Preface
This travelogue is a recollection of the journey untaken by a sixteen year old girl. The views are that of a girl born in a country regarded as one of the poorest if marked according to the per capita income, views of a girl who was nurtured in a country who has its roots in the depth of the Himalayas and whose inhabitants believe that Tantric Buddhism is the way to happiness. These views include the girl’s emotions during the journey and should not offend anyone who does not agree with it.
I was one of the "chosen four" selected by my school to represent Bhutan in the United Nations International Students Conference of Amsterdam (UNISCA) in The Netherlands. Seeing Europe at ‘"16" would be anyone’s dream but there is more fun when you get paid to go half way across the globe and as also get attendance.
So along with three other school mates, with approximately 1000$ in my pocket, my passport and my almost empty travel bag, I set off………………………….
to Amsterdam…………………….
Hop to Holland
2:45……..The alarm rang and too excited that I was, before it beeped for the second time I turned it off. My mother came rushing five minutes later to check if I was getting ready. My clothes were neatly pressed the previous evening but I still had some last minute packing to do, my comb was missing and oh! I had to check my passport and my tickets. Finally by three thirty I was ready to move to the airport. The drive to Paro airport is almost one and half hours from Thimphu - the capital of Bhutan and that gave me plenty of time to take a nap (even with such excitement of traveling with friends for fifteen days to Amsterdam could not stop my eye lids from closing).
After much hassle and impatience I got through customs and checked in.
Finally, following much anticipation the flight took off to Bangkok where we were to wait for twelve hours in transit and then board Chinese airlines to Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.
Four oriental kids on a loose, traveling alone to Europe aroused the curiosity of custom officials in Bangkok airport and we had a "special security check" for the four of us. After the WTC attacks, traveling was no longer a luxury. Our documents were xeroxed, our passport doubly examined as it was hand written which made it more primitive and lastly our money was also counted. With such disgraceful treatment, we thus boarded the plane. As luck would have it the flight got delayed for two hours and it took us more than fourteen hours to get to Amsterdam.
Ahhhhhhhhh!!!Whew! That was indeed a long journey and that too not an easy one.
The university had thankfully sent a Dutch student to receive us and the two Bhutanese boys couldn’t believe their luck when they saw a Dutch brunette with a placard "Bhutan."
"Hi, I am Madeline. Well come to Amsterdam," said the brunette. Madeline could be called "a normal Dutch girl"; a girl who was six feet in height, thin, slender and gorgeous. Having always being grief struck by my stunted growth the Dutch girls looked so tall and sophisticated that it was like an entire supermodel magazine coming to life.
The airport buzzed with people busy in their own worlds, some people departing and some arriving and amidst them some crying over their missed flights. But I had to follow Madeline along with the others. She took us through a series of escalators and finally we reached a place where we could exchange our dollars to Euros. Near the exchange machine were a series of machines and from one of them we bought lots of tram tickets as we were told that it would serve as a useful means of traveling around the city but we eventually lost all the tram tickets, so much for wasting our precious Euros.. All this sounded very foreign to me for the only time I had taken a train was with my family! We then took a train to the main city. It was more than an hour ride from the airport. The train ride answered all my dreams of a fantasy foreign land. We passed by beautiful sceneries, castles, buildings of very European architecture and of course Europe has a sense of romance in its air and I was breathing it!
Dry November air, Dutch blue skies, tulips of every colour blooming in the fields and the train passing like a snake in the colourful maze and I peeping out of the window, savoring, relishing every sight I saw and without batting an eye lid I watched the beautiful whisky miniatures of Dutch Houses that I had back home come to life.
The train stopped and we got out at a station whose name I could not pronounce. Dutch was a strange language; sounded more like people who had swallowed bananas trying to talk but ended up making noises that one would probably make while vomiting but every language sounds strange to a stranger doesn’t it? Madeline escorted us to a restaurant and said she would be back after confirming our reservation. The Dutch restaurant looked dimly lit and early birds were sipping their coffee. The Dutch lady who came to take our orders looked more like a saloon mannequin with her hair streaked in every possible, imaginable colour than a waitress. My three companions ventured to drink tea and I being a non tea drinker decided to nibble the cookies that came free with the tea. The lady appeared with three huge steaming glasses of water and a small box. She thunderously kept the glasses and the box on the table and went off. Later a small girl came with three small cookies and I happily relished them. As for my companions their tea happened to be a good surprise; blueberry, blackberry, apple, cinnamon were some of the flavours in that box in tiny tea bags. These tea bag plus the hot steaming glass of water was the Dutch idea of tea (milk tea is known as Indian tea).
