It is time again to leave this town. To go. I will miss Amsterdam and her whims. I will miss the shops that never open. The waiters who stand behind the bar, chatting, never knowing that you are there. Or at least, doing a very good job to pretend. I will miss plates of cheese and deep-fried things. I will miss a country that understands beer. And not the crap that SABMiller make, but beer. Nectar of the gods. The drink they serve in Valhalla and all places holy. A beer made just for autumn. A beer made just for spring. And another 100 for the times in between. I will miss my bicycle and the quietest rush hour a man never heard. I will miss the kids in boxes wheeling by. The dogs who stand proud in baskets like Nelson on the bow. I will miss my house built when my ancestors were still ferreting down an English coalmine. I will miss the lean and the bend of the canalhouses. The wooden bridges on their pulleys. The locks and the lanes. I will miss the houseboats that don’t look anything like boats. The scabby coots that build nests of jetsam on old bits of flotsam. I will miss the herons poking about. I will miss Apple pie made right. I will miss shops that sell just one thing. The button shop, the stamp store and the toothbrush shop with its toothbrush ferris wheel. I will miss movies with big yellow subtitles. The old brown bars that were last redecorated when Napoleon was mooching about town. I will miss the old people who smoke outside the hospital. The smell of marijuana in the morning. I will miss the tourist lost on mushrooms. The space-cadets in the frites line. The stag weekenders asking how much to come right under the red light. I will miss the 101 different types of expat. The Swedes with their skinny jeans and snus. I will miss the gleaming grins of the Americans and the non-ironic use of y’all. I’ll miss the English, morbid, dry and happy. The Germans and their psychologies. The Spanish, the only people who can pull off a mono-dread and still look cool. And of course, I will miss the Dutch. Their honesty, their socialist bent, their sing-song greetings, their appreciation of personal time, and their obsession with orange. I will miss riding in the snow. The crunch under tyre of a fresh lay. The warm yellow glow of the best street lighting of any city I have ever been. I will miss the oliebollen and ice skating on Dam Square. I will miss the Paradiso, the bands who come to smoke pot and fumble their sets. I will miss seeing the Pixies one night, Nick Cave the next and LCD soundsystem the week after. I will miss a Broodje Hema rookworst met mosterd. Where else in the world does a shop sell household appliances and fat hotdogs?
Amsterdam I’ll miss you, but it is time to go.
Hello Durban!
Hey Buddy, sounds like you’re coming out of retirement or has your stash of Durban Poison run out…LOL
The real question is – Is Durbs is ready for you?
Came across this post thanks to @mrbarrington. As a Dutchie, I think this is a great list of all the things that I love about this town! And absolutely love the picture you chose for the Dutch, it’s too cliche but so true
All the best!
Hey Mr Harris
Hopefully Durban is ready, because I am certainly ready for Durban. Now I just need to convince my Australian wife that we need to stay there permanently!
Durbs is good and cold today
and we we’ll miss you.
sorry we didn’t make it to the so called surprise posh boat thing with food.
we’re in london growing beards.
ps: is this how we keep in touch now?
IN CAPITALS? YES.
hold on, i feel a new shit coming on.
Boy are you going to miss plenty more in Durban. Culture shock here you come. Try riding a bicycle here with the lunatic drivers, Rush hour is 24/7 with everybody in a hurry to go nowhere certainly not to work.
Dave, Dave…how you evoke my City of Birth that I left at age 5 and have returned to umpteen times as my second home until those that made it home for me all died out or moved away. Now it is only as a tourist that I still visit it, this incredible human, even humane, world city with the informal intimacy of a village but the underlying energy of a metropolis.
You will have some adjustments to make in Durbs, first with the WC hype and then the inevitable hangover for all of us afterwards.
Maar….er zit muziek in Amsterdam, en die blijft er!
Welcome home!
And the best thing about life is the memories it makes.
You’ve described all that I like about this city (apart from the Hema hotdogs)and why I don’t want to leave just yet.
Wow, brave man. I really don’t miss all those ugly shopping centres, the lonely suburbs, the endless driving and the dodgy nightlife. Just running though daily M&G headlines with its seemingly infinite amounts of political bad news is enough to make me all too happy with my European carefree cycling existence. But I understand the pull to what one had as a kid.
ps. I learnt to surf on an old Safari board in Durbs:)
You will also miss the Australian who sat opposite you in the office, he who waited hand and foot on you with fresh coffee (ps I owe ya a tenner $$$).
pps. BTW, Bloody brill dave !
Fantastic, the memories brought a lump to my throat.
