kelle.de

Recently, I have been doing some more driving than I used to. Fortune has had it that I got into the possession of a car. A modified VW Polo, fitted with a few modifications (twin turbo charger, super-flat tyres and a gun in the front). So anyway. A few days ago I was invited to participate in a seminar near Utrecht, a town in Holland that is right in the geographic centre of the country.
I was warned NOT to take the car, due to impossible traffic situation that have to do with the Netherlands being the most densely populated country in Europe. After an extensive amount of very strong morning coffee I finally got moving. It was around 6 o clock so I was bound to encounter the pure joy of rush-hour traffic.

But fortunately my car was equipped with James-Bond-style gadgets, so my enthusiastic smile stayed on, speeding along the emergency lane. The gun was also very useful to motivate the yellow-license-plated snails in front of me.

I can’t remember much of the rest of the trip but a faint sense of being out in the woods made me aware of approaching the goalpoint (I had been only looking at the satnav screen all of the time).

I did it. I was in the center of the Netherlands. A place some miles away from Utrecht city. There is not much but woods and a large car park. It was quite cold and snow stuck beneath. But It did not scare me. I had a large amount of whiskey and German “Mettwurst” with me, so I endured, cutting a loaf of bread and making Mettwurstbreads, devouring them soonafter.

When I got tired of Mettwurst, I decided to go back home. I was also beginning to feel a bit cold, after 3 days of living in the car with wintery conditions outside. So I stretched my bones and made the decision. It was time to leave.

I drove up to the exit but there was a closed gate. It wouldnt open so I had to call the operater using the communication device attached to it. I shouted something in dutch at him, and finally the gate opened. I sped away, with the cheeky feeling to have saved the parking money. I honked and fired the front gun in joyful satiscation.

Oddly enough the 1er arondissement in Paris seems to be infested by a lot of muggers and hooligans… something one would not expect from the very center of such a grand city. There is very much the athmosphere of banlieu. Never mind, on our first night here we had a good time partying on a boat on the River Seine. However, when we got back to the 1st district (where the friend I am visiting here has a small flat, somewhere near the Centre Pompidou), we decided to be hungry and eat some Panini stuff (something typical about Paris night food supply seems to be that there is only Panini). One of the regulations recently introduced by the Prefecture, however, is complicating things, easy as though they may seem regarding the paninism of late hour nutrification.

Between midnight and 4am you are not allowed to take away food. You must remain within the premises of the establishment where you bought the food, else there be trouble.

And so it happend. Some hungry frenchmen were ignorant of that rule and went away with their food, only to receive beating by some bouncer whose job it were to keep food-wielders inside the box shaped sales room of the feeding station.

Oh how they squealed, flying paninis and fists, pushing and beating, and greedy hands trying to salvage whats left of the object of anger.

If it was not so scary a vision, people getting really freaked out and violent, I would have laughed my head off. (By the way, managed to stay in the spectator role)…