, so I decided to pick up and put my credit card to good use somewhere more akin to my style.   My dutch colleagues and my dutch friends were quick to point out how much of a net loss I would incure in travel and hotel expenses by shopping in  a distant city. I had to remind them that bargain hunting is not alway the first priority and that I had the triple benefit of seeing a new city, staying in a very nice hotel in the off season, and hopefully finding some clothing that was at the very least well fitted and reasonably appropriate for work.

Like Brussels, Antwerp's architecture is a hybrid of Dutch and French styles. It's beautiful. But it seems culturally more dutch while Brussels seems more French.  No one spoke to me in Dutch. As soon as they heard my ugly American accent, which is now being made even worse by the influence of an ugly Amsterdam accent  (I am told), it was more than their refined Belgian ears could tolerate.  And the Belgian accented Dutch is nearly entirely incomprehensible to me. I really need to work on this.

It was just the perfect weekend as it was exactly as I had hoped. While I didn't come home with a whole new summer wardrobe I did pick up a few choice things and the window shopping in Antwerp is far better than Amsterdam...also those wonderful and innovative and ever so tasteful Belgian fashion designers.I meandered through all their boutiques. Further, I had dinner with a friend who is born and raised in Antwerp and got to see the city with a bit of an insider's perspective which is always enjoyable.  Didn't buy any diamonds or chocolates but I could tell just from my one dinner out that dining experience in Antwerp is about a bazillion times better than in Amsterdam, not that the bar could be set any lower.  And finally, while my beloved Amsterdam has this very strange smell that is a combination of pot, shoarma, smog, and dog shit (and stunningly, it is rather welcoming rather than repulsive)  Antwerp smells like fresh, warm belgian waffles. It's enough to make one delirious with desire for a truckload of them covered in strawberries and whipped cream.  Somehow I refrained but I now regret it.