I love this neighbourhood - this one we live in, I mean.
Went out leafletting on Saturday (hey, its for a good cause and its something i actually enjoy doing, a grassroots thing, a practical, concrete thing that involves little of the endless talking that marks every other political activity I can think of, and which I do at my work too much already. Plus it gets me out on more of the evening walks I enjoy, and I find it fascinating. All the little details you suddenly notice about your neighbourhood that you otherwise unknowingly pass by. You'd never realise how different each part of these respective neighbourhoods here actually are, for example. Each street really has its own character, its own mood; you can sense who lives there, and how their domain would differ from the next's. I would hate to ever live in one of those expanses of suburbia where block of streets after block of streets, it's all the same.
Random funny example on that (as we're talking politics anyway), I was in the snackbar the other night, and the owner and one of the guy customers watching soccer on TV carried on a conversation about some kind of council measure they disagreed with. Some kind of limit on what was allowed on the little square down there or something. The owner shrugged and muttered, 'well, what'ya expect, it's those Green Left people, you know'; and when the other customer muttered something disparaging he insisted, 'no, they're a real force in this neighbourhood, you know! And these Greens down at the canal, in their fancy houses, they are insistent about this kind of thing. What are we ordinary people down here to do?' He was right about the Greens being big in the neighbourhood, by the way, though wrong about the canals - the party's actually stronger in the neighbourhood's backstreets, and has gradually been pushed back as gentrification increases. But his view neatly fitted with the stereotype, and who am I to **** with popular legend? So I didnt butt in.)
Anyway - Saturday I went leafletting for some elections about water, and I picked myself a cute coupla streets. I've wandered there ever so often, with or without Anastasia (we should have a dog!
, yet still I got to notice new things. The Plompetorengracht is now almost all fancy offices. But in the random handful of winding streets and streetlets behind it, it's all mixed. One short street I noticed must have been an industrial/artisan street once; some houses with wide doors fit for transporting things in through, and a house with one of those things jutting out on the top floor that were used to tie ropes onto for hauling things up with (you'll know 'em from Amsterdam postcards). It still has two garages and a storage depot, and over a few other houses the name of a further garage was still proudly tiled into the bricks. I like coming across signs of old, advertizing some shop or business that's long left, with phone numbers of improbably few digits. They've started to become newly appreciated now, preserved or restored by new owners. When I went with A. to the 'Volksbuurtmuseum Wijk C' last week they had panorama-sized pictures of signs like that from around the city, they were cool. ("Volksbuurt" doesnt translate into English, the dictionary suggests "working-class district"; in any case, the museum is devoted to the neighbourhood down the other way; a cool museum, full of intrigueing old photos and taped interviews with elderly former inhabitants, but also random objects from the old school there and stuff like packaging from the 30s and 50s - just anything that would meet the yearning of ex-inhabitants for a piece of the experience of life back then. It also functions as hang-out for some of them to drink coffee together at.)
People just stick all kinds of stuff in / near their window. When the windowsill is full of little porcelain animals on embroidered cloths, and you catch a glance of a room full of ornamental stuff and perhaps even those thick, Turkic cloths (more like little tapestries) over small dark coffeetables, you know it's one kind of house. They most likely have a sign, 'beware the dog', next to the doorbell, and they might have Dutch-language tearjerker-music on (I'm exaggerating, now). They're not very likely to be interested in elections about water ;-). If in the windowsill, they got some stylish African-art thing going on and a wide expanse of parquet-ed floor-space stretches out behind it, with a huge bookcase on one side and a magazine rack near the low, glass coffeetable, it's another kind. In this little neighbourhood, it was somewhere in between and everybody was informing us of something. Got their little posters up. For a theatre piece, next week. A discussion in debate-centre Tumult. An exhibition. A political party.
A few houses had monumental doors but with double signs: this bell for one inhabitant, that one for another. Down one street, a little girl was trying to ride a unicycle. In the street with the garages a boy was kicking a ball against the wall. You dont see that much anymore, children playing outside. Its kinda reassuring when you do. At the end of the Plompetorengracht, in the (once?-)squatted Moira, a guy and girl were standing guard at a bar, waiting for someone to come visit their expo. Nobody seemed to do. Down at the other hand, by the canal skirting the inner city, with a canalboat on one hand, there was a dream of a little house on the other which I'd never noticed. You have to go in through the little gate to deliver your mail, through a small, wonderful garden full of roses and other flowers and a real swing. The building next to it housed a women's library (more announcements of debates, "women and Islam") that'd never caught my eye either. But in front of the prison, where there'd been a little playground and - yeh, what else
had been there?, everything was torn up - new stuff to be built. Perhaps luxury apartments.
Today, I went down the other way. Cheerful blue posters abounded here, all about a neighbourhood "vredesfeest" (peace party?) in June. The people of one house had put some stuff they didnt need anymore out on the bench they had outside, with a sign saying "free to take with you". In honor of the snackbar-owner, I distributed my leaflets only along the canalside. Each house has a little gate (or once had one, as many seem to have disappeared over time), which you go through to climb up the three or four steps to the front door - the gardens thus being the mere idea of garden, and usually left appropriately free to run wild. Children's shoes at the door. Bycicles in the hall.
Around the corner from here, there's 'Circus Jopie'. It doesn't have animals - just volunteers and things to juggle and hang in. I'd never been there, but they're having 'open house' this week. I went to see the show of the adult students - they give courses, and tonight the adults who'd done the course showed what they learned. Juggling, walking on a ball, unicycling (so that's where that little girl learned it!
, tightrope-walking, gymnastics ...
The organiser was proud: in 12,5 years, this was the first time they'd had an adult course group! That made me smile, too. After the skates, the scooter hype (hip adult computer designers riding a scooter to work - yeh, one like you had when you were a kid, except in slick metallic mini-styling), the plastic-ball-to-sit-on-at-the-office-cause-its-good-against-RSI, the lounge cafes for clubsters grown too old to stand around all night but not ready to do away with teenage life, and the 'popcorn' hype of elevator music and Charlie's Angels-look, the retro generation's trend of infantilisation gets added a new item: back to the circus! And indeed, after the performance (of otherwise endearing amateurism) ended and the audience was invited to 'try for yourself' the trendiest group of around-30's, that'd cheered their friend on stage on with infectious tongue-in-cheek zeal, jumped on in ahead, with the first guy falling off the tightrope almost instantly. Yahoo! <smiles>. I dont mean to sound disparaging at all, here, actually, I think its cute; its sweet; wholly harmless; and it probably says something optimistic about times to come. And hey, I wanna learn how to ride a unicycle. And to juggle with more than three balls. Now there's a hobby ;-).
