more on Amsterdam

Zinnia's comment made me want to write more about the "attack" issue because I left out in the last entry of what else came to my mind after it happened. I also thought of how easy it is for people to blame immigrants for whatever bad happens. That is basically what I thought after the man told me it's the "immigrant problem". I didn't see the faces of the men who attacked me. They spoke in English and I couldn't point at any specific accent. The policemen suggested they could have been drug addicts because yes, they do also have people addicted to hard drugs here. So... To assume immediately that immigrants attack people is racial or national or however you want to call it, profiling. Most of the people who are begging for money on the New York subway are Americans. How many times have I listened to elaborate stories of how they came to live on the street (one woman was begging for the eleven years I was in Queens for diapers for her little baby...). Of course, I understand these people are sick, weak, mentally unstable, addicted, for the most part. But they have legal status and the knowledge of the language of the land. At the same time all these immigrants work minimum or below minimum wage (if they have no legal status or they don't speak English), working long-hour and hard jobs the autochtons would never even consider doing. And they are not respected for what they do, on the contrary. I actually found an article in the Dutch paper discussing this issue. There was a voice defending all the immigrants doing the work that needs to be done but nobody wants to do here except immigrants - because immigrants have no choice, basically, but to take whatever. And lets not forget that what the "rich" and "developed" countries do affects hugely the entire world. Many of the world poverty or the political, tribal, etc. conflicts, fueled by arms provided from developed countries (and I mean ALL developed countries because I don't think there is one which would not be guilty of trading arms), made the people flee their land in search for a peaceful and better life conditions. Everything is very connected these days. Before we point a finger at anyone we should think long and hard...

After a week of living at Martijn's apartment I moved to the apartment of Nicole - a person I met in Colombia in October. I came to visit her and she offered that I stay with her as she has a spare room at the moment. Nicole was born in Colombia but has lived in Amsterdam since she was four years old. Nicole took me to an opening of a restaurant where her daughter is a manager, she took me to the huge outside market which I very much liked (with all kinds of things to wear, furniture, herbs, bikes, street food... anything under the sky) and the cafe "Granny" which she has visited all the years of her adult life and which remained unchanged all these years. We went to see a movie which was a part of the Documentary Movie Festival. I also walked on foot, since I love walking, through many streets and found some streets I particularly like and a cafe with good vibes and great capuccino on Utrechtstraat. So I found some nice things and places in Amsterdam and it will be nice to be coming here the next year for school and more wondering around.

Yesterday we also had a party at Femke and Vivhar's apartment (and their 4 cats), my schoolmates, to celebrate the end of the semester. I very much like the atmosphere at school. It's very different from my former school. I begin to fully understand the importance of Qi Gong exercises. What we did at Swedish was kind of playful and was used more for relaxation and a break from all the other theoretical classes. The Qi Gong here is really taught for the purpose of self-cultivation and basically means that we have to do the Qi Gong exercises for minimum of 3 hours a day. They are exercises which teach us the power of mind over body as everything else stems from it, from the perspective of Daoist philosophy. In the beginning the exercises are very strenous, for the body and the mind. It's sitting, standing and wide-stance meditation for the most part. I find it painful and challenging but everybody does in the beginning, so it just takes time to get into the practice. However, after the exercises I experience incredible lightness and clarity of mind. It's very hard work but very rewarding. Apart from the Qi Gong exercises I have also other subjects to study but the Qi Gong is the base. This is most important because the mind free of delusions is what makes a person compassionate and understanding so a doctor who know the mechanics of using needles and point combinations, etc. cannot be a good doctor if he is also not cultivated toward mindfulness and mind and body clarity. I think that once one does the Qi Gong exercises one fully understands the difference between self-cultivated and unself-cultivated mind. The insturctions are given in one-on-one classes and it is up to the student to decide how to schedule them, whether once or twice a week, depending on the student feeling ready to go to the next step. There are specific modules/classes to be taken but it is up to the student to design the schedule so the responsibility belongs to the student. Depending on the self-cultivation process and the student's seriousness and self-discipline, he or she will need less or more time to complete the program, and will graduate sooner or later.

