sat 21 jun 2008 10:26:45 — witte de withstraat
dalai lama avoids "is"
watching today's buddhist tv broadcast. i think the dalai lama doesn't like the word "is". he seems to skip that verb a lot in his sentences. eg "intelligence ... very important" or "women ... perfectly capable". i did hear him use the word "is" once in a sentence. but he avoids it.
the other night pani and i were at stoplicht and some drunken crazed young scottish man came in and sat down to try and hit on pani. his name was chris. i was very curious as to how did this guy end up here in stadsdeel de baarsjes. he said he lives in paris, but he's here to work off a punishment by doing community service in amsterdam noord. he kept saying he was certain he'd never see us again after this night. i asked him like what are you gonna be a suicide bomber? how can you be so sure? we both had a hell of a time trying to follow his english. but when he spoke french, she said he had almost no accent, and that was really funny. he was trying to flow and versier pani the whole time, starting out kinda charming but growing gradually more pathetic. when it was time to leave, we were like ok dude seriously, where do you live, where are you staying. chris said "i dunno, i really dunno." and he just wandered off along jan evertsenstraat -- presumably never to be seen again.
by the way, speaking of the word "stadsdeel". a few weeks ago i told a taxi driver at schiphol i needed to go to witte de withstraat in stadsdeel de baarsjes. when we got to postjesweg approaching the corner of wdw from the south, he suggested we turn right, but i said no it's the next left. but he said, the stadsdeel is here to the right. he meant the stadsdeelkantoor (district office). so i guess some people think "stadsdeel" means the office of the stadsdeel, rather than the district in general.