"En route to meet the girlfriend we made a reservation at the posh restaurant De Aalmoes which had set up temporarily in the museum café. I'm currently a food snob as a result of my kitchen porter career, so I was like "acceptable". Waiting for this woman that I'd received so much analysis on was giving me the jitters. She got pointed out to me from like half a mile away so I had plenty of time to soak it up before she was right in my face. She seemed like a hotter version of a 21 year old Claudia Schiffer from that distance. The gradually revealed reality was a freckle faced, sorta Irish looking, plain jane (not that there's anything wrong with that). So we dicked around town and the girlfriend became visibly isolated the more we talked about art and issues affecting daily life. Later we rocked up back at the museum café for dinner. I ordered the beetroot salad which literally (and I use that word literally) turned out to be 3 slices of beetroot, 1 piece of lettuce, a slice from a goats cheese cylinder and 2 pieces of a satsuma. No joke. As a child I would eat beetroot in large volumes and even drink it's juice so my pee would come out weird, hence I was underwhelmed. It was tasty though so I built a bridge, and got over it. All the restaurant staff were Flemish and our waiter had a pretty gross cold sore that kept repeating on my memory."
We continued on for party times
"After that we went and had a few beers in the street which was stacked with cranking techno sound systems. Techno, house and dance constitute Dutch folk music and are a cultural glue to which young and old relate. Period. Come to think of it, each host I'd stayed with had asked me if I loved it, which they all most certainly did. People were raising their fists in the air and dropping them to the beat. Mostly it was women in the 40-50 age bracket who were doing that. Dutch women with big hair, weathered orange skin wearing large knitted ensembles with joke/oversize buttons and collars. That was the landscape. People must have been trashed but I can't prove that assumption cause they could just have easily been stone cold sober. The apex of the situation was when an early 2000's 'anthem' came on, everyone looked at each other knowingly and jammed out 10 times more than they were jamming out already. That was Rotterdam in a nutshell. During all this there was some obvious distance between my companions and I was made pretty homesick by the surroundings. I felt for her but as my host had said, she didn't tend to express anything, or react to stuff. Her job was so boring I can't even remember it, yes I remember it, she gathered financial data from the media about the activities of companies. Being able to remember that doesn't make me feel good."
And now, the riveting conclusion...
"I was happy to walk home but my host wanted to take the tram. We got that whilst she biked. He bitched and complained about her the entire journey. When we got back there was a 'singing legend in concert' show on the telly that we watched. It was exceedingly boring. The next morning as me and my host ate chicken saté for breakfast I made my decision; I was gonna get the F out of Holland. I didn't think I could handle the lifestyle anymore. I bought my ferry ticket then and there. The girlfriend woke up about an hour later and we all talked about techno music."
That's How That Shit Went Down™
