Another Wednesday

I have been drinking very little here in Amsterdam and I haven't been drinking at all for about two weeks now. Alcohol, that is. My body tries compensating for the absent stressor by inducing me to drink more coffee and by thus giving me headaches anyway. It was only by chance that I was spared when I accidentally bought decaffeinated coffee. Kicking addictions since 2012.

I have also learned why the Dutch ride their bikes during torrential weathers and don't carry an umbrella. National pride, I was told, is at stake: if one refuses getting soaked he is declared to be made of sugar.

The tour of revelations (contd.)

Today once again I have embarked on my weekly Friday-bike-tour-of-revelations. With a camera! Not the best day for taking pictures, I thought, all grey and dark and threatening to start raining any minute. And I was completely right, of course - the pictures turned out to be awful and blurry (that's also because half of them I took while riding the bike). But anyways. The day before a spoke to a reasonable study abroad and we were complaining to each other how it's getting a bit depressing, probably because of the lack of sunlight, and she said yes, of course, with this unpredictably ominous weather one is bound to stay indoors more that would be considered normal. So I thought it was about time to learn to ignore what the outside looks like. To the detriment of the quality of pictures, that is.

So today I was asked for directions to the Central Station. This happens to me in every new place and very early on and never once yet I have failed to provide the directions. That's just because a place being new and me having a moderate map fetish go very well together. Another question is why I am constantly being asked. When I was a bit younger and more naive I used to think that's because I looked like a local. Here is a better theory: I seem to act like a local. When I walk alone I tend to be in a hurry, and the more destination-less the walk is the more in a hurry I am. This, it seems, to the outside eye appears as if I really know where I'm going (and what can be easier than looking like you know where you are going when you don't particularly care where you are going?).

Here's another revelation. It seemed surprising at first that there are so many Subways around, as many as McDonalds if not more. The solution, it dawned on me today, must lie in the dietary habits of the Dutch having just one warm meal a day.

Two encounters with unlucky celebrities also. I passed by the house where Anne Frank lived and stopped by the park in which vicinity Theo van Gogh was killed to take a picture of "The Scream" placed there in his memory (below).

Now to the pictures.

What I see every day.

Every day.

De Schreeuw. Theo and the freedom of speech.

This is what I see when I'm riding a bike.

Museumplein

A successful city-rebranding effort. They want less sex-drugs-rocknroll and more nice and cozy things.

I've heard meta-commenting on meta-picture-taking is in vogue again.

More water.

Theo

Today I have learned that I live five minutes away from the place where Theo van Gogh was assassinated.

Fri

I was gonna write a long post on Friday but I didn't and now I don't remember what was gonna be so long about it. Well, it was a relatively eventful Friday. First, I have recently become all legal with my new fancy Dutch social security number so I went and opened a bank account like a real working man. Then I took a walk in the center and witnessed a weird street performance by a weird Australian guy who was sort of offensively funny, soliciting money and cigarettes from the crowd, insulting passers by, and performing a magic escape from chains and plastic wrap. I didn't see how he did it because when the guy said "If you think my show was not worth at least 5 euros you may leave now" I did leave but when I was coming back from a coffee shop having spent 5 euros I saw him half-naked. Monologue:

The Guy: "People who think I can get rid of this chain - clap now!"
[very few people do]
The Guy: "Seven people! Now, people who think I cannot get rid of this chain - clap now!
[very few people do]
The Guy: "Same seven people! Now, people who think I should just get on with the show and stop wasting their time - clap now!"
[everyone finally begins clapping]
They Guy: "You assholes!"

Also, I think I have finally been christened into Amsterdamers (Amsterdamites? Amsterdorkers?) by getting under a heavy rain while biking. I was sure it would be the end of me but what do you know, I made it. Which was fortunate because it allowed me to finally do my laundry when I came back. A trip to the future that was. Machines talk to you in human language ("Pay up!") and add detergent automatically.

