On the occasion of the second Fur Ball in Amsterdam:
If I were a bear,
And a big bear too,
I shouldn’t much care
If it froze or snew,
I shouldn’t mind
If it Snowed or friz –
I’d be all fur-lined
With a coat like his!
For I’d have fur boots and a brown fur wrap
And brown fur knickers and a big fur cap
I’d have a fur muffle-ruff to cover my jaws
And brown fur mittens on my big brown paws
With a big brown furry-down up to my head
I’d sleep all the winter in a big fur bed.
A.A. Milne
English Writer
We’re back from a whirlwind trip to York. We departed Amsterdam for Rotterdam/Europort on wednesday afternoon, to catch the night ferry to (Kingston upon) Hull. We drove from Hull to York, and got to the Wheatlands Lodge hotel at about 9:30. It’s a kind of anniversary for me, as I first stayed there in 1980, when I started my 1st term at YCAT (York College of Art & Technology, as it was then called). Apart from Jan, all of us had been to York previously. All of us was my mother, my brother and sister-in-law and their two daughters, and Jan and myself.
Things hadn’t changed as much as I thought they would have. The York Arms was exactly as I had left it 20-odd years ago. Or it looked suspicously like nothing had been changed.
Other things had changed though: there’s now a Starbucks on the corner of Stonegate and Petergate, with a wireless hotspot. Technology certainly has moved along. It was in York that I saw the first Apple Macintosh. Now if only I could get a wireless card for my iBook….
After an all-too-brief (not-quite-)two days, we took the ferry back to Rotterdam/Europort. We’ve only been away two days/three nights, but it seems like a much longer trip. I suppose that’s good value for money…
I’ve got a cold. Running around Cologne for a couple of days in just a thin layer of nylon will do that to a body. I just hope I’m well enough to go to York (England) next week as planned. Just a short trip, to celebrate my mothers birthday. It’ll be deja-vu all over again, as I lived in York for four years between 1980-1984. I expect it’ll have changed. As have I.
Last weekend was carneval, or as they say in Cologne: Fasteleer. We were there, as every year, and it was fun, as every year. But it wasn’t as busy as other years: maybe because of the time of year, too soon after Christmas, or maybe because so many people have the flu.
Our little bunch was one short: Henk was ill in bed, in Amsterdam, with a bad flu. While we (Frits, Niels, Thomas, Jan en Timon) were in Cologne, with a spare costume…
After a lot of phoning and asking around, we found Mario who didn’t mind helping us out. The problem was that we needed to be six, as we had costumes in the six colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. And Mario had to ‘fill in’ the yellow costume.
And even though we got a lot of compliments, we didn’t win any prizes – but then we’re used to that.
The costume ball of the Rosa Funken was as busy as ever, but a large part were ‘curious’ rather than ‘gay’: people who had heard that the Rosa Funken Ball was always such fun, and who had come to see what is was about. What they didn’t get, was that the idea is to come in an inventive, and possibly outreagous, costume. Something off-the-peg from the Kaufhof or Karstadt simply doesn’t cut it for this crowd. So we were not too impressed with the costumes.
But there were some good costumes: Josephine and GeraldineDaphne were great, we loved Audrey Hepburn: but they (like us) were not appropriate to the theme, which was ‘Pirates of the Seven Seas’, and so did not get to the stage, let alone a prize.
I’m just hoping that next year it’ll be more of a ‘Gay Ball’.
See more pictures here: carneval 2005