Getting started on a sunny Saturday morning

So I have finally decided to join the dizzy crowd of bloggers. Who should I write it for? How honest can I be? Do I make it a travel log of all our sunny and sometimes not so sunny holiday? We will have to see. One thing is for sure, I don’t want it to be too heavy!

Let me give a quick update on the year so far: We started 2010 with a bang in Cape Town. Well perhaps it was not such a big bang after all. Cape Town is a fantastic spot to be for the Christmas holidays, but New Year’s Eve is rather feeble in comparison to all the light and sound of the European capitals. However, there is nothing as beautiful and caressing as a sunny day on Clifton beach and snow covered Amsterdam quickly pales into insignificance on Boxing Day. Before you know it you have to pack up your summer clothes and the city lights of Cape Town are fading into the background of your little round KLM airplane window.

Little window on the world

Black the Piketberg lies below

Bright the tiny lights of Table Bay twinkle

Icy white Schiphol dawns

Scratches my heart

All too soon

Curl up, the dark Vondelstraat winter nights

Curl up, against warm homely familiar flesh

Tightly against me,

And in my heart,

I am at home again

Home again, in my carry-on luggage life

The best medicine for a bit of winter blues is another holiday. So at the beginning of February we were off to the Vancouver Winter Olympics. We had been to the 2004 Athens summer Olympics and had had a blast. It took little convincing when our friends, Bernard and Daniel, invited us to come and join them for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. They stay in Abbotsford and have the cutes of boys, Byron.

His name is Byron

And yes, he is so cute

They even named the most beautiful bay in Australia after him

A long white beach

Waves rolling in from the blue Pacific

Hippies with flowers in their hair

Grey bottlenose dolphins in the surf

His name is Byron

And yes, he is my Abbottsford mornings ….

Vancouver put its best foot forward and we had a great time. In spite of all the critical press and the lack of snow, we had a fantastic time! The highlight was definitely seeing Alexandre Blandeau of Canada win the freestyle downhill moguls!

The ice hockey was fun as well. It was my first ice hockey match and they really do at each other. It makes rugby, the blood sport of my youth, look like a Sunday school pick nick! The mighty Russians lost against the nimble Slovaks in the match we watched. Byron was so excited about attending the ice hockey match, something of a national cult in Canada; but was fast asleep after the first innings from exhaustion!

I know they had a hard time with the snow at Grouse Mountain, but it is sheer indulgence to watch the Winter Olympics in a T-shirt at 12 degrees Celsius. We drove up to Whistler to see the ski jumping. It was rather special to get up close and personal to the likes of Simon Aman, the Swiss national hero in ski jumping and Olympic Champion. I did not realize how minute these ski jumpers are. They look like victims of the Ethiopian famine! Really not a pleasure to look at ….

Things have been rather hectic at work. We finally decided to group the retail and wholesale and internet banking activities together under on management. A step that looks very logical given the present pressures on the financial sector. The good news is that my boss was made head of the new bank and he asked me to remain on as his Chief of Staff. The bad news is that we needed to sort out the governance of the bank in the first couple of months. This interfered terribly with my holiday plans, especially as it dragged on into March!

So you can imagine my boss’ surprise when I said that I was going on a Gay Cruise in the Caribbean in the beginning of March. It has always been one of my fantasies to go on such a cruise and when my dear friend, Paolo, suggested that we go on the March cruise last year, there was no turning back! It was one of the nicest things I have ever done and all the stories are true! Furthermore, the departure coincided with the Winter Party in Miami. Say no more ….

It was my first time in Miami. I cannot say that I saw a lot of Miami, but I am convinced I managed to see the best part – South Beach! Paolo and I rented some bicycles and cycled across the causeway connecting the so-called Venetian islands. It was a brilliant sunny morning and the opulent houses on the sparkling lagoon water looked like paradise. It was also such a gay friendly environment. Twice some rather hunky joggers stopped, and offered to take pictures of us together.

The Winter Party is great fun. We did not manage to drag ourselves out on Friday evening as Paolo had spent exactly 12 hours to get to Miami, but we made up for that on Saturday. I particularly liked the pool party. It felt rather classy in one of those spa hotels along the beach. Pure American beef was served in big measures, if you know what I mean. The music was nice and for once the toilets were discreetly hidden behind a fence at the far side. Just a pity it was still a bit too chilly to plunge into the water wholeheartedly and in any case there is nothing more irritating than an old man dancing in wet shorts!!

