logloglog

I should be in the Netherlands today, but I’m not. I had a ticket for a flight to Europe last night, but I didn’t use it.

During the past 6 years, I always bought return tickets from the Netherlands to Montréal. In the beginning because I just went for several weeks to several months to visit Alison. And when I finally immigrated to Canada, 4 years ago exactly, I didn’t buy a single ticket. The reason is that a single ticket is actually more expensive than a return ticket. To give you an example, I can fly next week from Amsterdam to Montréal and back two weeks later for EUR 403. If I book a single ticket however, the cheapest flight will cost me EUR 1049. That’s more than twice the price for half of the product. Explain that to me. It’s like if you go to the grocery store and 1 loaf of bread is more expensive than two loaves of bread. It’s absurd and some economic watchdog should take measures to correct this, but that’s a whole different rant.

So I always, during the past years, bought return tickets. Usually with British Airways and those tickets were valid for a year and you had to pay a certain
fee (100 USD) if you wanted to change the return date. But, I discovered a loophole. Those tickets are valid for a year, but you can’t actually book your return a year ahead. The computer only “knows” about dates 10 months in the future. So I had my travel agent call BA and ask if I could change my return date for free because I couldn’t book it yet. That was very convenient, an open ticket for a low price. Later they closed that loophole and I could only change the date to a date after those initial 10 months but then I just paid the fee. Which I did a couple of times, when my mother was severely ill and I decided on short notice to visit her.

Last December, after such a surprise visit, all flights back to Montréal were fully booked and the remaining seats very expensive. So, suggested by my sister, I booked my flight from a city in Germany that is actually closer to my mother’s home that the airport of Amsterdam. There was room on that plane, I could just be on time here for Christmas evening and the price, although high was not unreasonable. As a return date I put 11 September 2007, because that was the last date the computer would let me, and easy to remember. I actually feared I would have to go back much earlier, because my mother’s health situation at the time was very precarious. (She seems to be doing much better now, thanks for asking.)

So a couple of weeks ago I foresaw that I couldn’t make it on 11 September because I was just too busy with all those projects here, that needed to be finished. So I called Air France to change the return date on my ticket and fell from one surprise into another. The first person told me I couldn’t change my ticket at all. I looked at the ticket and there it was clearly marked that I could change the date for a fee of EUR 150 (yes, those penalties did increase over the past years). Yes sir, but I see here that your ticket is only valid for 9 months. What? They now sell tickets for 9 months. And they don’t advertise that in any way when you book it. She then transferred me to another person who said that OK, even though I couldn’t officially change my ticket they would make an exception. My heart rated lowered instantly. Because the new ticket was more expensive I only had to pay a surcharge. A surcharge of 3400 EUR. Yes, you read that correctly, thirty! four! hundred! fucking Euros. That’s almost 5000 Canadian (or American) dollars. My hearth rate went up a couple of notches and I started laughing uncontrollably. “Vous faites un blague madame, n’est pas?”, but no, she wasn’t the type of person that made jokes, probably never had. The only thing I could do was hang up and stare at my computer screen in disbelief.

Just to put the absurdity of that amount in perspective: A return ticket Montréal-Dusseldorf with Air France on December 4th to December 24th would cost me EUR 3,245.64. Of course that would be a Business class ticket, since a normal economy ticket would only cost EUR 717. That is with Air France, I could have a direct flight with KLM to Amsterdam on the same dates for only EUR 578…

And these prices are for flights from Canada to Europe and those flights are always more expensive than if you fly from Europe to Canada. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea.

So now you know why there was an empty seat on flight AF 347 last night.

I had to restrain myself from going to the the airport yesterday, checking in an old suitcase, and then just leave the airport and let them have to remove the suitcase from the cargo bay after they found out I wasn’t showing up. That would have caused a nice delay. But with all the no-fly lists these days I figured out that was probably not a smart thing to do. Even though I actually was in the neighbourhood of the airport at the time.

Just hearing my name (that nobody can pronounce here, neither English nor French speakers) over the intercom would have been worth it.

“Last call for Mr. …. Rash-n-ders on flight Air France 347.
Mr. Rash-n-ders, please head to gate B34 immediately or your luggage will be offloaded.”

We’re having a lot of Dutch visitors lately. Last week my sister Aagje and brother-in-law Steven came by to have supper with me, before they continued their “Eastern North America in 3 weeks”-tour. We sat in the garden, listened to the crickets and my sister told me that they had visited Montréal’s highlights by luxury coach that day but both the driver and the tour guide got lost in the “no left turns” Montréal traffic situation. If your map says to turn left and the traffic signs forbid it, navigating our city can be quite hard. The next day they were heading for Ottawa (half a day) and Toronto and so forth. I couldn’t travel that way, it would be too superficial, but they like it. They’ve seen a lot of the world this way over the past ten years.

