A warm slice of high apple pie – or, as the natives call it – appeltaart, is one of the first distinctively Dutch things I came to appreciate when I moved to Amsterdam, back in 2012. It’s also the easiest to love about the somewhat austere Dutch cuisine. I must confess I’ll always point guests visiting from abroad in the direction of my favourite appeltaart place, rather than sending them off to nearest herring stall.
Watch the book releases in September: something warm and tasty is cooking for you and some other millions people. That food connects us one another and to our environment is a very basic concept we first learn as school kids, with that of food chain. Unfortunately we tend to forget that we live in a network of feeding relationships with the world, until we bump into a reminder.
What kind of flyer are you? I hope you are not of the chatterbox type …although, if you are, please come forward: I think we need to talk. Not chat. Not screech. Talk. Aircrafts seem to provide an ambience where some personality traits come to the surface more easily. I see my trips by plane as little social experiments. It’s like sitting and watching the fish go by in an overcrowded water tank (while being inside the tank as one of the fish). I have the feeling that people tend to assess on a specific behavioural pattern when travelling by plane. I think it’s a consequence of mental dissociation. It is a psychological fact that your mind needs to dissociate from your situation when you are stuck in a metal box thousands of meters above ground level, confined in the smallest personal space you will ever tolerate in a social situation, with limitations as to standing up, turning, satisfying personal necessities (toilet, email-checks, uploads of selfies to Instagram). Would you be conscious of your actual position all …
I received my first birthday present up in the sky this year. The author of the gift was my dear friend Nina, with whom I was travelling from Amsterdam to Lucca, Italy, to celebrate. We were probably flying over Germany or France when she handed me a funny patterned bag and wished me happy birthday.