The cruise was great! We passed by the Bahamas, St Barts, St Thomas and finally the Samana peninsula of the Dominican Republic. It was not great weather all the way, but that is not so important if you have the good weather packed in your heart. Some moments really felt like a scene from Blue Lagoon! One such moment, was striding through the shallow waters of the Cococay in the Bahamas. We came across a huge starfish and immediately started a photo shoot! There are truly beautiful spots on earth that takes your breath away and leaves you totally silent and thrilled – like that first gold star you got at school.

The cruise is a fantastic mix of parties and excursions. The highlight of the cruise is the white party. Paolo and I had found a pair of very cheap children’s shorts to wear for the occasion. As any gay will tell you, less is more ….

The amazing part is that they are the official shorts of football team of Suriname. I thought it fitted right in with the Caribbean rhythm. The highlight of the cruise was definitely seeing the sun rise after having danced the night away. It was a glorious sunrise without a cloud in sight. The powder blue slipstream of the ship played naughts and crosses with the bright orange yellow streak of sunrise. We lay out on these couches at the back of the huge cruise ship convinced that life does not get much better than this! 24 hours later we were in a US Airways plane careering back to Amsterdam and a cold but sunny white morning.

Caught the morning in my hand

Held it tight

Broke the eternal rhythm of the days

Spread it over my wet body

Dried my skin all brown and warm

Colored my eyes bright powder blue

Sang a soft old familiar melody

Flowed a fresh morning stream through my mind

Caught the morning in my hand

And, contented, finally, unwillingly, let it go

Yes, had to let it go

Just to make sure that I don't loose it all and pack up and leave, we planned in a wet weekend of culture in Berlin. Berlin is undoubtedly the capital of fun in Europe. Its young inhabitants, culture of freedom and its affluent and spoil crowd of bureaucrats and diplomats makes an explosive mix. We did get to Berghain, voted the best club in Europe, but the main aim of the trip was opera. We managed to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut which is a rarity in the Opera repertoire. The voices were of top quality and the classical décor was surprisingly refreshing – lots of white and pastel colors. It a beautiful love story that falls horribly flat in the last act. The two lovers get stranded in the Nevada dessert after being shipped to New World as prisoners. How they managed to get stranded, on foot, thousands of miles further in the desert without a drop of water, but even more important, without a horse, boggles the mind! Anyway, that’s opera for you! Her final swan song is probably one of the most beautiful arias ever written. It makes dying worth all the while.

Last night was the first of four concerts that Thea, my office manger, and I have organized for the bank’s charity, Chances for Children. Organized is a big word, as Marco, a good friend of mine and his events company, really put it all in place! It is a concert by a Dutch artist, Nikki Romijn, singing songs of Kate Bush. Although I have never been a huge fan of Kate Bush, hearing the lyrics of her songs have made me curious! Sometimes the lyrics remind me of the poetry of e.e. cummings. It is as if she leaves you with phrases that you can make your own. You can tie them to a loved one, you can mash them on people that irritate you, you can give them as presents to friend you have not seen for the longest time – and all of that in that beautiful little mind of your own.

The crisis of the vacation countries ....

It is hard to believe but the economic crisis is back. In spite of a huge rescue package for Greece, the confidence in the financial markets is gone. Today is the third day in a row that the bottom seems to be falling out of the world stock markets. And once again it is all about trust. Do we trust the Greeks to pay back the huge package? Can we trust the fickle European government to vote in favor of the disbursements? Will international investors trust the Mediterranean government sufficiently to buy their future bonds? Can the battered banks absorb the potential losses from the Greek, Portuguese, and god forbid, eventual Spanish fall out? Will investors continue to support the banks given their direct and indirect exposure to the toppling vacation countries?

What should one feel about the rescue package? What is the right sentiment to hold: irony, pity, frustration, sympathy, compassion? In my mind’s eye I see that rather fat sweaty hotel owner in Mykonos that probably pays no taxes. Frustration! I see those brown muscled bodies of the Greek boys spending their summers weekend and August holidays on Elia beach. Irony! I remember those confident Greek boys that I met a couple of years ago all starting their own small trading companies in Thessaloniki and Athens. Compassion! Greece and its blue waters is in our mind’s eye one big vacation land, filled with joy and freedom. It all seems so ironically removed from the lack of discipline and years of corruption and overindulgence that the austerity package implies. One cannot imagine the hardship and the years of austerity and the possible bankruptcies that it implies for the people that we meet every odd year on our blue sky holidays. I cannot imagine how one keeps your boat afloat in an ebbing tide of this magnitude. How do you grow your company with hardly any available financing? How do you start a company if the value of your first house hardly covers the mortgage? Sympathy!

