Friday Thought..

If men had breasts,

Would Friday dressing mean - no bra day?

..swimming in a fish bowl...

It has been removed from where it belonged, but rings in my head over and over again like a chant

“…The ghosts of men will burn
And their dark ashes will flow
In the homes built on delusions

(And you will give my love to someone else,
And think that you are loving me back, ha)….”

Random Post

I realized shortly after I landed here that ‘I’, the lover of bright and vibrant, has the following in her wardrobe:

• 1 beige trouser
• 1 beige shirt
• 1 white shirt
• 1 black shirt
• 1 black and white top
• 3 black blouses
• 3 black trousers
• 2 black stoles
• 1 black pullover
• 1 maroon pullover
• 1 maroon and black kurta with BLACK churidar and BLACK stole
• 1 blue-BLACK jacket (are u getting the pattern here?)
• 1 black and maroon heavy jacket
• 1 saree – no prizes for guessing what color it is!

In the name of color, I have 3 different shades of blue blouses/light woolens which will anyway get hidden under the blue-black or the heavy maroon-black jacket.

So, I practically have four colors in my wardrobe for four months:

• Black
• White
• Maroon
• Blue

To add to this wondrous wardrobe planning, I forgot to buy ANY black socks. I am quite speechless about this discovery of the boring-ness of my wardrobe and the dullness of my head when I was buying all this stuff.

Either I was really depressed or I was plain out-of-my-mind!!!

On a completely different note, here is one more random crib -

(Men who are very orthodox or squirm at girlie topics may stop reading from here onwards)

A couple of days back, on the way back from office, CK said aloud ‘I wish men also got periods’. And then added ‘Do you think then every month there would have been at least 3 compulsory leaves for everyone?’

And I think ‘Yes’. Then, it would be perfectly normal and maybe the following could also happen:

• It would have been normal to set your out-of-office to:
  ‘I will be out of office from 11-11-07 to 13-11-07 as I have my menstrual cycle and the cramps have set in. I will join back on 14-11-07 as I will feel better by then’.
• Sanitary napkins would have been sold at ration shops.
• Some one would have definitely invented a REAL pain-killer.
• PMS would be treated with more respect.

What do you think girls? Some more?

Amsterdam :-)

Finally, a weekend that was fulfilling and not related only to cleaning and ensuring the house is stacked with groceries and the related stuff.

Living next door to Amsterdam, it was top most on the list to visit places in Holland. But, as confessed earlier, I have very less international experiences and am quite shy and more than that very psycho about losing my way around in a new country due to lack of spatial intelligence.

CK was a good moral support, as she is as less traveled internationally as I am. So, after looking up the map for basics (where basics = which tram station to get on the tram and where in Amsterdam to get down), we made the following plan…

8:30 am – wake up
9:30 am– cook and have breakfast
10:30 am – get ready and leave so that we are there in sufficient time to do the following:

• Stroll around the city centre
• See the Van Gogh Museum and Rijks Museum.
• Find a good Indian restaurant and have lunch
• Go on a canal cruise (as advised by a Dutch colleague)

This is what actually happened:

9:30 am – grudgingly got out of bed
10:00 am – still thinking what to cook for breakfast
10:30 am- cooked some thing and had a lazy breakfast
11:00 am - gossiping about random things
12:00 am- rushed to get ready
12:30 am – at the tram station

This was the first time we were heading in the Amsterdam direction of Holland so everything about the scenery was new and before we realized we were in the middle of the town. Still not sure where we were getting down was really the centre of the town, we got down at Dam. Walked a few paces ahead and reached the sex shop area and were quite taken aback and wide-eyed (for the hundredth time!) to see real women in bikinis ‘selling sex’ in the windows of shops in bikinis and lingerie. It was probably as natural to them as hawkers selling watches in Sarojini Nagar, pestering passersby to ‘sishter, have a look at least’.

But it was surprisingly quiet for a Saturday, and our main aim to get away from Amstelveen was to get away from the eerie silence and get into some hustle bustle and NOISE. So, we moved around in search of some more hustly-bustly places and walked backwards from Dam along the tram track (to be safe). At every few paces, the street names changed. We wanted to get to Liedesplein. So, for the first time in my life I looked at a map carefully (which to some extent explains my lack of spatial intelligence). Asking for directions is quite hopeless because by the time you learn the correct pronunciation, you can go from Amstelveen to Amsterdam 3 times.

So, again for the first time, we explored the place on our own, only with the map (I know u are thinking, ‘which is how it should be’ yeah..yeah!)

So, although we can strike off the first item on the list about ‘strolling around the city centre’, we quite forgot about the Museums in all the glamour and glitz and amazing buildings of the place. CK was going nuts clicking pictures, and I was blissfully just looking around and taking it all in. The people, the neat looking bill boards, the ‘green coffee shops’, the smells…more than often of the weed/pot/grass wafting at short intervals, stoned gazes, the canal, the jaw-droppingly amazing designer shops for shoes and clothes, the trams weaving in and out of the crowd, the beautiful and old brick buildings and some magnificent new ones!

About the Indian restaurants…we found quite a few, one almost immediately as we reached Dam and a few more, some hidden, some sitting proud on the streets with Indian flag etc…all had one thing in common…ridiculously expensive! Only a firangi can be duped into having ‘bhindi fry’ for 7.5 Euros? R-I-D-I-C-U-L-O-U-S

So, we decided to make do with some good falafel. Thanks to CK’s prayers, we found a ‘vegetarian only’ falafel joint….she must have prayed real hard 'coz as it turned out it was run by a sardar. So, after a hearty pita bread and falafel meal, we headed for a scoop of Ben and Jerry! I can only tell you that Belgian Waffle Sundae is quite heavenly! Also, we were extremely proud that we managed a filling meal with dessert in less than 15 Euros (for both of us!!)

