Moaning about the weather again…

The sun is back in its appointed spot bang in the center of our window. No matter how early I rise, it’s always high up in the sky bathing our living room in retina-scorching white light. After months of long winter, I seem to have exchanged the endurance for heat I brought from India (howsoever meagre) for my resistance to cold. While my parents were weathering 42ºC in Delhi, I was moaning about 24ºC.

Since bright, sunny days in Amsterdam are quite rare, they are much revered. There is a general sense of festivity in the air that usually manifests itself in impromptue barbecue in the parks and beer parties in the streets and on the boats in the canals. I find myself quite unable to work up the enthusiasm. Quite the opposite - I sulk like Dickens’ Scrooge (my redemption is complete only when I am visited by the next inevitable batch of rains) while everybody and their dog is out in the skimpiest of clothes soaking the sun.

The sun these days shines relentlessly till 10:00 PM. I often drag myself to bed around the same time. But the light outside makes the mind spurn sleep’s soothing embrace.

Our home; and homes in general here, don’t have ceiling fans. They are also built in a way that the occupants can live comfortably through sub-zero winter temperatures without burning the quantity of fuel that propelled Apollo 11 to the moon. The net result is that on a warm sunny day, our home in Amsterdam is quite reminiscent of our home in Delhi during a summer power-cut. This makes me homesick. But more importantly it makes me uncomfortable and quite unable to sleep at night.

After waking up grumpy from the lack of sleep for two days, the wife finally procured a standing fan today. She lugged it home on her cycle - Dutch style. It has made the home a lot more bearable. Our apartment faces a road. While opening the window lets the cool breeze in, it also lets in a lot of ambient city noises (the occasional ambulance siren, the callous motorcyclist). Eventually, the mosquitoes also find their way in. Now the mosquitoes here are not of the dengue, malaria bearing variety of the tropics, but that doesn’t make their tuneless buzzing any less annoying. Once the windows are shut, you are cut out from the breeze and the noise and can even hear yourself breathe. Today we make our own breeze. The soft whoosh of the fan dominates the background. It’s a soothing white noise that should make for a lovely sleep.

P.S. The Accuweather forecast page for Amsterdam, has two types of clear days: Sunny and Bright Sunshine.

P.P.S. With summers the cruise ships are back. Even after a year of seeing them regularly, I am amazed at how huge they are. This morning a Costa Crociere ship went past our window. I was quite surprised that the company is still in business. A ship from their fleet sank earlier this year off the coast of Italy. The fiscal consequences must have been enormous - not to mention the indirect losses from litigation and the loss of customer trust. I must find out who they buy their insurance from. Once the ship docks in Amsterdam, it becomes a part of the city’s skyline (given Amsterdam’s maritime history, I find this quite poetic). It is visible from the 5th floor cafeteria of my office:

A docked ship becomes part of the Amsterdam skyline

[Look for the yellow ship funnel with a blue C in the top right corner between two buildings]

P.P.P.S. The best part of sunny days are long sunsets. The sky - undecided between dusk and night - is orange and all shades of blue between cornflower blue and midnight blue all at once. The windows of the buildings reflect their individual interpretations of the sunset’s orange.

Each window interprets the sunset’s orange in its own unique way

The cool, strong breeze carries the smell of wet grass and is quite redolent of that smell after rain in India (there I go again)…

May 25, 2012

In which men and women are from different planets

Both the wife and I had used up our deodorants so I had been tasked with buying them during the evening trip to the neighbourhood grocery shop. The men’s deodorants have abstract names (Cobalt, Quantum, Afrika) that have no co-relation with what the deo smells like. If I don’t sample the product in the shop, I would have no clue what I would end up with. On the other hand, the names of women’s deodorants (Aloe, Lavender) give a fair indication of their smell. I wonder what it tells us about gender stereotypes? That men will throw money on anything that exudes a vague hint of machismo, whereas women like their products to be coherent and predictable?

