The past few weeks and the weekends have been strange. It would seem to the occasional visitor of the blog that I have become too busy in this new fabulous life and there must be so much to write that I don’t know where to begin. It is true, the latter about the too much to write, but not about ‘fabulous life’ Naah aah!
However, I shall begin where I left.
The weekend of the visit to the Van Gogh museum
I was going there on the strict instructions of my dad who is a great admirer of all arts especially Monet and Gogh! (I always think his idea of a ‘teerth yaatra’ would be visiting all such museums and art galleries.) I don’t know how my visit would help his dream of seeing all this in person, but he sounded more excited than me on hearing about the plan. And so I obeyed still thinking what else could I have spent the 10 Euros on instead of the ticket.
(Here, I would like all to know that all the knowledge that I ever had about art was only because of watching dad paint or because of ONE painting book which had the descriptions of all the famous masterpieces with a picture accompanying it.)
So, basically, what I am trying to say is that I cannot look at a painting forever. So, I thought I will be over with it soon.
And of course as usual, I was wrong in my judgment of own likes and dislikes.
It was like entering a new universe for sometime. I didn’t take the audio tour, which is basically hearing whats written next to the pantings and a little bit more. I prefer reading text to hearing text any day!
After staring at some 200 paintings and some 100 sketches, I came out quite enlightened and missing my dad like hell. I could not help thinking about him when I saw original Sunflowers and The Courtesan and actually looking at the pointillist paintings, which dad had tried explaining so many times.
It was a special trip and I hope I can retain in my head all that I saw so that I can tell him in detail about his favorites and more and see the glint in his eyes.
We planned on going on all-museums-trip that day but I didn’t want Van Gogh to fade or get obscured by other things so we decided to laze around in Leidesplein (which is where we went the last time too). We even had the same food, falafel and then a belgian waffle sundae. So much for exploring Amsterdam! (I am completely disappointed with myself on that front. More about that later.)
But Amsterdam did look different. It was a sunny weekend after a lot of grim-cloudy weekends and for the first time since we landed in Holland, we saw crowd and hustle-bustle. It was quite refreshing to our Indian souls. We found a bench in strategic place sat around on a bench and just watched people around and talked loudly in Hindi, which we had to pay for later.
It so happened that an unpleasant looking desi (ULD) overheard our conversation (by the way, our conversations are not really suitable for overhearing, as they are mostly very gawaanr like ‘arrey, woh uncleji ko dekh!’ or ‘hey bhagwan, isko thand nahin lag rahi? Kitni choti skirt!!’ )
ULD: Aap kahan se hain?
Me: ‘Bangalore’ – (it has become a habit to say the B’lore instead of India, i think it is more popular than India!)
(I was trying to be the 'pleasant me' thinking he is curious to know about people from his country. Bechara, chalo koi nahin, baat kar lo. Yes, polite conversation basically.)
ULD: Means ki kahan?
Politeness was immediately replaced by a combination of disgust and discomfort.
Me: India
ULD: Haanjee, mujhey lagg raa tha, maine suna hindi, toh mujhey laga…’
(Einstein!)
ULD: Toh aap ji phamily ke saath hain?
Me: Nod
(Discomfort increasing)
ULD:Toh phir koi khabar sunao India ki
Me: Humein bhi nahin pata (I dint know what the heck to say and all this while CK was ignoring his presence trying to pull me into another conversation)
ULD: Ghoomne aaye ho?
Me: Nod
ULD: Kab se ho yahan pe?
Me: Bas abhi 1 week se (My brain was trying to rapidly thinking of ways to get up and leave and therefore churning out such crap!)
ULD: Toh ji aap ko toh pata hoga India ki khabar hum toh yahan pe paanch saal se hain’
Me: Nod (still thinking)
Goes on about some chacha/mama in b’lore.
ULD: B’lore mein kahan rehte hain?’
(Brain tells me to say: why the fuck u want to know?’)
Me: Umm..Bangalore mein’
ULD: Toh app koi company ki taraf se bheja hai ki ghoomne aaye hain?
