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.