I never got to skate on Dam Square though, wasn’t cold enough..
Cool post. You evoked deep nostalgia for a much loved place. Thank you
Oops. I really didn’t mean to sound so negative about SA as I naturally love the place to bits. My comment was also more based on my latter teens phase in Johburg. But I am then also reminded of an amazing late 80s/early 90s Johburg inner city life (downtown indie clubs, Yeoville, etc) time that is no more.
So Durbs is of course great and all the best!!!
What a brilliant description!
I’m living in the Netherlands currently (will be home in August – YAY!), and I so agree with this post. Although, you forgot to mention the piles of stinking rubbish stacked against beautiful old buildings during the municipal strike. Unpleasant but quite artistic
Dude you leant money to an Australian, obviously you have not picked up any street smarts on this tour, you won’t be seeing that again, but at least you got some services from him for the money,
Wellcome back. Surprising move, after that poetic eulogy for what seems an idylic life. Oh do be honest, you thought we were having too much fun here down South without you, didn’t ya? Just tell the partner from down under that she is now much closer to home
“Pixies one night, Nick Cave the next”
You bastard! You will burn in hell for that. I am now gonna put on “Henry’s Drem” and lament that Nick, live, will remain but a dream for me.
A wonderful description, Dave. If Durban disappoints come to Cape Town: the scenery’s better, a lot of us ride bicycles, there’s always surf somewhere, and Tassies is cheaper than beer!
@Wineou:
Tassies is cheaper than beer!
So is water, but you won’t find me drinking it!
Tassies is a colab between UCT art & Psychology departments: part joke, part instalation art, part social experiment.
Then again, SAB beer sucks, at least you guys have Bosun’s down there.
Gerry: no doubt you are a connoisseur, while I am an ordinary ou who likes cheap red wine, Windhoek beer, walking on the mountain and lying on the beach. I recently tasted some 1982 Chateau Mouton Rothschild which costs about 1000 times more than Tassies. It had a lingering astringent aftertaste, but tasted only slightly better than my usual tipple.
If you go to http://www.winemag.co.za/article/tassenberg-general-2007-06-19 you’ll find an excellent article on Tassies ending with the words, “Tassenberg is the antidote to snobbery in wine. With no attempt made at expressing a sense of place, varietal or even vintage, it strips off the emperor’s new anorak and offers consumers honest fermented fruit of the vine at a reasonable price. And 12 million litres of annual production don’t lie.”
If you have studied psychology you’ll know how easy it is to be fooled by expectations. Very surprising things emerge from blind tastings.
And don’t knock our water. I’ve cycled from Cape Town to Durban, drinking water all the way. And now I know it’s not for nothing that the ancient name for Cape Town was “Camissa” – Place of Sweet Waters.
@Wineou – Where do you buy your Tassies that is cheaper than beer? Yikes, I might be able to afford Tassies again if that is the case.
@Gerry – Do you even like red wine? If you did you would realise that quality-wise, Tassies does hold its own as a very drinkable housewine in all but the box/bottle design. I proved this by swopping the wine in a “good” bottle with Tassies and all the wine snobs I served it to were going “this was a really excellent year for this vintage, where did you buy it?” Ha. Students only made it famous because student are famous for ignoring wine critics and going after the best taste for their budgets.
X Cepting: I bought a 750ml bottle of Tassenberg for R16.95 from Pick n Pay Claremont today. The last time I bought a six-pack of beer for a braai I seem to remember each can cost about R6. Now Tassies has 12.5% alcohol and beer has about 5%. My calculator tells me that each cc of alcohol in Tassies costs R1.81, while each cc of alcohol in beer costs R3.53. So you get much more bang for your buck with Tassies. Or looking at things another way, I feel pleasantly mellow after 250ml of wine (costing me R5.65) but would need two bottles of beer (costing about R12) to achieve a similar effect.
I did something similar to you many years ago when I decanted cheap wine from a half-gallon jar into a cheap bottle and two empty expensive bottles. We then took these to a nearby flat where some girls had invited us for dinner. They wrinkled their pretty little noses when they tasted the “cheap” wine; but were full of praise later when the same wine was poured from the expensive bottles.
welcome home boet, i have an office for you in cross street. 0837164878.
KwaZulu Natal’s wealthy historical past is documented in a number attention-grabbing museums in and across the city. The advance of Durban into the city we all know today additionally be considered from quite a few essential perspectives. The historical past of apartheid is located in the Kwa Muhle museum, seafaring memorabilia will also found within the Maritime museum and the historical past of Indian indentured labour is proven in photographic and document form within the Durban Cultural and Report Centre.