May 20, 2012

Old posts from a trip to Bhutan in 2008

We visited Bhutan in 2008. It was my first visit to the Himalayas. I was quite moved by the beauty and the grandeur of the eastern Himalayas and had written a detailed account of each day of our stay there. When I migrated my blog from blogspot to its present vanity domain, I toyed with various blogging platforms including one I had written myself. I eventually settled on Wordpress but most posts that I had made during the transitory period were lost. A friend who is about to visit Bhutan dug them out recently and wondered if I had the pictures that went with the posts around. Fortunately I did, and just today I finished re-posting the entire day-by-day account with pictures.

Punakha Dzong

The writing and the pictures both come a little short of my expectations. I am not proud of them but neither am I ashamed of them - I was who I was.

May 19, 2012

My love of rains

I formed a positive association with rains at a very early age. Summers in Delhi are harsh. By mid-May temperatures hover in the 40-45ºC range in the afternoon, and rarely dip below 30ºC in the nights. All this would be compounded by long, untimely powercuts depriving you of even a fan - in temperatures that otherwise need air-conditioning to cope with. On a number of nights, I would wake up stewing in my sweat and wonder what had I done do deserve this misery.

On other nights I’d lie in my bed listening to songs that had sounds of thunder and rain and pretend that it’s raining outside.

And then the Monsoons would try to make it up to you. The phrase ‘too little, too late’ could be applied to the Monsoons in Delhi with remarkable regularity. Come August, and the wind in Delhi would turn so heavy with humidity, that it would begin to weigh you down. This would make the last days of summer (with maximum temperatures still above 35ºC) quite unbearable. And then one day, the skies would open up. The newspapers next morning would be full of pictures of traffic jams on waterlogged roads. A picture of a bus trapped in water under Minto Bridge would inadvertently be there on the front page. The power cuts would continue and on some days actually become worse. But the temperatures (at least in the evenings) would be pleasant enough for you to sleep through the night without a fan.

When I left Bangalore, the summers there were beginning to get a little warmer, but thankfully, were no where close to being as traumatic as summers in Delhi. Even on hottest of days, a pleasant cool breeze would magically transpire to keep you cool. After sunset, the city would cool down rapidly and I don’t remember a single night when I lost sleep because it was too warm. Still, I carried my pleasant associations with rain to Bangalore. The pre-monsoon showers would begin by March-end and it would rain regularly all the way till October. It was also my favourite time for traveling all over Karnataka but especially to the lush, rainy hills in Coorg and Chikmagalur.

Lush, rainy hills of Chikamaglur

In Amsterdam, it’s Monsoon every day. The city is under a cloud cover for almost the entire year. It’s also very windy. As a result you rarely get something resembling a torrential downpour. Rain here feels as if a barber’s water spray is being blown into your face. My pleasant associations with rains have come with me all the way here. On a Monday morning, when I look through our window at a feeble sunrise through layers and layers of rapidly shifting grey clouds, I actually get excited about my commute to work. On days when it’s freezing cold, and I am outside in the rain with an umbrella that I can’t open because the speed of wind would render the whole exercise pointless, I look at the sky (rain lashing my face, water droplets streaking through my hair) and finding myself unable to contain my joy, laugh like a man possessed.

A typical Monday morning in Amsterdam

May 3, 2012

Bye Bye Blue Shirt

Some shirts feel like your second skin. At one point in my life was quite besotted with white shirts with blue stripes. I had picked up a couple of them from the Benetton store in Ansal Plaza in Delhi. The salesperson tried to warn me that I was purchasing two identical shirts, but I was quite convinced that the stripes on one were darker. I even insisted that we have a look at them in the sunlight to settle the matter, at which point the salesperson gave up and let me buy both of them. One of the shirts has been with me for over 12 yeas. I don’t know how it has survived hundreds of rounds of washing, drying in the sun and ironing. While my enthusiasm for blue stripes had diminished over the years (though stripes still dominate my wardrobe, I am no longer partial to blue), it has remained one of my favourite shirts for all occasions. After a year of tumble drying in the Netherlands however, it looks ready to give up the ghost. The collar is frayed and a touch grimy and the colour - though still quite becoming - is definitely not what it once was. Before I consign this dear shirt to the trash, I thought I’d write it a little farewell note, and take some pictures:

Stripes Stripes