by OP | Feb 2, 2022 | Society
I visited the Sex Museum in Amsterdam.
It is positioned as the Venus temple and the world’s first and oldest sex museum. The museum is hard to miss. It is located on Damrak street, in the heart of Amsterdam about 100 metres from the Dam square, normally filled with tourists and pigeons and a 6 minute walk to the centre of the red light district. The Sex museum pops out like a flasher on a street that is dominated by the mundane sight of supermarkets, tour operators, eateries souvenir and forex shops.
This is typical Amsterdam where sex work is decriminalised and has earned respectability as legitimate work.
During the regular Corona press conferences to announce new restrictions and regulations, sex workers enjoyed legal recognition. I watched the news with a mix of amazement and amusement as sex workers held their own in the recurring anti-lockdown protests and presented their counter proposals of how to handle their corona hygiene protocols. For most of 2021, one could visit a brothel, while museums and cultural theatres remained closed.
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by OP | Jan 25, 2022 | Culture
I am wondering what to teach my children about winter. Beyond telling them that it is a cold weather season that black people don’t like. I don’t want them to be like my former self, afraid of the cold.
I was raised in a country dissected almost equally by the equator. In Kenya, we experience blue skies throughout the day and feel the sun’s warmth all year. You don’t appreciate this privilege until you move to the Northern hemisphere where talking about the weather becomes the daily conversation starter.
From a young age, I associated cold weather with illness. I was pronouncing the word pneumonia long before I could spell it.
“Don’t go out in cold weather, you will catch pneumonia”, my mother warned.
Kenyan mothers fear the cold and every time they feel a chill, the children must wear an extra jacket.
People born in the tropics develop a sunny disposition and it becomes one of the first things you begin to lose when living in cold countries. Against your strongest instincts, your behaviour gets regulated by the seasons, dull and closed in winter, warm and bubbly in summer.
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by OP | Jan 11, 2022 | Culture
The Amstelveen bus station is located under a large parking lot serving the Stadshart shopping mall where several luxury brands have stores. It is not the kind of bus station that I am used to and I find it quite sterile. The passenger platforms are wide and mostly empty and the walls on one end are a dull grey in a way that emphasises the often lugubrious weather in Amsterdam. There are two lanes where the buses enter and exit smoothly and on time. The drivers never honk their horns, or leave the engine running as they go off to look for a toilet. There are no touts jostling for customers or hawkers trying to catch the eyes of passengers through the windows. I have never seen a queue for the bus even in the rush hour. The efficiency of public transport in this new country can feel robotic and it does not encourage idling.
But today, I find myself idling because I did not bother to consult my transport app to time my departure to precision. The electronic bus schedule screen tells me that I have a twelve minute wait time for Bus 348 that takes me to Amsterdam South station where I can catch a train to the North.
From where I stand, I spot a motherly figure about 20 metres away walking calmly towards my direction. She stops in front of a pay point. The Netherlands uses a cashless system and you have to buy a ticket to use a bus, tram or train. She starts ruffling through her bag. I find myself staring at her unusual presence and instinctively straighten up as one does in the presence of a woman deemed to be in the age group of one’s mother. I have this sudden need to be helpful but all I do is stare at her.
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by OP | Jan 4, 2022 | Culture
It is the last days of 2021, and instead of thinking of New Year resolutions, I am more concerned about when they will open up this country, so that I can resume doing normal things like having a haircut.
I check the time. My watch glows in the dim light and it reads only quarter to five. The darkness is descending fast on this moderately cold winter evening in late December. I walk towards a wooden canteen, decorated in glittering Christmas lighting, situated at one of the entrances to the Amsterdamse Bos forest. It sits adjacent to a car park, under a cluster of tall bare trees. Across the road, lies a hockey stadium with its flood lights partially illuminating the bright green artificial playing turf.
The Netherlands is a hockey loving country and they are the most successful team in World Cup History of the sport. I hear the banging of hard rubber balls against the woodwork, the clash of hockey sticks and the chatter of the players responding to instructions from a coach. A metal fence shields my view from what strikes me as a parallel universe, where a sense of normal still resides.
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by OP | Dec 21, 2021 | Culture
The Netherlands went into a hard lockdown on December 19th in response to the Omicron COVID-19 wave sweeping through Europe. Everything shut down except for provisional shops, supermarkets, grocery stores and pharmacies. This comes as we officially begin the winter season, dumping sombreness on the Christmas cheer with the restriction on house guests. The government directive on the number of guests permitted into a home has been reduced from four to two visitors with the exception of children under the age of 13. Outdoors, three is a crowd. Two is the magic number.
At a press conference announcing the new lockdown measures, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte stressed that despite the difficulty in observing the 1.5 metre social distance rule, people should limit direct contact between persons aged over 70 and children as much as possible. He pleaded with the elders, “…do not hug the grandchildren under the Christmas tree”.
I wanted to tell the PM, “If only he knew what I would do to hug my grandmother, one last time’’.
Three days prior to this announcement, I received a text message from my mother who lives in a little village in Siaya County in Kenya.
“Dani Wahonya passed away this morning at Sagam hospital. Her body is at the hospital morgue”.
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