On a much happier note, April and May is national holiday season in the Netherlands. On top of the more usual Ascension Day and Pentecost, the official birthday of the Dutch Queen is celebrated on 30 April and once in 5 years the Liberation of the Netherlands from the Germans is a national holiday on 5 May. Wow, great fun!

Last Friday was Queens Day. Nowhere is it celebrated with such exuberance as here in Amsterdam. Around a million people pour into the streets of Amsterdam, creating what borders onto sweet chaos. In no other country is anything remotely like it possible. Nearly everyone dresses up in bright orange. The Prinsengracht gets clogged up with boats of all shapes and sized, filled to near sinking by revelers. Every street corner gets its own DJ and the different drum beats roll over each other in a strange nearly discordant mix. What stuck me this time round was the way in which every group has his or her specific corner. We weaved our way around town, and in front of every canal or DJ booth the crowd as just ever so slightly different. The sunglasses, my-mom-and-dad-is-rich, one-day-I-will-live-in ’t Gooi, crowd gathered on the Amstelveld. The music was lightly techno and modern and they frowned at you if you dared to push your way around. The hard-line track suite wearing clubbers were on Rembrandt Plein chewing away at their spearmint gums and nursing their Heineken beers. The young pimple faced crowd, complete with binge drinking friends from England, collected in front of the Stadschouwburg on Leidse Plein. The weekend tourists, with their heavy duty cameras, were sprinkled along the Prinsengracht ogling at the passing boats.

The gay crowd use to all bunch into Regulierdwarsstraaat. In the more recent past they have split up into 3 groups. The transvestites and their fans have moved to the Westerkerk, and the sporty, swimming club, older gays congregate on the Amsteel Bridge near the Amstel Tavern. It was a beautiful sunny day and we split our time between the club music of the Reguliers and sing-along of the Amstel. Our jovial friends, Victor and Paul, were over from Vienna and equally fun-loving Paolo flew in for the weekend from Milan. We spent our day drifting just above the ground, smiling and chatting with each other. The muscle boys from Splash gym filed past. The tall handsome boys from the swimming club were standing in the sun on the bridge. The smiling boys from London invited us for a drink. And finally we invited ourselves to the after party with the Italian Lebanese crowd. We kissed, we chatted, we greeted, we even danced a bit as the sun slowly set over the canals and colored the skies into an orange finale. Paolo and I decided that the day was over all too fast and spent the night pub and club crawling. It was one very tired body that finally got into bed around 4 am in the morning. But even when you close your eyes the drum beat goes one in your mind and the faces continue to file past you like actors in a macabre dance.

On Wednesday it was precisely 65 years after the liberation of the Dutch from the Germans. Wednesday is the day of celebrations and Tuesday evening is dedicated to the remembrance of the dead. As work and the management team dragged on during Tuesday evening, I did not get to the commemorations on Dam Square on Tuesday evening. Just as well as the proceeding were rudely disrupted by a man screaming bomb which led to an ensuing stampede that injured several onlookers. The celebration on the Amstel was much more peaceful and joyful and there was an atmosphere of defiance and above all support for the Queen. They build a huge stage on the Amstel River and normally a fleet of small ships moor on to each other on the opposite side to view the performance. An orchestra from Limburg, together with local opera and musical stars, performed a pleasant mix of songs from operas and musicals. The highlight is really the Queen’s arrival and even more important her departure by boat. It is moving to see the love of the Dutch for their Queen. She seems such a binding factor. Her grandmother was such a huge symbol in the protracted and costly liberation of both the Netherlands and eventually the whole of Europe. How we rally around symbols and concepts! It seems to make us feel safe. It makes us belong. It gives a strange meaning to our own existence. That lady with her huge wind proof beehive, fast aging, rather bent over, increasingly dressed in black, is so much more than her physical self. She embodies and symbolizes all those values that define the Dutch as a society: perseverance, diligence, consensus, industrious, art-loving, creative, caring and above all freedom!