Netherlands May 2016 - part 1

My blog has been sleeping for about 6 months now. That is definitely not good, is there a good explanation for it? Am I suffering a writers´ block?

Well anyway, I have never really had a specific “writing style”. The small stories are all pretty easy to read and I never check them before posting, so every now and then some small error may slip through.

So, a couple of weekends back I saw how “la belle France” lost the final of their European Cup, against Portugal. The tournament was not having the same “ambiance” as previous tournaments, although the new teams Wales and Iceland made a real difference. There are some funny tweets I wrote which you can still find in my Twitter feed.

In May I returned briefly to my country. This was to be able to visit my family to celebrate my parents´ 40th wedding aniversary. Due to circumstances (my dear wife Yina is pregnant and the paperwork you need to arrange to get into Europe for non European people is complicated and bureaucratic), Yina stayed in the village. She did bring me to the airport with her brother.

When I got through Bolivian customs, one of the blokes tells me that I need to pay almost 20 bucks because I´m leaving the country. I see this as a “fine” so I ask the guy: So basically this is a “fine” which I wouldn´t pay if I´d stay in the country? He answers that it is not a fine, but merely a tax. Yeah sure, I think. I grab the dough out of my wallet and pay him, now having left only 30 Bs.

I continue and this police officer asks me to pass him my hand-luggage so that he can inspect it. And when we finally get  onto the plane, this sweet labrador dog comes around to sniff all luggage. Finally we fly to Madrid, where the ETA is 5 AM in the morning, Monday, 16 May. I play some cribbage on my cell, watch an episode of Mr. Bean and try to sleep.

The guy next to me is from Jordania, and he flies via Madrid and Istanbul to his country.

In Madrid I have to walk to another terminal and again I need to pass with all my stuff through the X ray ports, where a “hombre de seguridad” orders me in a bold way by only saying “zapatos”. Si, y que desea señor? Flying 11 hours is already annoying enough to remain kind with typical douchebags on airports who give orders.

“If you could show me your shoes sir”. Ah OK that´s better. I show him my 6 dollar valued 2nd hand shoes and the guy says I can go on.

When I arrive at the gate, where I eventually have to wait for a bit more than 1 hour, I search for a bar just to have a normal coffee, but everything looks incredibly expensive and there are only “combo” menus. So I grab some lemon water from a vending machine.

Air Europa then announces their flight to Amsterdam and I board the plane, which is obviously a lot smaller than the previous one. An Arab lady sits next to me with her 2 year old son, she speaks Dutch, Spanish and Arab and is very curious.

At Schiphol, the famous Dutch airport, it amazes me once more the long way I need to walk before reaching the luggage belts. After 4 minutes my suitcase arrives, I take it and walk through the green area of the dutch “Douane”, there is nobody there.

My Mom and Dad come to pick me up, they are very happy. We drive eastbound over the A1 and around lunch time we have a very nice salmon sandwich at the Golden Apple.

Meanwhile, my brother Laurens is talking with my dad on the phone. “When are you arriving”, he asks. My dad calculates traffic jams and says: “Around quarter past 2.” Nevertheless, the 2nd part of the trip the roads are clear and we arrive home just before 2. We are just able to see my brother and his girlfriend sneak back in the house.

They both jump out of the house with fireworks and a bottle of cava and the window has been colourfully and artistically painted “Welkom Robin”.

Overwhelmed by this welcome commitee, I put my suitcase in the hall and we step inside to drink the cava and afterwards, the first green Grolsch bottles come out of the fridge.

Oscar, my other brother still had to come from the northern part of the Netherlands. My mommy said I ought to have a siesta, since I should be having a jetlag. So I went to my old room and slept about 45 minutes.

In Bolivia I became an uncle automatically after marrying my wife. But that can not be compared with becoming an uncle of your brother´s little son, they gave him the name Daniel and he is 3 and a half months old. A cute fella, always smiling. When he cries or screams it is just because he´s hungry, says Oscar.

We continue drinking beer and turn on Mommy´s imitation iPad, playing some tunes to get in the mood for the 40th anniversary party. Tracks such as 1984´s Skin Deep by the Stranglers (probably one of the best tracks for brothers), 1987´s Beds are Burning by Midnight Oil and later, when selecting a playlist from the Clash, little Daniel moves his head on the melody. So the little man has got the same taste as his uncle, that´s cool.

The next day, my brother, his little boy Daniel, my Dad and I drive east to Borculo for a short visit to our Granny. She lives in a modern residence and is still very sociable with everybody. In the evening, when Oscar and Margriet go back north, my Mom is a bit sad because they take her little grandson away from her, although it´s just for a couple of days.

My parents take me out to go shopping on Wednesday, since it is kind of complicated to get size 45 shoes in Bolivia (you can only buy cheap trashy most probably illegally imported from the USA 2nd hand shoes on the Ramada, there are decent shoe stores, but when you enter one of them asking for size 45, the standard reply is: No, no hay (with a voice that is a blend of sadness and indifference)).

