Too Bad Peanut Butter, and Dodging Mad Cyclists in Amsterdam

Friday last week, I drove up and down to Amsterdam with my sister, to help her move her stuff to our parents’. She is moving to Helsinki, Finland next month after 13 years in Amsterdam. To be totally honest, I merely provided transportation and she’s the one that did all the carrying. Other than simply being a lazy sod, I had a hernia repaired in my back a few months ago, and have pinky-sworn to my physical therapist that until she gives me the green light, the heaviest object I shall be lugging around is my laptop.

I left Belgium at 5:30 in the morning, armed with my new Tomtom GPS, and several cans of Red Bull in an effort to make the most of my day, hoping to beat the infamous traffic at the Kennedy Tunnel in Antwerp. I was looking forward to driving in Holland. I often complain about the homicidal driving habits of fat Belgians in Mercedes-Benzes and other German ‘prestige-metal’, and was looking for a repeat of the downright pleasant and polite Dutch driving I encountered around Eindhoven this past July. As it turns out though, Amsterdam is not Eindhoven...

I encountered my first ‘Amsterdammer’ on the freeway, as he was making a valiant attempt at driving his blue Audi up my rear. He then (predictably) started blinking his high-beams at me, which is Audi-ish for: ‘move over you silly slow person’. My first thought was that he must be Belgian… But the yellow and black license plate that was tickling the hairs on my bum was most certainly Dutch. Then I spotted the driver, and had thoughts similar to those of Arthur Dent as he first spotted the Vogon Constructor Fleet. He… or rather ‘it’ had a filthy gray beard that would have given Roald Dahl’s ‘Mr. Twit’ a run for his money. In fact, I may have briefly spotted fragments of old cheese in his moustache and, quite possibly, the putrid skeleton of a long-deceased sardine swimming in his nose hairs. Then I noticed the maniacal blue eyes and did the sensible thing to do. I cut in front of the 20 ton lorry I had been attempting to overtake, let ‘Mr. Twit’ through, and drank another can of Red Bull.

Here is where I have to give thanks to the wits of my new best friend forever, Mr. Tomtom, also a Dutchman. The device is simply astonishingly accurate and incredibly easy to read. I like the fact that all the telemetry readouts are very similar to those you find on the seat-back entertainment system on commercial airplanes. The only thing that could make the navigation in my car any sexier would be to install a Garmin 1000 unit on my dashboard with a HUD just for fun, but then the wise words of a former girlfriend pop into my head: “It’s a car! Wout, not an airplane!!”. Sigh…

After observing a Boeing 767 crossing the freeway bridge, dodging countless blind cyclists, and driving with half the car on the raised tram tracks because a van was parked on the road (which, my sister assures me is perfectly normal in Amsterdam), we reached the center more or less in one piece. At this point in time, the title of Bill Cosby’s famous book for graduates entered my mind: “Congratulations! Now what?”. We were in the less than envious position of needing a place to park. The Dutch phrase ‘helaas pindakaas’, which roughly translates into ‘too bad, peanut butter’, also entered my mind. No wonder there’s so many bicycles in this city!

Eventually we did manage to find a spot along the posh Herengracht, which used to be a bustling center for banking, back in the days of horse drawn carriages. Now, the buildings are mostly vacant, and that’s hardly surprising. At 5 Euros an hour, not even the bankers could afford to park here! I was told it is theoretically possible to get a ‘proper’ parking permit for central Amsterdam, but the waiting period’s a whopping 7 years…

Amsterdam is a fantastic place for a day on the town, especially as a global nomad. I had my first Starbucks Macchiato since leaving California and my first BK double cheeseburger with twisty fries in…well, a very long time. For the resident expats there’s the amazing Eichholtz Deli, who stock anything from Vegemite to Jolly Ranchers. To give an idea of exactly how amazing these guys are, they can actually do the impossible. They carry the holy grail of candy bars. The empress of sugary confections, which has delighted the palate of anyone (without a coconut allergy) who has ever visited Australia properly, the mighty Cherry Ripe! A secret like this however, doesn’t stay hidden for long among those initiated. It so happened that earlier that day, the manager of a certain ‘Mrs. Kidman’, in transit to New York, had come in and bought the lot…
Too bad, peanut butter!

On the blog again!

Blimey, I have seriously neglected this blog! My one and only post was back in October of 2009, and very little of that posting is still relevant. The what, how, and why is too complicated to describe in a blog post. It is however a damned good story, and I might one of these days write a book about it.
In a nutshell, I have been living in Belgium for nearly two years now, after living on and off in the USA for the previous 16 years. My profession is still, officially a classical flute player. The practical reality however is, that I'm still on the prowl for meaningful work...

A few months ago I started writing down my thoughts, as I was looking back on my youth spent in South East Asia, and started reliving adventures with poisonous snakes, Himalayan mountains, strange foods, and tropical sunsets. It made me realize pretty quickly that all in all, I've been having a pretty amazing life. There have been some epic ups and downs, but it's rarely been boring.

I came to the conclusion that these adventures in 'book' form would make a good read, and provide a look at how a Third Culture Kid adapted to life in the tropics, and had a bloody fantastic time in the process.

For the next year or so, I'm going to be blogging about life as an adult TCK, the process of finding a literary agent, and hopefully getting the thing published. The last thing I published was an adaptation of a book of flute exercises for saxophone, and was a such complete commercial disaster that I don't think total revenues were sufficient to even cover the price of an ISBN number...

Better luck this time around!