An Amsterdam Weekend

What a weekend in this hopping city! Friday through Sunday just flew by like an arrow. The biggest joy for us was to see Tom Kee again after 6 years and have the whole weekend with him. He has launched a company, XWIRE, that creates an intelligent, fast and versatile WiFi router which is developed mainly by himself. He has been living here for 3 years, but now he is about to move back to the States.

There were two art exhibit events that we checked out during the weekend. On Saturday, we headed to West Amsterdam to the Kunstvlaai at Westergasfabrik, previously some kind of a water utility facility. There gathered “off the wall” local artists for a collective exhibit, consisting of a variation of innovative expressions to truly off the wall eye openers as well as crackups. An amazing thing was the big turnout of those who chose to spend a Saturday afternoon enjoying art. Old fashionable folks, young creative types, and families with baby strollers all seemed to be enjoying a peaceful time with art. Kind of like one summer day in Golden Gate Park or one of those San Francisco street festivals.

We got together with Tom for dinner and “walkabout” in a rather relaxing mode this evening, unlike our first night out on the town Friday that took us to jam-packed, smoky and extremely busy clubs like The Dolphins, Café Alto and Bull Dog, both just around the Leidse Plein neighborhood, with diverse nationalities of people whose languages that I could not even recognize. This evening (Saturday), Tom took us to an Indonesian restaurant, then to a couple of loungy clubs. Of course, the partying crowds started to move into those clubs as their first destination of the night, sometime around midnight.

On Sunday, we headed to Tom’s flat in the early afternoon. As we approached Leidse Plein, there was a horde of Ajax Amsterdam fans already starting the tailgate party for the day’s game. Several families were in the action as well, low-teen girls covering themselves with the Ajax flags with their mothers, or little boys with their fathers, both completely decked out in the team colors of red and white. Later we learned that it was definitely a game of significance --the Dutch Championship game. I captured the sounds of the crowd with my mic while walking through some tall-ass young dudes sucking on Heineken cans. The game was to start at 4PM. They had more than 2 hours of partying to do. The party would continue, as mighty Ajax won the game.

We set off to Kunst Rai with Tom and his friend Danielle, a cheerful Dutch photographer from just outside the city. The Kunst Rai is an annual main-stream art conference in a business-like convention center. The aforementioned Kunstvlaai mocked Kunst Rai for its stiff style, but speaking of off the wall, some of the artwork at Kunst Rai weren’t necessarily so different. Only the difference between the artists, besides those who are already well known and established, is whether they got luckily recognized by critics and galleries or not.

Arts everywhere. That’s what counts to us at the moment.

Tom started his trip to Taipei via Paris, by a bullet-train from Amsterdam the next morning at 4 AM. Good luck to you, Tom! And big thanks to everything you have done for us.