So we drove northeast to  a fashion house in the province Overijssel and first they spoiled me with some genuine Cars Jeans and some t-shirts. The fashion house had a coffee bar where I went with Dad while Mom was searching a suitable party coat.

En route back to my village, we acquired some pairs of decent shoes and get some fish for lunch. We visit the bank to obtain a card for my account (it had been sleeping all these years), since very soon I´m going to need dough that I would not be able to save up in South America in a lifetime.

When I told Johnny that I would come to the Netherlands, he said: “Oh that´s splendid news Robin, you should come to visit me and have a coffee”.

So I sent him  a message thru Whatsapp via Daddy´s  wifi (something that is still being developed here in Bolivia, i.e., it does exist, but it is expensive; all “fancy” tech stuff is way too expensive here). I borrowed one of the bikes and headed 5 KM south to Ruurlo. Johnny, a chess master and his wife Annelies are very nice and kind people, they are parents of my friend Niels. They laugh a lot about the typical south american situations.  After the coffee they invite me a couple of beers, one of them brewed by the father of Anne (Niels´ girlfriend) in a village near Saarbrücken in Germany. To avoid getting drunk I thank them for everything and go back home to have dinner there.

While the neighbours come to visit us to help with the setup of the party tent in the garden (they eventually fixed this in less than half an hour) I “lock myself into” the office and turn on Skype for a creative meeting with my brothers.

We talk about a small conference about our parents during the party and exchange ideas, consisting of all kind of funny anecdotes we can remember. In my brother´s former bedroom I find a box of “Sinterklaas rhymes” of the last decades which are funny to read.

In the mean time,  my Dad is sitting in the tent with the neighbours and the bottles of beer + the pica pica is on the table. I quickly put on a pullover and my jacket. Normally it is a bit warmer in May in the Netherlands. Everybody is curious about my experiences in Bolivia and I explain the people about how things are done in South America.

Around the end of the first week, my brothers come back to the village. Also our niece Betty arrives, she will be the main waitress at the party.
The neighbours are in charge of the tent´s outside decoration. The family does the inside decoration; balloons and coloured light bulbs.

The weather forecast for Saturday, May 21st is exceptionally good and the sun shines. Early in the morning I help my Dad and the catering guy to put some essential stuff in the tent, like chairs and tables. Harry, the DJ also comes early, a friend of my father.

Just before the start of the festivities, I print the conference for me and my brothers. Then I run to the tent, because the first invites have arrived punctually at 3 PM. Pretty soon the tent is full, we have coffee and cake.

Retrogaming, part 1

Four and a half years ago I opened my twitter account. Not that I had any intention to use it a lot, and it was merely to write about dumb, funny, silly or tragic situations, such as the day when a Russian store that used to sell delicious smoked pork chops decided to close down.

Approximately 1 year ago I started to post on my Twitter account about 90´s retro games such as Road Rash, my favourite Sega Megadrive game. It was then that I began to find a lot of gaming accounts related to Nintendo, Sega, Atari, MSX and the Commodore.

Let´s go on a blast to the past.

In 1986, one of my classmates has a Popeye Game and Watch which I play on a Friday afternoon before going to jiu jitsu class. The jiu jitsu itself was kind of boring, so I quit that and 2 years later I started to play soccer.

In the summer of 1987, my parents, my younger brothers and me went on holidays to a small village in the kanton of Zürich, Switzerland. After a few days we went further south to Italy. On the camping in Verbania, close to the swiss border was a small arcade with a sort of grandprix game. Basically it was my first holiday hanging around at an arcade, but unfortunately the Lago Maggiore flooded and we left to Neuenburg in Southwest Germany, near the french border of Chalampé.

In the winter that followed, my dad switched his blue Sierra for a red one. That same particular weekend, with incredibly boring iceskating on the telly, he was very busy in his office with his new PC, one of  those terribly heavy hardplastic suitcase machines. If I remember correctly it could even be locked with a small key.

He showed me the computer and eventually I asked him; Are there any games on this computer?

I found a pacman game in ASCII style, very basic and simple, and in GWBASIC there was a cute blackjack game.

In 1988, you could say that I got stuck in the Nintendo warp pipe. My cousins had the NES and they really had to drag me away from it. Their games: Super Mario Bros 1 & 2, Mach Rider and Tennis.

At a certain point I was more or less addicted to this japanese wonder, then somebody decided to hide the cartridges in a microwave, and a couple of hours later they were damaged enough and the NES wouldn´t recognize them anymore; bye bye Nintendo Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, almost all DOS games were for CGA, EGA or VGA, but I still played monochrome. There was a German emulator to play then on Hercules, so I started writing my first batch files. My niece had the same issue. I went to visit her one day and asked her what games she had. Oh well, most of them are for colour computers so…

Her dad, my uncle (a great guy with splendid music taste who rests in peace for almost 6 years now) had a fabulous collection of games. My niece said to me; Hey, I´ve got this strange game about a bloke who is in a bar, he buys a whisky and then he goes to take a piss…

 To be continued…