about a boy,
who was lost,
and thought he was found,
until he meets a girl,
the same girl,
who makes him wonder
if there's more to life
than just getting by.
-
[a Jem-centered novella/sequel to The Girl Who Saw Through Jem]
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Chapter Eleven
Did You Fall For A Shooting Star?
Jem
Halloween and Thanksgiving came in a wave of unanswered postcards and emails from my mother, regaling me with details of her glimmering and glittering life in The City That Never Sleeps. My lack of replies didn't stop her from sending me endless tales of her robust career in attending society galas and my half-brother Orlando hitting incredible milestones of his first words being "No" and taking his first steps.
From time to time, my mother made incredible notes of my silence with throwaway lines of "I know you're incredibly busy, Jem, but it'd be nice if you update me once in a while". And she was right, I was incredibly busy. Moving to Amsterdam was a bitch and a half and I threw myself into work the minute my plane touched the tarmac, helping Brecht with managing the bar, sorting out immigration papers, and writing my book.
Christmas and the New Year saw a busy period with the bar being packed almost every weekend. College-age backpackers in fleeces and New Balance sneakers flock to our one euro pints and locals that adore the live bands we had playing for us on a semi-daily basis.
The bar scene in Amsterdam is extremely ubiquitous in the Dutch social life. Except they don't call bars here, they call them bruine kroeg. This roughly translates to brown cafe. Brecht's bar takes place in a previously abandoned wine cellar and like the rest of Amsterdam's traditional bars, it's an unpretentious, unpolished institution filled with camaraderie, like a British pub or an American neighborhood bar.
In a brown cafe, pouring another beer is much more important than dusting off the back bottles on the bar. Brecht shows me the ritual is to draw a beer to get as much foam as possible, then to use a wet knife to shave off the head between a series of final fill-ups.
Even if you're not a beer lover, venturing into a brown cafe in Amsterdam will give you a peek into the city's everyday life. In old neighborhoods, brown cafes are on almost every corner -- you can't miss them. Most have lacy curtains on the bottom half of the window, and perhaps a cat sleeping on the ledge. In winter (and sometimes into spring), their front doors are hung with a thick drape to keep out drafts. Once inside, you'll find the smoky, mustard brownness that's unique to an Amsterdam brown cafe, the result of years -- no, centuries -- of thick smoke and warm conversation.
There may be booths or little tables sprinkled around, but the only spots of color and light will be the shining metal of the beer tap and, perhaps, a touch of red still showing in the Persian rugs thrown across the tables (a practice that's typically Dutch, if you recall the old paintings). You'll feel the eons of conviviality the minute you walk into a really old, really brown brown cafe. Some have been on their corners since Rembrandt's time, haunted by the ghosts of drinkers past. The best of them are on the Prinsengracht, below Westermarkt, at the Dam, at Leidseplein, on Spui, or with a bit of searching, on tiny streets between canals.