I woke a little sick today, I was biking with Nicole in this cold and damp weather, so I think I will stay home today and read Chinese Anatomy and Physiology reader as a way of bed-rest entertainment. Warm hugs to everyone.

Amsterdam

Going back in time: after returning from Brazil I packed my stuff and sent it to Poland and gave up my apartment in NY. Then I went to Colombia for two weeks. I went snorkling in Islas Rosarias north of Cartagena - beautiful islands on the Caribean Sea, then for a few days I stayed in Cartagena, and then I went to Santa Marta and Taganga - a small fishing village with fishermen, artists and tourists. It's a lazy, laid-back small village where everyone who stays there for a few days knows each other. I met some old friends there whom I knew from Tyrona before and made new friends. Wonderful people live there, mostly the local artists who went there from all over the South America and the fishermen. I met also "hippie Cogui"as they are called by the locals or indigenous people who live on the verge of the jungle and the modern world, have built small houses and live partly according to old indigenous ways and partly according to modern society's ways. I learned a lot of many interesting things about the amazonian plants, also medicinal, about purification processes done by the peoples deep in the amazonian forest and about the possibility of going there and studying with the medicine man in the future, with permission of the tribal governing bodies. I will use these contacts in the future when I am ready to travel into these villages in the heart of the selva to get purified myself and to study the medicinal plants. When I came back to NY I stayed with Marzenka, Jarek and their daughter Nadinka, who were my neighbors all these years in NY and who became my friends. I went to the last herbal classes to get the certificate and then packed what remained of my stuff, said goodbye to everyone dear to me and left for Poland on the 21st of October. Katarina visited me in Poland a few days afterwards and we went to visit Michal in Wiselka. We had a wonderful time, walking on the beach (with my doggie Maksio whom we took with us), visiting the little towns on the German side, visiting the Polish buffalo natural reserve, eating delicious Polish home cooking at "Maria's Restaurant" in Miedzyzdroje - a town 10 km away from Michal's home. It was a very relaxing time. We slept many hours each night, getting used to the fresh ozonated and iodided air of the Baltic coast. After our return Kasia went home to Slovakia and I got ready to leave to Amsterdam. I arrived on the 6th and immediately went to my new school to get acquinted with teachers and students and to see what my schedule would be like. As I am quite advanced in the program I will need to do only a few courses to get the BA (with the BA in Europe it's possible to already work in the field of Chinese medicine) but they are stretched out throughout the year so what I have decided to do is to go back to Poland and come here for a few days every two weeks or so. Prices of rooms and apartments are quite high here and in gereral I like my home town more than Amsterdam. Amsterdam must be beautiful in the summer but at the moment it is gray, windy, it rains a lot and in general this is not my type of energy. I walked a lot through the city. It has very nice streets going along the canals, very nice architecture, people from around the world so it resembles NY in that sense, very nice parks so it looks like the city is build in a park in some places. There's general sense of freedom: dogs run in the parks without leashes, the famous "coffee shops"are everywhere (the places where you can smoke marihuana) and the smoke of weed is overpowering at times (seems like the locals smoke responsibly because they will always have the possibility but the tourists smoke themselves to death and they look very stoned sometimes on walking out of the coffeeshop), and so are the stores with all kinds of goods made from cannabis and various halucingenic mushrooms, the ladies in langerie are in the windows waiting for the customers in the red light district (I went to take a look and they are of various colors, shapes and sizes from around the world looks like), live porno shows are advertised in the same district. Looks like very open society. I live at the moment in the apartment of a schoolmate Martijn in the Turkish-Marrocan district and most of the women there cover their heads or are veiled altogether in black chadors and it's hard to find a restaurant that would serve anything else than kebab. So it seems Amsterdam welcomes everything and everybody. Seems like nice but somehow the energy here is stale. For some reason, maybe because it's autumn, there's just no fresh vibrant energy that I know from other places. My hometown is not as open as Amsterdam but I feel some of that energy there. I walked with Katarina and then with Patrycja in the old city, around the lake and forest behind my house and I felt vibrant. So in any case I see myself more there than here. Another thing is that I got robbed the day after I came here. I was walking from school at 8 pm in a quiet residential area and two men attacked me from the back, one