Passover in Amsterdam

I travelled central Europe with Alexander Marmar (nee Marmarovich), Esq., a good friend from college. He is seen above, in the composition "Hammerfest: Outside the Gate, 2007," which is a photograph I shot not 5 weeks ago outside of the casa de Gutman, on the Brauersgracht in Amsterdam. We stayed with the family of Felix Gutman, the uncle of my other good friend from college, Roy Blumenfeldensteinmankrantzblatt, for Passover. The house was absolutely amazing, and there was good cheer all around in commemoration of the Jews' liberation from slave life in the Land of Narrows to split-subdivision pre-med life in Garden City, NY. Rejoice!


...a hearty dayenu


...brisket, game hen, lamb chops


...old Israeli conversation, between old Israeli men

The craziest thing about Amsterdam (besides the weed), was once again the degree to which rich Europeans exaggerate their problems. Amsterdam is, quite literally, one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world, but all you see is stuff like this:



I'd live in a police state too, gladly, if half my income was subsidized by the government, if the entirety of society got off work at 4:30 and lounged at canal-side cafes, if marijuana was not only legal, but bred, studied, and produced by the world's top botanists, and if my house looked like this...



And if evenings on the Amstel looked like this...



Roy's uncle Felix owns Canal Bus and Canal Bikes, the two biggest boat services on the canals of Amsterdam. There is minimal competition, and if you've been on a tour there, you've probably padded Felix's retirement fund. It was good for me and Marmar, though, because we got free rides everywhere, with open bars and delicious dishes...



Indonesian soup with bamboo shoots and green veggie broth...



Various peanut-sauced and spicy wet-gravied Indonesian meat dishes. Indonesian food is the jam right now, all over Europe. It's delicious...



This is what a staircase looks like in a canal house. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of an 80-degree angle. The house are buily high and narrow, understandably, to fit around the canals. In addition, some of them are about 400 years old, which is an amazing thing to see, especially when the years are carved into stone plaques on the outside...



Some of them have been slowly sinking into the Dutch mush over that time. This picture is not taken with a fish-eye lens, but it looks like it. The houses are actually tilting in on one another. This is a back street somewhere in West-Central Amsterdam.



Here are some of the "modern" canal houses. It literally doesn't stop. Just miles and miles of houses with incredible views, beautiful facades, and monthly rents that make you turn down your ears and let your tail go limp.



The Bjorn Borg motorboat. Amazing. There's a hot new clothing brand in Holland named after the fashionably ridiculous Dutch tennis star. We wanted to buy some underwear -- you know, to gird our loins in the glory that is the John McEnroe foe who inspired the character of Richie Tenenbaum. We never got around to it. So we took a snap of this boat instead.



A bike, strapped to a canal overpass. Discuss.



Lovely day near the Anne Frank House.



And the man, himself, Felix (center) instructing Roy and friend Joe in the intricacies of billiards. We had a tournament later. I out-drank everyone, but ultimately lost the table games. I won in spirit, though. Damned if I didn't...

First Impressions of Europe

I arrived in Frankfurt from Madras, on my way home from India, after a long debacle that involved me losing my ticket (I left it in my apartment in Bombay), paying several hundred million dollars, purchasing some rugs from a newly-befriended family of Kashmiris in Madras, and falling asleep in the 104-degree Mahabalipuram sun (yeah, I used an internet Celsius-Fahrenheit converter) and waking up the color of raw London broil.

I keep telling people that no, I'm not culture shocked to be in America, because I spent two weeks in Europe first, and going from India to Europe to America is like going from 0 to 100 to 50. I remember on the ICE train from Frankfurst to Amsterdam, I looked out my window and saw a river, and that river actually had clear water in it. Then I looked a little longer, and noticed that the water had a swan swimming in it! And the swan was alive! It was unbelievable. I knew I was not in India.

In any case, here are the first three things I saw in Germany:



donuts.



sausages.



incredibly fast trains.

Coming to America

"Maaa, baaa, daaa-daaa...."
- Josie

Ok, so I'm not in India anymore. My Indian compatriots may have noticed this. I miss it like crazy. Right now I'm in Pittsburgh, but I've passed through 5 other countries and a few other American cities before I got here. I'm going to try to sort through my travels and post about them retrospectively over the next few days. But, as we all know, memories slip away by the day. I'll do my best.

In the meantime, it's important that you all realize that all travels end with a visit to Josie, who is shown here, after laying waste to some spaghetti, scarfin' on her current favorite victual, corn on the cob. Girl's got like 6 teeth now! And she talks! (sorta).

Stay tuned,
-Robbie.

Mount Mary's Candles

The neighborhood I live in, for those of you who don't know, is called Bandra, and it is the second or third suburb out of Bombay to the north, just after Mahim and Matunga, both very crowded middle-class Maharashtrian suburbs. Bandra juts like a hand out into the Arabian Sea to the west, and as recent as a hundred years ago, it was mostly farmland and populated almost entirely by Koli fisherfolk, the same people who called the seven islands of Bombay "Mumba," or "Mumbai" -- the city of Mumbadevi, the patron deity of all Indians who dip their nets into the ocean and live off the bounty of the sea.

These days, there is a different patron -- she's called Our Lady of the Navigators, and her statue is perched on a tree-lined hill towards lands end, the outstretched pinky finger of Bandra's hand, near the swanky Taj Hotel. The Portuguese brought Catholicism to Bombay in 1543, and handed over control of Bandra to the Jesuit missionaries in 1570. In 1640 they built the Castela de Aguada, or Bandra Fort to defend against Maratha raids, and in the same year, Mount Mary's chapel took her post on the hill, 30m above the blue sea. The church was destroyed, depite their efforts to protect it, in 1738, and the statue of the virgin was recovered from the sea by fishermen and temporarily installed in St. Andrews Church, which is right around the corner from my apartment, before being shifted to the rebuilt Mount Mary in 1761.