Me: Apne aap (I knew he had asked this already but the brain was just not multitasking as ever!)
ULD: Toh phir kahan pe rehte hain aap?
I must have looked like a retard because he shifted his gaze and started to ask CK, who thankfully turned around and just said ‘Yeh kuch zyada sawal nahin ho gaye?’
PHEW!
ULD: Ein..zyada ho gaye jee? Achcha nahin poochte chalo
He looked embarrassed and I thought, THANK GOD for CK!
But to our complete disgust,
ULD: Ji last sawal pooch leta hun, aap ko zara chai pila sakte hain?
BOTH: ‘Nahin, thanks’ we said in chorus and walked off.
I never thought THIS is how it would feel like to have a conversation with the first Indian we will meet in a foreign land!
The Weekend After
This weekend was quite a waste I would say! Complete lack of initiative in planning a trip and imagining someone will knock on our door Saturday morning and say ‘Can I take you ladies somewhere?’ And we will just slide into a car and ‘Voila’ we will have seen Europe. Yes, that’s how lazy and shamelessly boring people we had become on this particular weekend.
However, I guess we still had a little bit of shame and we decided to go ‘venture out’ to the city center of Amstelveen (this is like a small square with a lot of expensive shops, where you feel even if you window shop, it will cost you money.
So, we started with checking out a stationery shop, which turned out to be the backside of a mall!! So, we just spent a lot of time inside it and had falafel for lunch (yes, pretty interesting, isn’t it? I love to try out ‘new’ stuff!)
Came out exhausted after an hour. Too much stuff to drool about! Then went to a C&A and bought a sweater each. Please be my guest and guess the color. Yes, it is black and you can roll your eyes till they fall out of your head, but I wanted a heavy black woolen sweater that I could wear with the rest of my black formal stuff.
Came home and secretly sulked about my new black sweater because it has a hood and wont really go with formal trousers. I here by declare myself the Worst Western Wardrobe Shopper of the Century.
Last weekend
After the most boring last weekend, we decided that in the coming week, we will plan very seriously about going out of silly Amstelveen and certainly not Amsterdam. We will infact plan to go OUTSIDE Holland.
Well, we did exactly that. We planned a lot. Planned to go to Paris, planned to to Disneyland, planned to go to Brussels, and planned to go to Munich.
Comes weekend, and where are we??
In our living room watching ‘Kuch Kuch Hota hai’!
(CK is a big SRK fan. I know, I am really lucky! SRK + Kumar Sanu.)
This weekend beats all others.
Apart from the fact that all our plans remained plans, it was rainy and cold and damp and HORRIBLE!
Then, after whole day of lounging around the house and cooking and eating and doing very little and watching the rain and talking and watching ‘The Blue Umbrella’, we got really tired and couldn’t even think of lying on the bed. We are not used to ‘doing nothing’ really.
So, we picked ourselves up and shoved ourselves in the rain, which had turned into a drizzle at 8:30 in the night and decided we will stroll around the block. The plan was to peep into people’s house to see how the rich Dutch live in this quaint little town. You can imagine how haplessly bored to our bones we were (and a bit demented too).
As we started to walk past a little too closely to the row houses, we realized quite a few houses had ‘sensor’ light bulbs outside the houses. It was a little startling initially but then this was quite an exciting thing if you compare it with the rest of the day. So we went zig-zag in all the rows of the row houses to find out how many houses have the sensor lights by walking past them. This was our idea of fun.
And we walked and walked and giggled every time a light would come on. We talked to the ducks in the canal. We counted how many houses had just old people in it and in how many were occupied by the young. We rated the houses on the way they had decorated the front living rooms. We laughed at the houses which had more than two old people and said ‘oh, they must be having a party!’ And we laughed at the houses which actually had a party because their idea of a party was sitting around a table and only talking. We were having fun finally.
And I thought, after avoiding the rain for the whole day, we were finally wet but more cheerful than we were when we were dry and safe inside. Hmm!
I hope to update the blog more regularly from now onwards (mainly, because my fingers are aching from typing 5 pages! I will never be able to write a book, I think.)
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