Balduino; and a cafe crawl.

Things had been flat all week for me. Hardly surprising given the circumstances, so when my venezualan soul brother Balduino called me up on thursday asking if I was free to meet him today for a few hours, I very vocally told him that I was, and said lets make an afternoon of it. And so we did, starting at two o’clock at the Blue Teahouse in the Vondelpark, the center park of Amsterdam city.

It was a cold afternoon when I pulled my bike up to the iron gate entrance of the place, maybe 8 or 9 degrees by the feel of it. I could see the man himself sitting on a seat outside as I locked up The Shark (my fireapple-red bike so named in honour of Hunter S’s fireapple-red convertable that he drives on his first visit to Vegas in, Fear and Loathing). He was wearing a long jumper and one of those jackets that looks like the sleeves have been cut off or stolen. A strange choice I thought considering the time of year and weather conditions. As I walked over to the table, he looked up and saw me and his face lit up in a big smile, and he said, “Mi Amigo… Hola my friend, it very very good to see you”, in that big spanish accent he has. We embraced, and then he wanted me to sit down as he went and got us both coffees. “So… what fucking shit are you in now”? He asked me with that big grin on his face as he took a sip of espresso. And that’s how we started.

The next few hours we sat and talked about the last two months of life, his and mine in very personal and intimate detail. He’s a unique friend like that, it’s very rare for guys to discuss details of our lives intimately with other guys. Most guys don’t have the capacity for sensitivity that is necessary for deep talking, but he is someone that does. I think it has to have something to do with him being an artist. Artists tend to be very sensitive people who embrace human emotion rather than shy away from it. This also gives Balduino an almost healing quality to his presence, as he has a way of saying the things to you that most need to hear at that time. In a big way he grounds my life here, because his experiences are so similiar to mine day to day, and he sees the city and its people in a lot the same way. It helps knowing that I’m not the only foreign square peg struggling like hell to make it through the round dutch hole!

We cafe crawled for about six hours (I think it was). Each place we went to people would come up to him like he was a local television soap celebrity and say how wonderful it was to see him again, and asked how was he doing. At one point I started wondering if he might not have actually been a television soap celebrity because it seemed impossible to me otherwise how else he would be known by so many people. Seriously I think that it has to have something to do with his spanish accent. It does mesmorise people like some sort of cheap circus show act. He speaks dutch now, and quite clearly his mind control powers have increased considerably now he can talk to the locals in their native tongue. So I vowed that I would go back to studying dutch and spanish, in the hope that I too could one day exert the same kind of jedi like influence over the people around me that he does.

As the evening deepened, and the weather grew colder – making Balduino shake as hypothermia started kicking in – we made our goodbyes and I headed for home. I felt good after our afternoon together, and more importantly good in myself for the time we spent together. It reaffirmed within me that not everything in my life has changed, and that there will always be that guy there when I need a friend.

A good way to start the next week.

Padwanna!

The Balduino; and a cafe crawl. by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.