And yesterday Linde arrived. She’ll stay a bit longer in Montréal, about 4 months. She’s going to be an exchange student at McGill University, and is the daughter of one of my readers. Through a comments on loglog she ended up in our guestroom. (So if you want to be our guest, you know what to do next.) Linde won’t stay for 4 months in our guestroom, she’s looking for a room to rent. Today, her first day in Montréal, she went out and already saw several rooms. She even said yes to one of them. But now she has buyer’s remorse and is in doubt if she shouldn’t look at a couple more rooms in shared apartments.

It’s difficult for Dutch people to do these things: in the Netherlands finding a room (or a house for that matter) is really hard, so if you find something you immediately take it. Here you can be a bit more picky.

The dogs like her, and she’s an excellent guest. Alison suggested, over the phone, that we should adopt her.

Invariably one of the first things people ask me when I tell them I’m from the Netherlands is if I smoke. I tell them I smoke cigars, but that wasn’t what they were interested in. They wanted to know if I smoked marijuana or hashish.

Well, I did. But not very often, and ever after I was kicked out of art school I smoked maybe 2 joints (and that was in the strict sense of the word, with others) a year. And I didn’t inhale. Okay that’s a lie, but when I inhaled I started to cough loudly, and that never went away, not even when I blowed (that’s the term used in the Netherlands for smoking softdrugs) regularly at art school. It always made people laugh, but I hated it since it prevented me from keeping the smoke in and getting high. Maybe I should have built a water pipe but that was just too much of a hassle.
So no, I’m not a pothead exactly. And I don’t know many people in the Netherlands that are, even though you can buy the stuff at almost every corner “coffee shop”.

To give an example, this joint we recived from Alison’s brother (the other brother, not the one that has pot-induced schizophrenia) as a Christmas gift, has still not been smoked, a year-and-a-halve later.

I figured I’m still not yet assimilated to Canada, when I read the following:

Marijuana use in Canada is the highest in the industrialized world, far higher than in the Netherlands where it’s legal, and more than four times the global rate, a report by the United Nations has found.

So it’s about time we smoke that joint.

Sometimes, fortunately not very often, I get so mad that I break things. I rather break things than people so it could be worse. But it’s not exactly something I’m proud of.

This time it was a marble slab, used in our kitchen as a counter top. This piece was very old, older than I am, because it was the top of my baby dressing table.
I, and maybe all of my brothers and sisters, lay bare-bottomed on this marble when my diapers were changed. It was well cleaned before its new use as a kitchen table, don’t worry.

I also used it as a prop in “Musca“, the animation film I made nearly twenty years ago, and that I’ve recently put online.

And now I broke it, and not even by having wild sex on it. If only, then at least I had some fun while doing it.

I’m going to try to glue it, it’s a very clean crack.

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11 September, een dag om terug te kijken. Naar 11 September 2001 toen ik in Toronto in het appartement van Dolph en Mansa, die op huwelijksreis waren, al de gebeurtenissen live op de Amerikaanse TV aanschouwde, maar ook naar 11 September 2003 toen ik officieel ‘landde’ in Canada. Een jaar hier alweer; het lijkt zoveel korter.

Zonder 11 September 2001 was ik hier waarschijnlijk nooit geweest. Want door de aanslagen in New York verkeerde ook Toronto zich weken in een staat van shock. En ik ook, want ik had niemand om de verschrikkingen mee te delen. Bovendien werden al mijn afspraken met mogelijke opdrachtgevers geannuleerd en begon ik Toronto nog vervelender te vinden dan ik al deed. Dus besloot ik om Canada vaarwel te zeggen en terug te gaan naar Nederland. Het was gewoon niet de goede periode. Dolph haalde me echter over om voordat ik terugvloog nog even langs Montréal te gaan, om te ervaren hoe die stad was. En ik liet me overhalen en reisde per trein met mijn veel te veel bagage naar Montréal. Aldaar aangekomen was de sfeer zo anders dan in Toronto dat ik besloot een maandje te blijven om er uiteindelijk zelfs bijna twee maanden te verblijven. Via iemand die ik ontmoette tijdens mijn twee bijna slapeloze nachten in een jeugdherberg vond ik een kamer die je per maand kon huren. Ik installeerde telefoon, nam een Internet abonnement en probeerde te ervaren hoe het was om te leven in Montréal, niet als een toerist maar als een inwoner. Zonder 11 September had ik dat allemaal waarschijnlijk niet gedaan. Het was voor een deel een reactie op mijn niet al te fijne tijd in Toronto. En natuurlijk ook omdat Montréal een heel andere stad is en een verademing vergeleken met de bekrompen, amerikaanse mentaliteit van Toronto.

