A Different Drummer

But I think AIESEC International 05-06 is looking good



See you in Agra....

The hair and beard are gone, all gone. The hairdresser tried to give me a Dutch haircut, something close to a blowdried, puffy, mullet (you know the mullet....short on top for the fellas....long on the back for the ladies....). After this savaging, I basically asked him for a second haircut, which restored things to normality.

Yes, that is an Apple sticker on my HP laptop. I am a loser.

India in 18 hours.....

Enjoying it while it lasts - tomorrow the hair and the beard a getting the chop. Like all good friends, I know I will see them both again many times in this lifetime and beyond.....

I guess I haven't written much about Rotterdam. Well, I havent written much, full stop - two or three posts in as many months. But enough about that. More about the little pocket of Netherlands where I call home right now.

Rotterdam is weird. Not in that way that any city with a bit of character or history are weird. Rotterdam is weird because it isnt. Not at all. In any way. It is a completely normal place with almost nothing at all to say about it. Which is what Dutch people say when you tell them you live here - nothing. "Oh", they say. "Rotterdam."

You could wait for another hour there in silence but you're not going to hear another thing about the place from them. There's just not really much to say - not in a bad way, no...but not really in a good way either. Just...not.

Rotterdam has a couple of quirks that are worthy of mention though. In short:

The most obviously subsidised and uneconomic public transport system in Europe, and maybe the world. Rotterdam has a lot of public transport, even though there is nobody out on the streets, ever. Well, this is in part because everyone is on the tram, bus, metro or train - because every inch of Rotterdam is covered in public transport, but the point remains. Rotterdam must have the highest people/public transport ratio in the developed world. And it is ever growing. If you walk around long enough to find a thin gravel sidestreet that doesnt have two bus stops and an underground link, then it is likely that you are soon to come across the works crew installing the new tram lines just up the road.

The highest proportion of varied large meaty 2 euro ethnic sandwiches/population ratio in Europe. The Dutch, or at least the Rotterdam Dutch, are a bit freaky with their desire to put almost anything into a sandwich. It has gotten to the extent where almost any ethnic food eatery serves their food in two forms.....Normal, or sandwich. Cantonese chicken with cashew nuts and noodles? In a sandwich please. Anyhow who am I to complain. This development isnt entirely out of sync with my own views on the universe.....

Anyhow, there is the standard kebab. Done "Turkish" style because I think the Turkish are the biggest kebab making minority here. Even if its a Nepalese or Guatemalan family in the store making it, it is a "Turkish" kebab house. Not bad, but what Dutch people call a Turkish kebab isnt transcendant. But its good, and cheap.

Then, there is Surinamese sandwiches. There is a store run by a great bunch of Sri Lankan guys just around the corner from our office, producing these interesting Surinamese sandwiches. Now I consider myself a bit knowledgable about the world and its many countries, but when I first got to Rotterdam, I had no idea about Surinam. Not a clue. I knew it existed as a vague place....somewhere. Anyhow, check out more about Surinam, if you're interested. Rotterdam has a big Surinamese population. All that matters here is apparently the Surinamese have an innovative way of delivering a meat sandwich, a la kebab. Its a round bread, fairly spongy and thick, quickly toasted or fried. I'm not actually sure how they make the bread. Anyhow, the bread it a yellow colour, tastes of saffron or some similar spice, and is filled with.....chinese food. Made by the Sri Lankans. This is glorious international meat sandwich innovation at its finest. And 2 euro.

Finally, the King of the crop. Little Italy is the best place in Rotterdam. The value of Rotterdam is doubled by Little Italy. It is a wonderful, perfect little Italian deli, unexplainably in the centre of Rotterdam. It sells an incredible variety of great imported food from Italy - beautiful cheese and meats, wine, vinegar - all the fundamentals of great Italian eating. As a side item, it also produces the King of the Rotterdam 2 euro sandwich.

It's a giant round foccacia, stuffed with incredible meatballs in a perfectly spiced tomato sauce. Toasted in a pizza oven to perfect hot cruchy goodness. It is both superbly gourmet and utterly 2 euro meaty sandwich fodder.

This is the best sandwich environment I've ever lived in. And I've lived in Dublin.....

So yeah, there's the public transport, and the cheap ethnic sandwiches. Probably the most significant thing worthy of a mention along side these two is the fact that you can get out the hell out of here and be in wonderful Amsterdam within the hour. Amsterdam is bliss, and I'll write more another time.

I guess the other unique thing about Rotterdam is that AIESEC International is here. That on its own, external to what ever city it is in, makes any time and place amazing. Being in a collection of brilliant minds, day and night, really makes the location sit tightly in the background.

Tonight We decided tonight to invest ourselves heavily into our predicted certainties for the future. The price of oil will rise. And the price of real estate in Central and Eastern Europe will rise. We will invest, even if it is a piddling sum. And we will reap the obvious, inescapable rewards.....

Off to India on Saturday. Have been pretty excited about this for a while but it got even better tonight when I found out that there would be an India v Pakistan one day match played while I was there. The sight of Indian cricket fans watching a match with Pakistan should be wonderful.

But George Bush sure does vacation like them.....

4 weeks! Maybe he is a committed union man at heart.....

The genius who wrote this winning entry to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest - celebrating bad opening prose in literature - deserves a lifetime of rewards:

"As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chapter seven of the shop manual."

Wonderful. The quality of the rest of the shortlist is pretty awesome too, well worth a read. The contest has a great background:

"An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" Beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

I always imagined someone far more....Oriental....came up with the expression "The pen is mightier than the sword". Cool stuff.

According to Tamer, Sudan is in a lot of trouble following the death of their Vice President, maybe more than a lot of people outside of the region understand. You see, he was less of a Vice President, and more of a "former rebel leader integral to the peace agreements and ongoing power sharing", meaning that the country could be a lot closer to civil war than a lot of people are realising.

Keep up to date...

Stumble! is a web browser extension that will just fundamentally improve your entire experience of the internet. It rules so much that I will cease to talk about it, and simply provide a link...

August 1. Ohhhh Yeaaaahhh.

I was a fool for ever trying to create distinction and order on a timeline that had no such order. And now I am here, August 1, transition has officially finished. Freedom! Or not.

Not is most likely the case. We are busy like motherfuckers all the way through until International Congress in India, actually, even busier than in the last two months. But as guarateed, the blog is now relaunched, and I will be posting daily, thanks to my internet enabled apartment, and a general determination to find little ten minute blogging spaces each day.

It is 7PM in the office and the sun is beating down fearlessly outside. At this time of year in Europe the sun stays out until 11pm, leaving open the possibility for a new innovation named Day Within Day, trademarked by Arthur and myself. At the heart of Day Within Day is the simple concept that by leaving the office at 5pm, and getting right into serious lazing around in the park under a tree mode, one can still enjoy almost a full day of sunshine and happiness, every day of the week. Escape from corporate mastery people! Enjoy the day that is distributed for free in every full sized day!

Expect more in the coming days on the shape of this blog for the next year. Until then, I've got a second day to enjoy...