threw me on the bushes and the other put a knife next to my belly. They asked for money and I gave them a little sack I had in my pocket with about 10 euros. I was so deep in shock, that this has happened to me here and never during my trips to "dangerous" places around the globe, that when they asked for more money because "that was not enough" I was just laying in the bushes, not moving, thinking "rats, I come from the exhile to my home continent after all these years and I get this?!?!?!". More than anything I was angry. I had a laptop and more money in my backpack but they would have to lift me from the bushes to get to it and they didn't because some people were coming from a nearby hotel and they ran away. Nonetheless I felt really bad after it happened because nothing like this happened to me before. I asked a man who was passing by shortly after the incident where the police station was and he offered to walk me and while we were walking I told him what happened and he said "I am sorry for what happened. It used to be such a safe place but for the past 3 years, since the coming of, sorry for the word, "immigrants" it's not as safe as before."I told him I was an immigrant. He said he was sorry. I said he didn't have to be, he was not the one who robbed me. He was sorry in any case. Bla, bla, bla. What came to my mind later was that some long time ago people from this land went to sack others and their houses and their land and they even named it New Amsterdam after they robbed it away so the inevitable law of karma always gets fulfilled. It seems that maybe we should not be punished for what our grandfathers did but maybe we were the grandfathers in a different life? Or maybe it's the responsibility of the collective conscious of the land and its people and what must be paid must be paid? So if I owe you any money I forgot to return, just let me know... I don't want to drag it to the next incarnation... The police officer who interviewed me said that such robberies are commmon nowadays in Amsterdam but usually no one gets killed in result ("usually"did not necessarily made me feel better). The good thing (and it seemed like a bad thing but it turned out it was a good thing) was that I lost my wallet the day before I left NY so I didn't have any credit cards or ATM cards and only the little sack with what usually be my wallet (the wallet was found after my departure and is in possession of Kasia in NY at the moment). So as a result of the robbery I made friends at the police precint and was given a ride home - that evening I was not feeling like walking after dark in Amsterdam (after dark is 4:30 pm). In general people are very nice here, very kind and helpful. It's a different type of kindness than the South American kindness, less open and spontaneous I would say, but nonetheless it's kindness in the way people know it here and it's genuine. A few times I asked for directions and I got a bike ride on the back of the bike. Lots of people ride bikes and the bike lanes around the city are splendid: very clear and safe. People ride the bikes and they ride them with smile on their faces - they seem to be happy. At least the people who live in the wealthy center of the town. The immigrants who live in the place where I live now (outside of the center), don't exhibit that kind of happiness but that's the condition of being an immigrant: no matter how welcoming the place is, it is not your place and you will never feel as good there as you would at home no matter how hard or difficult it is at home. That may not apply to people who fell in love with a particular land and decided to stay there but it applies to those who left their homeland in search of better life conditions or a better future for their children. There's a difference between an expatriate and an immigrant. One chooses to be somewhere else, the other is forced to leave his or her homeland because of economic, political, etc. reasons. So Holland is not a place I fell in love with and I am tired for now, it seems, of being an immigrant (I will one day become an expatriate) and I will go home to complain about the immigrants who don't want to assimilate and wear strange things on their heads... Just kidding.

Coffee and cake

I didn't have the time to write as I said and I am again at the library, getting another break for coffee and cake... It seems I live in the library - it's such a cool place, archtecturally beautiful, with so many interesting things to do, and such great cafe upstairs that I just spend a lot of time here. So eventually I will get to write about the past two months a little later today. Until then hugs to everyone.

Finally

Finally I have the time to write something on the blog. I didn't write anything for so long that I wanted to just get to the blog to see if I can still remember the password... So I got to Amsterdam last Thursday and a lot of things happened since then already. I have been sitting at the computer in the library - the best library I have seen in my life, I think - for so long that I am going to take a break for coffee and cake and when I return I am going to write about my experiences in Holland, Poland and Colombia which I visited again in September. Life is crazy... I realize...