Mongolia is a strange place to be coming home to. Even when you think you’re prepared for the craziness (and in fact when that’s precisely what you’ve been missing), you’re not really prepared for the craziness. It constantly takes you off guard. Can a place like that ever really be home to an outsider?
Ulaanbaatar is in a state of panic – but panic pure Mongol-style, ie. totally inappropriate, illogical and likely to blow over in a week. Despite being still fragile after the two-day overland obstacle course through the seventh circle of hell, or Inner Mongolia (see my site for gruesome details), I am falling over laughing at the stringent anti-SARS measures, which include dodgy handmade surgical masks, gum boots, swimming goggles and the closure of all hospitals.
All open air markets have been closed but all indoor food markets are doing a roaring trade – indoors the food is kinda protected and there’s less, like, air, right?
The people who stand on the street with satellite phones wrapped in felt have now branched into selling surgical masks as a sideline. They’ve found their niche market, as all the chemists have sold out of face masks. I love the incompetence.
But this is the country where roosters lay eggs and people eat them, so nothing less should be expected. And for the moment, it’s home. Which means a bed in a room, music, work and some good people. A knowledge of the best back streets in town, the hidden temples. Shopkeepers who know me, people who worry about me.
I don’t quite know what people look for or need in a home. I do know that some people have a hard time accepting that the place I was born is not the place I want to call home forever and ever.
As much as I don’t want to live there anymore, I still pine for it, regularly. I yearn for a quiet empty beach, a storm in the afternoon, to walk in the bush with my dog, to sit in the same room as any member of my family. To be understood, easily and effortlessly – someone understanding immediately where I’m from, the things I grew up with, how to make me laugh.
Maybe everyone has a grass-is-greener syndrome. Maybe it’s just something that mellows with time. But maybe it never totally goes away.

I’m losing my Dutch accent, but I still have quite a bit of it. I especially have trouble with the ‘th’ sound, as in ‘thirty’. But to be honest, I’m not trying too hard either. Sometimes, this leads to funny situations.
Last year, my wife and I went to see a movie with a friend of ours. While one was buying tickets and the other went to the bathroom, I was at the concession stand buying drinks and popcorn.
“I’ll have a Pepsi, a Diet Pepsi, a Mountain Dew and three popcorns, I said. The girl behind the stand was looking at me kind of funny, like I insulted her and she didn’t know how to respond. She proceeded filling the cups and then asked “and what else did you want again?”
“Ehm…three popcorn”, I said. After another weird look and 2 seconds of silence she answered “I’m sorry sir, but you’ll have to pay for the popcorn”.

Ever since that day I started holding up three fingers in situations where I had to specify “3” “)

I went to Melaka yesterday.

It was a business trip, to visiting some potential customers. I went with two guys from my office.

One of the guys, I’ll call him Charlie, did the driving. Charlie drives an Alfa Romeo. I don’t know the model or the engine size, but it’s a sporty looking silver car.

I should have realised something was amiss as soon as I saw the car. Red leather interior. Big stereo with lots of flashy buttons and bright coloured lights, like a little space ship. Sports package gear box.

Boy racer car.

My other colleage immediately took the back seat and fastened his seatbelt. I clambered into the front passenger seat.

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I thought if I went to an instrument exhibition it would make me an instrument geek. Jesus, those people were so far evolved I may as well have been naked but for a penis sheath and a boar’s tusk through my nose. I was wearing a suit, they were wearing suits, mostly, but somehow it was immediately obvious that I was not one of them.

Maybe I was walking wrong, or breathing wrong – like, in short, terrified pants.

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Dieter: [murmering to self] Mary on a pogo stick, those giant olives stuffed with feta cheese sure look good. Mmm, artichoke hearts… And they must have a dozen kinds of Italian bread here.
Pat the Diet Angel: Now, now. You’ve already had three tomatoes for lunch.
Mike the other Diet Angel: And a bottle of mineral water.
Dieter: Where’d you guys come from?
Pat: You don’t really want to know.
Dieter: [Looks over at frozen foods aisle] Since when have they had Haagen D

I sometimes wonder if my feelings about living in the Netherlands will change when I am very old, when the children are gone, when perhaps my partner is as well.

When I am left here alone.

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The best thing about angel gin is you don’t have a hangover the next day, and your memory actually gets better. Like now I remember the way Marcia W. stretched out seductively on her side, head full of shiny black hair propped up on one hand, on the radiator in speech class in 8^th grade, batting her big, heavily-mascara-ed eyes at me, and the way our teacher, an attractive young woman on whom I also had a crush, said something to her like, “You’re wasting your time, Cleopatra.” I suppose she realized that I was a late-blooming dolt.

And I remember the way my uncle who lived next door to us named all his cows, and his pickup trucks. And the way it took him over an hour to get his motorscooter started when he dragged it out of the shed in spring and gave us all rides around the field.

He also brought back a suitcase full of firecrackers from Hawaii in the days when they were still illegal in Washington State. I can remember finding a dead baby bird with some friends, who stuck two firecrackers down its throat and blew it to pieces.

I can remember that the cultural highlight growing up where I did was visiting the home of a highschool kid when he was away and asking his parents if we could go look at his 40 gallon tropical aquarium, because the aquarium stood on a cabinet that held his Playboy magazine collection.

And we used to go into the filbert orchard and dig enormous holes. And the wild grapes that grew there were sour, and the yellow cherries were sweet, but gave you a bellyache.

Fu*king angels.