From July 2024
Since that run in Oosterpark where I first heard Nick Hakim’s M1, I couldn’t get over the song. As with most songs, I couldn’t care much about the lyrics: it’s the combination of a drum loop and the choral synth similar to Beach House’s To Die In L.A. and Hakim’s “achingly plaintive and soulful falsetto” that renders everything in slow-mo. It’s a very passionate song.
It was a song that played in my head in a trip I had recently to Amsterdam for an academic conference. I just got lucky: for one, I sent the requirements (a 300-word abstract) a day before the deadline on a whim. From the day I got accepted in mid-April was a harrowing three-month ordeal of applying for a Schengen visa and a travel grant at my university at the same time, and in between were trips to a destination wedding in Palawan, a work trip in Singapore, and taking online classes at Bahasa. At one point I was sorting out all the requirements standing by a photocopier shop for 30 minutes, with reams of documents and boxes to tick, and I muttered to myself, exhausted: What is this for?!
Fortunately, the trip in late July went smoothly and as planned: had I scheduled my trip a day later I would have been one of those passengers affected by the global IT meltdown. (The Schiphol-bound plane was flying over Turkey when the BBC and Al Jazeera reported on it!) In my first day at the conference I realized that I’m one of the few people who didn’t have a PhD, so I initially felt like a complete fraud – until I met people within my age group! I met people whose names were in class syllabi, names cited in parentheses, whose expertise range from the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, forest politics in Borneo, electrification of Indonesia in the 1960s and so much more.
Outside the conference I’ve met wonderful people: two dear friends who had to do a six-hour bus trip from Hamburg to spend the weekend with me; a former colleague and her fiancee based in Leiden; a Dutch guy, married to a Filipina photographer, who cycled from Manila to Leyte and shared the same sentiments I have about our cycling culture; a second-generation Dutch-Indonesian who does heritage walking trips around Amsterdam and The Hague; fellow Filipino scholars who have done their PhD in Boston, Nagoya and Canberra; a Filipino filmmaker whose documentary film made it to Cinemalaya, and many, many more.
Since about three years ago, I make sure that in every city I have been to I either do cycling or running – I believe it gives you a very different perspective of their way of life. In a rush of adrenaline one gets in foreign trips, I was able to squeeze in both in Amsterdam. Although my runs were usually just around where I stayed at, with Oosterpark being the farthest, the bike trips took me to the city’s parks and tourist spots and outskirts, i.e. beyond Amsterdam’s famous canals. Aside from there were no 24/7 convenience stores and very few coffee shops that are open beyond 6pm., true to European cities, Amsterdam is a very liveable city, I must say, with enough network of trams, trains, bike paths and parks. The food, though, isn’t good enough to even write home about, unless you count chocolates from Tony Chocolonely.
There were things I didn’t do that gnawed at me still: one thing I missed to do was to watch a film at a film center across the conference venue called Kriterion. (A shame, really.) Another is going to Stedelijk Museum. But it was a trip that went as planned with almost no hitches – aside from 1) draining my phone battery while cycling around Amsterdam, which isn’t any different as being off-grid; and 2) being late for eight minutes in the Friday walking tour, a deed frowned upon in Dutch culture. I did have a valid reason: I couldn’t figure out how to use the bike parking! Apparently it requires a card. The guy behind the counter was so nice to have lent me one for the day.