sat 08 nov 2008 20:25:06 — witte de withstraat
pauw, eylders, cave, taxi rij
last night i went to the "golden pauw" for dinner w dvr. the food was good, i had to send the beer back cuz it tasted really awful. then we went to het stoplicht and sat with all the geboren amsterdammers for a while. pani was sposed to meet me there but she had fallen asleep instead. back home i was getting ready for sleep myself, then hg called and asked me to come join him, somewhere. he didn't know where he was, except that it was off leidseplein, then he found out the address. i went there with dvr. turned out he was talking about café eylders. hg, his sweetheart helena, a wojtek and a malgorzata who was really pretty i liked her eyes. we had a nice time there. i asked them to teach me how to say something new in polish. wojtek taught me how to say "i would like a nice apartment in krakow," and then mentioned that by the way he actually *could* get me a nice apartment in krakow, if i was interested. so i took his business card. after a while i suggested we all walk to the cave, since dvr had told me he'd never been there yet. but the polish folks were all on fietsen, so they followed separately. and as they were arriving at the cave, helena's fiets slipped on wet leaves and she fell, and cut herself at the eyebrow. so they didn't get to go to the cave after all, they just went home (and i thought maybe with a stop at onze lieve vrouw hospital). dvr and i found djox and we went in. els was playing the music so that was nice. i saw chicha and arifa. djox and i ended up staying late. well after four i found myself contemplating taking a taxi, and stood for a long time studying the misbehavior of the taxi drivers at the leidseplein rij. it's very complicated and stupid. a crowd of people are lined up waiting for a cab; on the surface it appears that the first people in line should get in the first taxi in line. what happens instead is that the taxi driver refuses to take the first people where they wanna go because it's not a high enough fare to make it worth their wait in the queue. so he rolls along and chats with the next people in line, and the next and the next. finally he runs out of people in line, there's nobody left to negotiate with. so he just stands there holding up traffic entirely, until some cute girls come along and hop in (skipping the queue entirely), or else the two policemen come and hassle him. the policemen were standing there the whole time i was, but i only saw them talk to a driver once. so then i walked home. i got to bed shortly after six in the morning.
with pani's help i ordered a new nokia phone, it should be delivered here monday. till then i'm using a loaner from dvr.