All that is interesting, I suppose, but the real reason I'm here today, boys and girls, is to talk about Mount Mary's candles, which are unlike any I've seen in a Catholic cathedral. If anyone knows anything about this devotional tradition, I'd love to hear a history (extremely detailed, of course) or an explanation.

And for now, you can also read about Mount Mary's from two wittier, artsier Bombay bloggers, just by clicking here and here.



The candlse you can buy come in many moulds. They are shaped like cars, airplanes, disembodied legs, arms, hands, stomachs, brains, and even full bodies, couples, or pregnant women. Your hand hurts? You buy one of Mount Mary's hands, put it on the sacred fire, and pray to the Mountain Mama. Want a baby? Pregnant candle. Want a new beamer or to find a cheap Cessna on eBay? You get the idea...

I found the candles to be, I dunno, ghastly... Very pale and smooth, and strange in part because they so often represented physical objects, material desires, and not spiritual ones...



I think this picture captures what I mean by "ghastly"...



More disembodied limbs, shadows...





Prayer-vendors:





The extensive collection...



Family portrait...



In memoriam...



Across the street from the candlewalas, we have the Jesuswalas, selling Jesus in every form, pose, color, and mood imaginable...





And an entirely different sort of candles...



And a flock of crucifixions...



And this is the old basilica, where the 17th century statue is still standing. Rumor has it that Arab pirates stole Our Lady's hand in 1700 because the had some sort of "gilt object" in it. What was it? A ring? Brass knuckles? Roach clip? I wanna know...



Here's a devotee, standing in front of the sacred fire with the wax that dripped in hissing drops to the grate below.



And further, to illustrate the passage of time in this posting, I spent a whole Wednesday after work at Mount Mary's, counting rosary at the mass with the whole mumbling congregation, until the moon came out over the balustrade...



And nighttime descended on Land's End...

Holi, Holi, Holi

Us: Sir, what will you do to celebrate Holi?
Indian man: Children, I am holy every day!

Yesterday was the Indian festival Holi, and it was probably the coolest street festival I've ever been part of. The only contender is La Batalla del Vino, in Haro, La Rioja, Spain, which I attended in July or August of 2002 with my buddy Ben. At that festival, we celebrated an economic bounty -- the amount of wine produced in the La Rioja region -- by drinking all night, then having an early morning water gun fight, only it wasn't water (it was cheap red wine) and we didn't shoot each other with guns (but with leather wine skins). For Holi, some among us (I'll not say who) ate bhang, then smeared each other with "colour" -- or fine, oil-based paint powder in diffeerent pigments, threw water baloons at each other, doused each other with buckets of blood-colored water, and shot waterguns as well. Either festival, the result was the same. We came out completely stained pink, intoxicated, and thoroughly satisfied. That's Erin, up above showing off her rainbow skin, who took all of these pictures, by the way, because she was the only one willing to risk her camera. So she gets the flagship photo for this post.

So the deal is this. We're celebrating various things. Spring, first and foremost, but I don't really understand that because the difference between one season and the next in India is so negligible -- it's hot, then it get's hotter, then hotter, then it rains, then it's hot again -- that it's unclear why the ancients would need a Spring festival (praying for cool weather, maybe?). We're also jamming because of this mythological figure called Prahlad, who was really into Vishnu, and who thwarted his heinous father King Hiranyakashipu by resisting a totally bogus execution at the hands of his skank sister Holika by chanting Vishnu's name over and over again. Got it?

This guy, who stood, dazed, outside of one of the housing complexes in Mahim where we played holi (you "play holi" by smearing colour on people, then dousing them, then dancing in the streets to Marathi songs), mumbling "Photo, photo..." -- undoubtedly too busy thinking about Prahlad and Vishnu to do or think of anything else.



These guys are generously demonstrating the transformative spiritual powers of bhang, the aerated balls of marijuana that are ground into paste and powder and mixed with lassi or thandi, both delicious cold dairy drinks, to produce a mixture that gets you LOADED and in the proper spiritual fram



Here's my friend Jocelyn getting smeared, early on in the revelry --



We played holi in Erin's neighborhood of Mahim, which has a huge Maharashtrian population (as opposed to the dozens of other Indian ethnic identities that exist in other pockets of Bombay). That meant lots of Hindus, and therefore lots of Holi as opposed to the Catholic neighborhoods of the city, like mine, where Holi ain't so big. Kids like these were getting really into it (to the point of violence, almost), as well as singing songs in Marathi and in one strange case, shouting Shiv Sena slogans at me. Damn cute, though, aren't they?



The kids were having battles -- one housing society versus another, lobbing waterballoons over the divisions. It was great fun...



A bunch of cheeky girls hit me and Benji pretty bad, so we launched a counter-ambush with all the boys on our side. It was like camp, except I never went to camp, but was like what I imagine camp was sort of like...



I'm gonna call these guys The Ghouls. They were allies.



After soundly routing the nefarious girls, we joined the silvery Ghouls in an impromptu dance party which featured that guy in the middle singing lead vocals on some Marathi folk songs, and lots of Bollywood style pelvic thrusts. We were all guys, thrusting at one another, but believe me, it was cool.



There was a sort of George Romero feel to the whole afternoon, and I'm going to end with a few photos that are particularly Zombie-like. This is Erin, me, and Jocelyn, walking Reservoir Dogs-style down the middle of the empty streets, looking for live flesh...



This is Erin looking cancer-faced...



And this is me, feasting on Jocelyn's brains RAAAAARRRGHHH!!!...