Amsterdam

After a few days in Brussels for work (1), I took the 20-minute flight to Amsterdam for a couple of days. I'd never been to Amsterdam before but had always wanted to visit.

Walking through the streets past the canals, I think of you and wonder whether I step over the paths that you took over ten years ago. Beneath the smoggy stars above us, we dreamed of sailing here together. You were supposed to show me where you learned to blow glass, in a tiny room in one of these beautifully bricked buildings with their slanty attic rooms. This dream was one of many touchstones that allowed me to keep the faith, so many years ago.

So here I am. Where are you?

Walking around Amsterdam puts one in a perpetual state of arousal. Not so much due to the big-breasted, dead-eyed women in the windows of the kitschy red light district; but more due to the inordinately dense, transient population of potheads and others of altered mental states.

Thank goodness I was here with Aki.



Alone today, my last before going home, I walked through thankfully sun-lit skies with a clear head. I jogged around the park in front of our hostel in the morning. I started writing a new story. I walked to the Van Gogh museum. Van Gogh was one of my favorites (I even had a reproduction of wheatfields--or one of his wheatfields???--on my bedroom wall, when i was a kid). But I was oddly unimpressed.

To make up for that, perhaps, I got all emotional at the Anne Frank house. What slew me was an interview with one of her childhood friends, who saw Anne again--for the last time, shortly before Anne's death a month before liberation--in a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen.


my brain is cynical but my heart still bleeds

(1) Post script on Brussels. The meeting itself was very good and pride-worthy. But more on Brussels included, inter alia, hanging out with the indomitable Alba Lamberti, Crisis Group Lobbyist Extraordinaire. A brief drink on Thursday night with her and a motley of Brussels's thinktank types, one telecoms exec (who was not Indian but decidedly English, emphasis his) and one unhinged Hungarian or Israeli (he couldn't decide which) artist. He was ostensibly a sculptor. (2)

So, on Saturday afternoon, finally free, I hung out at her apartment, which was maddeningly close to my hotel (the outrageous directions Alba gave me, I will not repeat here). A few hours of gossiping with her and her friend Rachel, and I was then off to catch my flight to Amsterdam.

(2) Conversation apparently went like this, translated from French:

Alba: So, whaaat are you doing in Brrrussels?
Dude: Eeuh, I'm an Artist.
Alba: Oh reaaally? What kind of an artist?
Dude: (pause)
Alba: (helpfully) A sculptor?
Dude: Oh yes, yes; a sculptor.
(thereafter, about an hour later, he introduces himself to me as a sculptor.)