I'm crunching away at my duties and obligations, have enough time for side projects, do well in school and generally feel at peace. I have been reading fifty pages of fiction every night before going to sleep, haven't skipped a single night yet (Eco's Prague Cemetery - i cannot quite follow the intellectual rollercoaster of names and facts in all detail but there is still some weird pleasure in reading that novel) and (attention!) am drinking tea with milk! Oh how time changes people. Crazy things can happen. Who knows, I might even start wearing a watch or sleeping in pajamas!

wow

This is mind blowing. I have this dictionary plugin for Chrome that gives you the definition of a word if you click twice on it. I have accidentally clicked "7" and will never be the same again. 7 as a noun: "the cardinal number that is the sum of six and one", adjective (my favorite): "being one more than six". "Dude, I am so more than six". "You mean seven?".

Five circles of Amsterdam

I poked my head out of the window today at about 6pm. The weather prompted me to leave my lair. Sunny, still and fresh (now, a couple of hours later it is still quite magical - misty, my window is covered with condensate, it's like a very thick fog, so that you can see the beams of street lights standing out quite distinctly in the dark). So I took my bike and went.

They say in the tourist guides, "Don't be afraid to get lost, that's quite all right, happens to everyone in Amsterdam". I can see why you could say that, all buildings look pretty much the same (that's because of all the water actually, regulations: big windows to make them lighter, not too many floors etc), but it has not happened to me. I have deliberately left my bike on a street like any other next to a fence like any other so that when I want to come back from my walk I will not find it instantly and in this manner prolong the walk. Didn't happen. Found it. There seems to be just one secret to navigating the center of the city: streets are not straight but concentric. This made me think of the Inferno and I was prepared to make that comparison right here, but then I did some googling, and, surprise, Camus: "Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course..."  I should read The Fall. I have "liked" Camus on facebook some time ago and now I get these unsettling updates, "Albert Camus posted a new picture"...

I enjoyed the walk. It was pretty crowded but in an amusing way. Seamen who came to shore, in their bleached uniforms, taking pictures. A two-dog-powered bicycle. Tons of Britts... I might have also ventured into the red light district but I would not vouch for it, there were no red lights anywhere.

The very first store I went to in Amsterdam, my total at the cashiers was 10.99 but they charged me 11. Ripoff, I thought, would have never happened in Germany. But today I have learned that it works both ways. I got my eurocent back. Eurokarma, eh.

laws

I have so many thing to do I do none of them. I've been thinking about the spatial aspect of the law of diminishing returns. This law was formulated by mm fuck Ricardo. It's very simple. Add more labor to any task and with each new labor unit the useful output will decrease. If I need someone to dig a hole in the ground I could hire one worker and give him a shovel and it would be a great help compared to no workers and no hole at all. Get another worker and they would dig it twice as fast. Third one - they'd probably already begin slacking off, having smoke breaks and playing table tennis. Four, five - and they would just start getting in each other's way. Every new worker is less useful than the previous one. What is fascinating, I think, is the pure spatial dimension of such interaction. I always imagine like 20 people thrown in a pit, swarming like a bunch of worms, doing nothing, of course, just trying to disentangle their puny 3-dimensional bodies. Now if we have learned anything from modern physics this need not be the case on all levels of the material world: particles fly through walls like there's no tomorrow, electrons end up in a few places at the same time, some even say there's just one electron to all there is, whizzing around in time and space. Humans bump into each other all right, but that need not be the case universally. I couldn't find any formula on the Internet for the law of diminishing returns that takes mass into consideration. Midgets would obstruct each other's movements twice as little probably, and you can fill a hole in the ground with much more cats than humans, and probably on a certain level the law would not be applicable at all.

footnotes to bigger grievances (to come)

I wash my socks in the sink of my bathroom because there are six hundred students and only two washing machines here. Then I hang them to dry on a few coat hangers hanging on the edge of my desk because there is not really any other place. Pretty surreal it feels. What is also surreal is that I have 4cm long nails sticking out of the walls of my room, placed symmetrically but also randomly - their function is a mystery to me and I shall leave that to my landlord. I have been spending so much time in my room that the university feels like a small appendage to my surreal adult life (especially now that I have to cook for myself and wash socks in a sink). Which I am quite enjoying. Apart from the socks part.

almost forgot 2

Courtesy of Chatlin. Quite jolly.

almost forgot