Today I took the day off, mostly because I had two appointments at the, eh, LIMH this week and I didnt want to just turn up after noon at my work two days in a row - better just take up a free day, use it to do something else as well.
Of course, I heard last night that the appointment was cancelled ... no matter. Instead, as I took a sleeping pill last night and it worked, I woke up only after noon. Got off to a slow start, went down to the Bakery to check if they found back the Hungarian Quarterly issue I forgot there last weekend - I'm so pissed at losing it, it was very pretty and you cant get it here - but they hadnt. On to City Hall where I picked up a second box of Green Left leaflets. I had volunteered to distribute some, house-to-house, did 400 after my work on Tuesday and enjoyed it a fair bit. Something to do with your hands after a day at the office, out in the clear chill, doing street after street and picking up random observations from the scene. The leaflets inform the people over in Lombok about the aldermen's plans to build an escalation of new high-traffic speedways into downtown, and what the party is trying to do against it, using the argument of EU-established air quality norms. (The GL is the second-largest party in this city, with 16% of the vote).
I find leafletting one of the most relaxing things to do. Its got something meditative about it, the automatic, repetitive act, while in the meantime pondering the various things in people's windows, the odd glimpse of lives. So I volunteered for another 500, and went to do those today.
I really, really like Lombok - tried to get an apartment there when I was looking for one, but there's no way to get in - for rented apartments in Lombok waitinglists are long. Which in some way is still surprising, since it's still something of a problem-neighbourhood, low wages, high concentration of foreigners, above-average crime. One of the few annoying things about the place is that if you dont have cash money on hand, you have to walk back almost all the way to the station - after the xth robbery, they closed the post office (and adjoining ATMs) there. But the upside is a vibrant shopping street with shops from around the world; residents who are proud to be from Lombok; and an increasing influx of thirty-somethings who've long discovered it as the trendy place to live.
One thing you get to pick up on while leafletting is the mood or vibe of a street, and how totally varying it can be from street to street. In Lombok, it changes a notch every other street, from the station outwards. In the Damstraat, the numbers come without names, curtains are closed, doors themselves blank slabs of wood. The odd Moroccan shop, some boarded-up houses. In one house, I saw three or four beds cramped into a room, young folks hanging about, make-shift cloths as curtains.
Just two or three streets up, the houses come with the names of who lives there, kitschy sculptures of cats or birds start filling the windowsills, inside you see glimpses of either dark-brown cupboards and tables with little carpets on top, an old man or woman watching TV in a comfy chair; or white cupboards with fake-golden handles, and a blonde woman in her fourties at the table. A few streets further again, houses with the same kind of interior come with flowerpots outside the and fancily adorned nameplates, while you also start seeing ever more houses with bookcases, a reproduction of art on the wall, intruders' eyes shielded off with a panel of untransparent glass inscribed with a poem rather than a crocheted white under-curtain. Light there is tastefully dimmed and the couple sits at the table reading the paper. By the time you reach the far end of the neighbourhood, you come upon the new restaurant "Peper" with the newly ubiquitous "street food / finger food".
Fascinating. Reassuring is that it's not as desegregated as all
that; it's a continuum, not a interchange of individual blocks. In the street after the Damstraat, an upwardly mobile young person stepped brashly out of his new car and politely refused the leaflet I was about to throw in his letterbox; at the far end of the neighbourhood I glimpsed a set of Hindustani teenage girls lounging about watching TV on a rather makeshift but cosy-looking sofa.
Get to know your city, part 12. Sucker for it. In the meantime, it's another clear day today and by the time I get out there the sun is out: passers-by feel up the avocados on the grocery stalls, bicyclists criss-cross past unloading vans, young girls gab and scream in a sidestreet. Kids play outside in the side streets! You hardly see kids playing outside downtown.
I take a break in Museumcafe Lombok, which I think started out as some idealist arty/multicultural venue, dunno if it still is - but its beautiful, in any case. Established in an old De Gruyter grocery store, it retains its gorgeous tile tableaus up on the walls, scenes from colonial Java and the like; its a very pretty cafe. Now filled with Turkish men smoking, shaking hands and chatting (later a Dutch couple or two mixes in); on the walls, a photo expo of houseboats.
Crossing over the narrow canal into the next neighbourhood, the mood changes again. I dont have to leaflet the newly built yuppie apartments on the grounds where there used to be ... what?, some canal-side industriousness?, luckily. The apartments in the streets behind are small but cosy, some of the houses set back so they have a small stone porch of sorts. Other blocks have the front doors of half the apartments up steep stairs on the first floor, like where my aunt used to live in The Hague. All pretty annoying for leafletting, but likeable. Saw several posters saying "No demolition!" though, so God knows how long they'll still be there. Here, the residents are mostly elderly, with fitting interiors, cramped full with bric-a-brac or in the shade of oak wall units. I've put my MP3-player in my pocket; I like the sound of the city. Cars and people and children in Lombok; here, you can hear birds too.
I still have too few leaflets to finish my streets, so I wrap up and walk back down into town. Stop at a Surinamese joint to have fried chicken with fried rice with shrimp - none too good. Llike the coarse and very Utrechtish accent of the hindustani guy serving tho, when he boisterously greets a friend who's acting all braggodocio. And I finish reading Enzensberger's
Brief Summer of Anarchy,
after all.
Crossing underneath the railway, past a stony yard with nets around and above it where a dad plays soccer with his two sons, it's dark already, I stop again at the Give-away-shop on the Vredenburg. It's less busy now, just two or three regulars, a woman who's somewhat confused but cheerful, a headscarved lady and two teenagers. I leave a pair of trousers - good trousers, Diesel, but when I tried them on this morning I again had to face that they've simply shrunk a little and thus look odd on me and that's why I never wear them anymore - better just bring 'em away. In return I find two books to take: some election journal thing from 1972, and a 1962 issue of
Survey, Journal of Soviet and East European Studies. Who leaves that stuff there, LOL?
The "shop against senseless money" is collecting signatures though; the building is going to be sold on and the new owner is to get it sans occupants - so the squatters are threatened with eviction. They're proposing to instead move out as soon as the new owner is actually going to do something with the property, put in a shop or apartments - could be months or more, sometimes they buy it just for speculation, to sell it through. I signed, what more can I do?
What they do is beautiful ...
At the Bijenkorf, I buy birillozzi mandorla - Italian cookies, great stuff - and amble on home. Put the Joe Strummer / Calexico mix that somehow took me forever to get on the blasted player this morning back on. "I'm gonna do everything silver and gold / and I got to hurry up before I grow too old". Yee-haw, he whispers.
