I am now cool Eurostar stud. Have a seat preference and everything (last seat in any carriage 2 carriages away from food car). Was lucky as usual on way out to the continent; the guy sitting next to me moved to sit with his girl some seats away. I therefore napped stretchedly… aah.
Friday wasn’t supposed to be very happening. Just a catch up (by now biweekly!) with the mibi in Den Haag and then sleep to prepare for the Nimsy reunion the next day in Amsterdam. However. Mibi took me to a dorm party.. in fact a ‘corridor’ party (oh, MBH!). I haven’t actually been to one since 2003, and I took to it with the relish of the truly enthusiastic out of town visitor type. There were student boys of all shapes and sizes, some very cute and taken, others cute and into mibi, and others not cute. There was, however, one Portuguese phd student with a deeply hidden sense of humour. However, we managed to find it after a few drags of a shared joint. Yes indeed, ladies and gents… your favourite alcoholic went to Holland and discovered marijuana. Crazy that this happened 4 years after leaving that haven of hash called SPA Delhi, but praps I am now finally ready to change my life, a little. Indeed, I befriended beer this weekend as well, having earlier stuck stolidly to the whiskey, but more on that later. So apparently, ganja makes me energetic. Energiser bunny, as we delicately put it that night. The corridor party melted into a salsa outing, where mibi and I, after a few caipirinhas, showed the populace what bollywood was all about. Our latino guy-friend came and asked, not too delicately, what are you DOING? Tee hee. We then left them (we thought) to make our way homewards, past a place the local junta calls ‘el decadente’. Basically, the seediest club in The Hague. We ran smack into the people we had just left, making them suspect that we were very lesbian and cosy. To dispel such thoughts, we had to dance muchly with the boys again, which we did with gusto as the music was actually rather good. Mibi’s friends are in awe of her, but she has rationalised it all into a tight state of disbelief. I, on the other hand, still tend to delusions of grandeur… they are really rather good. Anyway, home at 3; giggled for an hour, smoke free and asleep by 4.
Morning felt like a dogpile, but the Nimeran was waiting. We concocted a rather sweet lie to tell her when she raved at us for tardiness… but actually she didn’t seem to care much. She was happily on holiday with the doting hubby (bless them!). The day passed in a haze of brown beer, aching feet, hot dogs and sexual innuendo, both on our witty parts and from the city of Amsterdam. Which is, after all, kinky central. My impressions of Saturday are rather plagued by the presence in our very midst of a VERY IRRITATING BOY. He was brought along as company for the sole husband present, who would apparently have died of all the giggling me mibs and nims would do. Sadly though, mibs and I found ourselves babysitting this obtuse creature, who either had a.d.d. or thought he was competing for the tiny trivia tidbit trophy all day: Did you know, they built a chip that can make you talk 5 seconds faster? Did you know this tree produces slightly green sap? Did you know Budapest has the most bridges? Etc. while nims and the hubby stared at Europe in heart warmingly wide eyed wonder. Aw. After sending the happy couple to a weird choreographed sex show and being dragged to a very very lame museum (of sex), I kind of faded and left mibi to field the irritating boy’s incessant chatter. I drifted off and wrote pieces of this blog post on scraps of paper from my bag. One was even a roach I think. I was swooping in and out of deep sleep on the train ride back to den haag. Woke up and stayed that way from leiden, because we had been scared that we’d end up in Rotterdam otherwise.. and it was way too cold to risk that. I had a giggling fit all by myself on the train, remembering ‘Monica Bang’... nimeran’s masterpiece of the day. She’d been ploughed into by a dutch cyclist, and it was my fault because I was supposed to be taking care of her magic mushroomed out highness… but I had skipped away from her at a crucial moment, when the cyclist hit. ‘Monica Bang!’ she said, from the depths of giggly stonedness, hinting she would tell hubby that I had broken his wife, when he had handed her over in good faith in a foreign land. Oh nims.
The next day was sunny, and we passed the time drifting in a goblet of brown Belgian beer, drifting along the sunny streets of den haag, swapping anecdotes about the boys in (or not in) our lives in the pretty square that turns into an ice rink. Eventually we drifted south towards Holland Spoor to put me on a train. Determined as we were this time to catch the right one, we arrived in the somewhat bleak railway station area 45 minutes early. What now? Well, I had kind of changed my tune this weekend, from hardcore whiskey to hardcore beer sampler. Palm, Grimbergen, Leffe, witten wickse(??) had all happened to me over the last 2 days. So we decided to use this last snatch of time for a last sampling. Find a pub! A quick scan showed little hope of finding a watering hole hereabouts. Time ticked, hope ebbed, we crossed roads that no pedestrian had braved before…aha! I see a beer advert! We skipped and tripped over tangled tram lines, sprinting jubilantly across the doorstep of the seediest greek pub you ever saw. The music was meditteranean and suicidal, the hostess had no English, and the 2 helpful men already at the bar were not.. um, anything. Worst of all, all she had was Heineken in a bottle. Well.. 10 minutes to go, we swigged, we peed, we left half empty bottles, said dank ju wel, and made it to the finish line. No hysterics this time.. I stuck to the belief that mibi would make a UK trip before packing herself off to India for good. And she let me believe it, for the moment.
I have a nice life sometimes.
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