It was 4 already and we were quite content with our own expeditions, till we saw the canal cruise board and realized ‘Oh..we had to do THAT too!’, so we found the nearest Tourist Information centre and got on to a 1 hour cruise.

(This was not as easy as it sounds, we often have to go round and round asking for directions and then CK and I nudge each other to go ask for directions because the accent is sometimes difficult to understand…here too we went round and round to know we didn’t have to go anywhere and the boat would come right there!)

Anyhow, I think the canal cruise was the highlight of the day. It was a fancy looking thing. Quite unimaginatively it was called the ‘The Blue Boat Company’ as all the boats were blue. I think we made the right choice to sit at the back of the boat with no fancy seats and in open air. Although, it was a wrong time for my bladder to feel full, I enjoyed every bit of it. It went through the city and on the way were the important landmarks of Amsterdam, the names of which I don’t remember but there were important looking buildings all around and also some beautiful and brightly painted house boats. CK, I think, saw everything through the digital screen of her canon camera, as she was again on the picture clicking spree. I think it was the shortest one hour of my life. There was SO much to see.

I think it was amazing how nature (canals) and technology (tram tracks) old and new, trees and buildings, blend into each other, none making the other look ugly or out-of-place.

It was 6 and the shops began to shut down….yeah, I don’t know what is with the Dutch and closing down most of the things by 6! Only on Thursdays Amsterdam is open till 9 PM. Morons, Aakhir Thursday kyun??

All-in-all it was quite a fulfilling visit. But next time we plan not to ignore the Museums and will plan a special trip for the Museums…or maybe that’s just an excuse to go back.

LIVING in De Nederlands

I thought I would post really nice photo-shoto blogs and other such regular stuff which shouts “Dekho-dekho, I am in phoren country and having a ball while you desi mortals fight your fates and toil away in cube farms”.

But NO, we all know its beautiful here. But did you know what all crazy things I am doing here for survival?

Sample a few …

• Have you ever tried cutting veggies with a butter knife? I have – The house has flute glasses, cappuccino cups, soup bowls and a chopping board…but no chopping knife. So, we had to make do with the butter knife to cut the tomatoes. If you are thinking ‘uh…arrey just buy a knife’, let me tell u another tale of misery.. CK and I braved the chilly winds and rains and went to buy a knife. After a lot of attempts to distinguish between the hajaar types of knives, we settled for one which looked close to what I use at home. At home, we realized that it was a no better than a butter knife…LOUSY! Maybe it is also a Dutch thing to keep the sharpness of the knife under a permitted limit or something of the sort or maybe it was just a bread knife. (‘Duh –uh’, you say? I know, but I never could imagine that buying a knife will ever be a complication.)

• Have you watched Radio on your TV?? – I have – The house has a TV with the most complicated remote control ever. To add to it is another remote for the DTH thingy. So, you switch on with one remote and change channels with another and then increase/decrease volume with the first one…etc..MINDFUCK..basically. So, in one such mindfuckedness I guess CK or I pressed too many buttons simultaneously and it resulted in the TV showing a channel with blue background that says Radio 1 and plays the most boring music ever. The automated music on ICICI helpline is more bearable.

• [On this note, I have to mention here that CK has lost it completely and is listening to Kumar Sanu!! SC, I miss you and how you would have taken CK’s happiness on this one ;-)]

• Have you ever made paranthas without a ‘belan’? – I did!! After an hour of all parantha-making preparation viz. kneading the dough, boiling/chopping the stuffing and getting the pan ready, CK and I realized this. As our stomachs had already waited long enough for some real aata to get in, we decided to give it a try with our own sweet hands! The initial couple of paranthas were appalling but expert CK stepped in with her patience and tactics to make better ones. Thank God! My stomach would have never forgiven me!

• Did you have to log on to the internet to figure out the instructions on the back of a toilet cleaner? – I have – or at least I asked CK to do so. As mentioned previously, the house has a cleaning agent for everything but as expected all the instructions are in Dutch on ALL the bottles. They all look fancy and all smell good but one said ‘bleek’ and I was guessing, it could be ‘bleach’ and did not want to mess up the floor in case it was. So, after a lot of searching, found out it was a bath-tub cleaner! What did I tell you? Too much of cleaning is expected here! SC, think about it again!

• Also, on the note of reading instructions, CK and I go quite nuts trying to figure out food in the grocery stores. To buy anything, first pick up, read WHAT it is. Then, match word-by-Dutch-word to the price tag on rack to see how much would it be. Choose the one that’s comparatively cheaper. Then, go a few counters ahead and see a similar thing at an even cheaper rate. Pick that up. Return previous thing at the previous counter. Then, realize the current thing is not actually the same that you wanted and so go back and pick up the previous thing. (Trust me, its even more complicated than it sounded.)

In the Thank God for small mercies section:

• We found out a Indian store here and it was extremely comforting to place a order in hindi and say ‘aadha kilo’ etc.

• After hours of cleaning and vacuuming etc, I first time had a bath in a bath tub, the way you are supposed to bathe in a bath tub!! There wasn’t any foamy thing called bubble-bath but what the heck! This was the real AAHAA moment of the month I guess. Sweet!!

More on my personal miseries next time!

PS: All expecting a nice travelogue about Amsterdam etc, please visit blog after a month…………………..maybe.