letters to thailand - part 5

To the boys and girls of the LEO CLUB
C/o the honourable chairperson BeeBee,
The Construction View Hotel Ao Nang, Krabi

New York… If you can make it there
You’d make it anywhere…but Rotterdam

I’ve said it before and I’ll now say it again…coincidence is mere cosmic poetry.
Just two days, my friends, after I told you about those different dictionaries going around, the mayor of Rotterdam spoke:

“(…) we have to make it clear that when you don’t carry Dutch inside your genes, you simply won’t make it here” (…).

Alas…Rotterdam once was reckoned to be a world city.

As I was brewing my morning coffee the old fashioned way, savouring the exquisite aroma filling my home, my last girlfriend sneaked her way into my head. We had a tough relationship, you all know the kind…in between stupid arguments we fucked our brains out. We did so mostly on the very couch I was having my first cup…our DNA has screamed its way so deep into the upholstery, it might still hatch.

My mind wandered back towards a very different morning…a morning where I saw even more clearly why I had always hated those pretentious gadgets …a morning just like this one, where the air was filled with the smell of coffee, yet something wasn’t right. I’d been through that experience so often…
I cannot say why I picked exactly this day for a fight. It was all over a trendy coffee-maker…you insert a pad into a kind of beak, it’ll munch the pad and as water is running through, your doll house sized cup is filling up.

Now, go to any Dutch birthday party, sit down in that famous circle of fun (roar) and surely you’ll hear somebody comment on the taste of this drink…I won’t go into that. There seems to be one common complaint though and that is the bloody lack of aroma. You might live to become a hundred years old in the very same house, it would never acquire that particular flavour that has been the trademark of the cosiest of Dutch homes.
But hey man; for the xenophobes amongst us it’s bad enough to feel a stranger because their world seemsto have turned into Babylon…how could they possibly bear feeling a stranger within their own compound?
What those clog-heads do? As they have their coffee pads munched by inspector Gadget they brew real coffee as well. They just won’t drink it…it’s all about the aroma…remember?

You’ve all guessed by now, this is exactly what my girlfriend did.
For all the beautiful mornings that followed those magical nights, it was the daily news however, which really triggered my tongue that very day; when darkness settled early…ripping our love…shredding it to bits so sharp they were sanding my soul.
Could it be because we’d had a serious discussion the previous night? We weren’t arguing, oh no. It just so happened that my lovely woman was into the habit of smoking two packs of blanks a day and got really pissed off when I said there should be a law against smoking in a car with children.
I was exaggerating she yelled as lighting up.
We had heard on the news that, of all people, a majority of Dutch parliamentarians were contemplating a law that would forbid smoking the weed in public places; they mean those trendy terraces where one drink costs the equivalent of one hour hard labour. Now savour this…they say it smells peculiar.

We are talking about the very same dickheads that earlier postponed a proposal to forbid the smoking of tobacco in sport-canteens and the like.
I smell a rat.

letters to thailand - part 1
letters to thailand - part 2
letters to thailand - part 3
letters to thailand - part 4