Tijdens mijn (lange) omzwervingen op Internet kwam ik Alison tegen en het resultaat is dat ik nu al weer een jaar officieel in Montréal woon, getrouwd ben en twee kinderen heb.

Alhoewel ik al een jaar hier ben loopt mijn leven nog niet echt op rolletjes. Ik weet niet of een leven op rolletjes überhaupt wel iets voor mij is, maar dat terzijde. Ik weet niet wat ik wil qua werk en heb daarom ook nauwelijks wat gedaan om werk te vinden. Ik mis mijn uitgebreide vriendenkring in nederland want hoewel ik wel al vrij veel kennissen heb, heb ik nog nauwelijks vrienden hier. En dat is lastig in tijden van crisis. En ik heb ook nog geen dokter terwijl ik die eigenlijk zou moeten bezoeken, wegens niet vanzelf overgaande pijn in mijn gewrichten.

En ik ben ook helemaal niet tevreden over dit weblog. Het is teveel een toeristisch album, met een plaatje bij een praatje. Dus ga ik hier binnenkort de boel omgooien. Ten eerste ga ik voortaan voornamelijk in het Engels schrijven. Not because my English is better, far from that, but because I often can only find English expressions when I write this log. I speak the whole day english, read English, watch English movies and it’s hard to suddely switch to Dutch when I’m not communicating with someone. I’ve no problem spealing Dutch on the phone, or replying someone’s email in Dutch, but for some reason I have a really hard time writing this log in Dutch. Another reason to change the language is that now my weblog is only understandable for people I already know, but who are far away. And because that audience is so broad, consisting of friends, family and acquaintances, I never show the back of my tongue, and most entries stay rather superficial. If I write in English it might be a tool to meet new people here, and that is important. The current form is also too rigid, and often I don’t write things because I don’t have a picture, or because I’m too lazy to transfer it from my camera, crop it and publish it.

So things are going to change here in the coming weeks. I hope for the better, but of course not everybody will agree with me.

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Zo, laat niemand denken dat ik niet in Rotterdam ben geweest vandaag.

Ha, ik ben ook nog in Amsterdam geweest zelfs.

Hoeveel de population van Amsterdam is weet ik niet, maar het was maar 10 minuten van Rotterdam en er waren geen file’s. Kom daar nog eens om, vandaag de dag.

Het was wel bijna 5 uur rijden vanaf Montréal, maar dat had ik er graag voor over.

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Vanochtend kreeg ik een kadootje: een T-shirt van de film “American Splendor” dat ik heb gewonnen op de website van Zone 5300. Ik win nooit wat, maar nu dus wel. En bijgevoegd was ook nog een exemplaar van dit wondermooie tijdschrift, dat al 10 jaar het hoofd boven water weet te houden.

De hoofdredacteur heeft mijn oude atelier overgenomen, maar ik had meegedaan onder pseudoniem, dus het was geen doorgestoken kaart. De financiële aderlating om dat T-shirt helemaal naar Canada te moeten sturen moet vreselijk groot zijn geweest. Mea culpa.

Rechts op deze foto, gemaakt in de metro, zie je het eiland waar Montréal op ligt. Van oostpunt tot westpunt is het zo’n 50 km lang. In werkelijkheid ligt die oostpunt in het noord-oosten, maar dat is een detail.

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Ik heb (ik geloof voor de tweede keer in m’n leven) een hele voetbalwedstrijd uitgezien. Ik was boodschappen aan het doen en kwam langs een cafe met open ramen alwaar men Nederland-Portugal aan het kijken was. En ik ben blijven kijken tot het einde. Grappig was dat bijna iedereen voor Nederland was, hoewel het in een buurt was waar erg veel Portugezen wonen. Maar later begreep ik dat er veel Grieken waren, en dat de Portugezen in een cafe iets verderop zaten.

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De bedoeling was dat hier tegenover mij aan dit terrastafeltje van cafe/restaurant Le Petite Alep iemand zou zitten, maar hij kwam niet opdagen. En dit was notabene de tweede keer dat een afspraak misliep. Nu ja, driemaal is scheepsrecht.

Ik ken deze jongen niet, dus het is een soort van blind date. Het is een Nederlander die ook onlangs naar Montréal is verhuisd, en ik kwam hem tegen op een forum op Internet.