| Cloggie: afp: Amsterdam Bookstore Meet |
Attending: Daniel, Eelco, Jeroen, Jos, Julia, ,Kat, Kimberley, Martin, Martijn, Michel, Patrick, Rolf, Uwe
Uwe & Rolf's view of the meet, including their pictures.
So muggins here decided he would like to organise his own meet, after several people had expressed a desire to go forth and plunder some of the second hand bookstores Amsterdam is proud of. No problem, right? Course not. Except when you forget that Euro2000 is taking place at the same time. Whoops. Thankfully this was less of a problem then it could be...
The day started for me with some frantic last minute cleaning of my flat, when at around 12 pm the first afper rang my frontbell. It was Patrick, who was unfashionably early, as the meet was only supposed to start at around 2 pm and i'd asked those people who wanted to park their cars at my place to arrive between 12 and 1 pm. OTOH, this did meant he could give me a hand with the dishes...
Unfortunately, he was the only early arrival: Daniel only arrived around 2 and the dollies even later, which meant we arrived at Amsterdam Central Station only at around 3 o'clock, to find the rest of the meet waiting impatiently for us, having arrived by train from the various parts of the Netherlands.
Now complete, we set off in our quest for books, only stopping at three bookstores, but three good bookstores. Especially the last one, as that was a bookstore specialised in English language books with a huge stack of science fiction books. Everbody was contendly browsing the sf stacks when I innocently asked Kimberley if she had taken a look at the crime fiction departement yet. She replied she had only found truce crime, so I showed her the room with the general and crime fiction books. While me and Patrick were looking at the books at one side of the bookcase dividing the room, Kimberley had started to browse on the other side. Then we heard her cry out: "oh shit" and we peered around the bookcase to find her kneeling on the floor holding a stack of books almost as long as she was. It seems there were quite a few books by Dorothy Sayers available she still needed... She was not the only lucky one, as Jeroen found an obscure Tolkien book.
After we had saited our hunger for books, it became time to sate our more mundane hungers by eating at a nearby Thai restaurant. Despite them being slightly flustered by the huge group arriving without reservation [1] and a waiter with not exactly the best memory in the business, we managed to get some decent Thai food inside us. Naturally, several subjects were geeking, including politics. but the sad highlight of the evening had to be Patrick and Eelco trying to make an connection to Patrick's afp-meet pages... Apparantely it involved taking the chip out of one mobile, putting it in another mobile with infra red port, then using Eelco's Palm to make a internet connection to telnet to his uni computer from where via lynx the webpages where looked at, all just to satisfy some obscure point in a discussion about early nl-meets. Some people...
The next stop after dinner was a visit to an icecream parlor, where we took over every available seat and nearly exhausted their supplies of chocolate icecream... Since they had to leave early to get back home at a reasonable time, we said goodbye to Olaf, Sindy and Julia, the latter still feeling a bit ill. The rest of us went to my favourite pub in Amsterdam, L&B's, which specialises in whiskies and a very good job it does too. We did had to take a slight detour to another pub first though, as it wasn't opened yet when we arrived. At around eleven the people who would not stay over left, while the rest stayed there till about 1 o'clock, when we took the last tram home to my flat.
Now fitting seven men into my tiny little flat is just not possible, but fortunately I live in a student's house which has a big kitchen custom made for it. So no problems there, except that some person went into the kitchen at 4 am, turned on the light, saw seven people lying there snoring and fled giggling...
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Waiting around for the rest of the meet to finish plundering the bookstore |
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Kimberley discovers the bookstore had some books by her favourite author |
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At the Thai restaurant, complete except for Jos |
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Misusing a Psion and a mobile to take a look at Patrick's afpmeet pages. |
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Unnatural acts involving Nessie and a coke bottle. |
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After dinner, the trek to the obligatory icecream parlor |
That sunday, after a good breakfast, some coffee and people checking their purchases it was time for revenge. At the last meet you see, Patrick had subjected us to the sweet voices of Mel & Kim, that great eighties pop duo at 16 rpm. It left a great scar on my soul, so i decided to get even. Having bought perhaps *the* single most repulsive record possible, an eighties relaunch of the Village People, i handed it over to him. He was very pleased...
A few minutes after that, while we were talking about juggling and having to watch out for balls getting sucked into passing areoplanes (i live under the approach path for Schiphol), Uwe made a mistake. He made a hideous pun and said, "there's one Boeing every minute". Which Patrick found enough justification to hand him the record, as he himself had earned the infamous Book earlier in the meet.
We then went outside for some juggling and no, no balls were sucked into areoplanes...
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Strike 1! |
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Hanging around |
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Some people still believe in old fashioned analog cameras |
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Patrick demonstrating his juggling skills again. |
[1] Their fault, I wanted to reserve when I was eating there the week before, but they wouldn't, the silly buggers.
