Being here in this island of tolerance and anarchy is so liberating that I snap my fingers at convention. Like this morning, for example, I wake up about five, so well rested that there is no other choice than to get up. I have coffee with a couple of slices of toasted raisin bread piled high with cherry confiture and Turkish yogurt, but am still hungry. So I microwave the leftover half cup of experimental posole. But that's only a few bites, rich as it is, and then I remember that huge cauliflower and the big chunk of Gouda.

Yep, Bloemkool Lodewijk, that dish I invented last year and have been recommending to deaf ears ever since, despite my claims that it is as quick and easy as it is nutritious and delicious. Hell, maybe it's too easy since all you have to do is cut up some cauliflower into flowerets to cover a plate, toss in a tablespoon of water, slip a plastic bag over the plate, and microwave it until the cauliflower is nearly done. Take it out, open it up, ouch ouch ouch, strew shredded Gouda or maybe some crumbled fourme d'ambert over it, slip the bag back on, and stick it into the microwave for thirty more seconds so that the cheese is melted and the cauliflower is no longer crunchy but not steamed senseless. All it needs is a few grains of salt. How can something this good for us be so tasty?

Now it's 7:30, I'm pleasantly full, and if I hadn't drunk that pot of coffee, I'd crawl back in bed.

Speaking of gourmet foods, have I told the tale about the time Allen and I were throwing a dinner party and the table conversation drifted around to the drabness of the cooking of most of the mothers in our generation? My own mother was an exception, but many of them did routinely overcook vegetables and have spice collections consisting only of allspice, cinnamon, garlic powder, and black pepper. The guests were really getting into this bashing until one of 'em tartly pointed out that if in his childhood his mother had served the dinner we were enjoying, the whole family would have turned up their noses at it.

A moment of silence fell while a wave of embarrassed sympathy for the poor old dears swept the room.

In the late morning I drift down to the Spuiplein in hopes of catching Sunflower (see all my previous Amsterdam tales), but they aren't there today. Still, the trip is more than worth it. On the way, there are photo ops, like this poster box:

And this street art:

I browse through the art fair in hopes of finding postcards by the woman who had the drawings of herbs last year. She's not here today, but then from several booths away I spot Wil Wiegant's work. He's back. Here's another link. I discovered him in 2004, and looked for him in vain in '05 and '06, which I mentioned in Amsterdam by Segway and Amsterdam by Foot.

When I walked up to the booth this time and started telling him what a pleasure it was to see him again after missing him for two visits, a thoughtful look crossed his face and he asked in English, "Are you the writer?" "Jazeker," I said, trying to wrest the conversation back to Dutch, but when he said that he had recently been Googling around and found my comments on him, I was too excited to even try to speak Dutch anymore.

Do I love it or what when I discover I've given folks a thrill? I eagerly bought a fistful of his wonderful postcards, but while we were talking and I was picking around in the cards, he dug into a folder and drew out four of those really spectacular folded cards from 2004 I'd loved so much that I'd hoarded the last one until a few months ago. I thought it would be greedy to take 'em all, so I just grabbed three. He also pulled out a really touching card reproducing a painting of nine stylized sailboats he'd done when a dear friend had died unexpectedly. Wil lives most of the year in the Canary Islands, and all the words in his paintings are Spanish. This one, he'd translated into Dutch on the card, which I'll render in English as "Eight boats for the living and one boat for the dead." Powerful painting, great card, delightful guy.

But the thrills aren't over. I walk over into the Athenaeum in hopes of finding a forlorn copy of the now apparently impossible-to-obtain English translation of Geert Mak's De Eeuw van Mijn Vater, in English My Father's Century. Actually, I can no longer google up any reference to the existence of an English translation, so misinformation regarding its existence may have occurred.

The nice young woman leads me to the Dutch-Works-in-Translation section, and what do I spot but an English translation of Mak's In Europa, which all my more intellectual Dutch friends have been raving about and which I didn't know had appeared in English. My joy is so great that I decide I'll follow through on my earlier threat to try Mak's De Eeuw van Mijn Vater in the original Dutch. That is, until I find it and see that the damn thing is three inches thick!!!! I paw through the Mak selection and determine that, even though he's a journalist, he apparently doesn't publish anything short. Well, for now I'm confining my Dutch reading to newspaper articles...short newspaper articles. Well, and emails from some of my Dutch friends.

Oh, and speaking of eeuw, I know that word in five languages, but can pronounce it understandably in only four. My attempts in Dutch have provoked snickers.