After the much expensive tea we set off with Madeline to the hostel which would be home to us for the next nine days. We walked from the restaurant and marveled at the castle located right in the middle of the city. The roads were not tarred, they were bricks laid out in a certain pattern such that it covered the earth and yet looked beautiful.
"Oh! Wow, look trams," said someone in the group. These trams were indeed nice looking unlike the trams I had seen in Calcutta. We then reached Shelter City, a Christian hostel from where we were left on our own and were told to report to the university the next day to attend the conference briefing.
Quick shower in the centrally heated common bathroom was soothing and I wore some warm woolen stockings and a thick jacket to shield myself from the cold. I hail from the mountains and can boast of withstanding quite an amount of cold but European chill had an ineffable flavour altogether. We walked quite a distance in some random direction and this area looked quite different from the area we had previously passed; it looked more crowded, noisier and shortly the posters splashed on the walls revealed to us that our Christian hostel was located in the famous "red light area of the city". To sixteen year olds from quite an orthodox place seeing a woman in 'only 'her untied night gown, busy dusting her clothes sent us fleeing back to the hostel with tears in our eyes. Maybe this is what people term as" CULTURE SHOCK." After much contemplation I decided to forgo all my prejudices and think with an open mind. I was luckier than the rest- to see the drug capital where marijuana and other drugs are legal and prostitution is licensed. It was definitely not an everyday scene.Down the lane of the hostel was an erotic massage bar. Souvenir shops had smoking pots, packaged joints, post cards of every kind; there was one of Bill Clinton in his birth suit ( He he).
University of Van Amsterdam awards credits to students who sit for this conference and successfully complete it. Students from all over Europe enroll for the conference. The university is regarded as worlds 69th best university and its departments are sprawled all over Amsterdam.We were lucky to have the University as our hosts since we had access to the computer lab and also the "cafeteria". To reach the university from the hostel we had to walk through the red light and after a few days we actually had fun watching the girls ushering the customers, reading the walls at the streets and eventually landing to eat one of the huge pizzas.
Amsterdam is an unusual city. It has its good and its bad side, one may argue which city doesn’t? But in Amsterdam one can find a certain segmentation and the word "bad" that I have used is very relative.. One part of the city is all canals and boats, bridges and castles, fur coats and shopping malls, elegant and beautiful. While on the other hand you have the ever popular " good boys go to heaven, bad boys go to Amsterdam," come true in the wildness of the drugs and sex end of the city.If time had permitted I would have loved to visit Anne Frank House and Vincent Van Goh museum. Also I regret having missed the opportunity to see the sex museum but I fortunately scrapped enough time to visit a sex shop.
The conference was a great success. I made Dutch friends, learnt that you greet Dutch people by pecking on both the cheeks and swore never to drink coffee again (horribly bitter).Amsterdam showed to me how different cultures can be and how different cultures perceive drugs and sex (considered taboo in most cultures)and "freedom- living life" is a value I brought along with me from this country.
While in the Dutch Capital,
I saw people
Some high on life,
Some high on weed,
Some high on brownies,
Only that they were made of Hash.
And others sobbing
Fighting for asylum,
Crying for love,
Praying for mercy,
Begging for food,
And such people I saw
In the Dutch capitol.
Ladies with furs of
Blue and red,
Brown and white
And dogs of the same
Walked the dainty roads
The hole less roads of
"Holland."
In some corner
Of the famous red light,
In a coffee shop where the sign reads
"please smoke your joints here" sits a man
Puffing black rings
from his meticulously rolled joint
looking somewhere into the horizon
understanding that this freeland
AMSTERDAM
Is a land both for you and me
If you need it
It’s yours if you don’t
You can still take it.
