friends.
For the second week of holidays my good friend Jon denHaan came to visit in Hamilton. We had some pretty great times, eh Jon? We did. You all missed out. I’m not even kidding. Auntie Margaret kept on spoiling us through the whole week, making breakfast ready and letting us sleep in to unknown hours. I almost felt guilty accepting it all. Almost.
There was a little mix up on Saturday, picking up Jon. You see, when we first talked on facebook about him coming, he said he’d probably come on Monday, the 29th. Later on he changed that to Saturday, the 27th, but I only recorded the days in my head. So when I told Auntie Margaret when he would arrive, I said the 29th. So we were expecting him then. Then I get a phone call from Jon’s mom at 4:00 Saturday afternoon, saying that Jon is in Toronto and will be in Hamilton in an hour. Dang. It turned out alright, though. Auntie Marg and I went to pick him up and they both laughed at me.
Sunday we went to Auntie Marg’s church again, and the pastor brought up Wall-E in his sermon as an example of how even our culture knows that our world is being destroyed. I guess it was a nice reference. Did you see that yet? It’s pretty good. Best thing to come from Disney in a long time. The people kind of wreck it half way through, but it’s decent.
I’m going to pretty well skip Monday. I don’t quite recall what we did, but I know it wasn’t much. Tuesday was much more exciting. We made some Ole Bolen. For those unDutch folks out there, Ole Bolen is about the greatest Dutch tradition ever to hit New Year’s Eve. What we do is make a sweet batter with raisins and peeled apple chunks in it, spoon some of the sticky stuff up, and deep fry it. What you get is a kind of doughnut that you dip in icing sugar and eat to your heart’s content (or demise, depending on how you look at it). They were pretty great. That’s pretty much all we ate for the rest of the week. Well, that’s not true, Auntie Margaret cooked some pretty tasty meals. We did eat a lot of Ole Bolen though. Man.
We also went out into Hamilton Tuesday afternoon to check out the city, form an opinion about the place. I don’t think we really did it justice with only one afternoon, but I think Jon and I both gave it a resounding “meh.” I did enjoy the fact that it reminded me of the Potma side of the family a lot, though. It’s hard to pinpoint why exactly, but for some reason it reminded me of train sets and doll houses. There seemed to be an exponential amount of figurine stores. And there’s one street where the old train station and tracks are kind of still in tact. The one all-one-shade-of-green building that looked like had just been placed from above gave it that train set feel too, I guess.
Thank you Nathan, for introducing me to your friends. I first contacted Scott Aasman, to see what he was up to for New Year’s. But he was going to a cottage, so you know what he did? He got Sarah Van Popta to call us and invite us to the Lodder’s New Year’s Party, which was so fun. We played telephone pictionary, brought the New Year in with The Bible and song, walked around a tacky, public, Christmas light display and warmed ourselves by a restaurant’s fire. Pretty great. We were supposed to go sledding with them the following New Year’s Day, but the bailed because of the cold. Apparently, -20 isn’t sledding weather. Wimps. Sarah did invite us to come to Toronto with her and some other friends on Friday though, which we did.
Toronto, it’s alright. We saw this really strange absurdist film with Philip Seymour Hoffman in it called “Synecdoche New York.” It was strange and sad and I don’t like talking about it much, but I liked it. It had some gold moments. Afterward we went to this dive bar called “Imperical Pub” or something like this. You should have seen this place. The bathrooms were hallways and they had a pile of beer boxes lining the back wall. It was awesome though. They were playing this “Sinatra, on Sirius” station, which brought jarring class to the place. And they had a phonebooth built into the wall, which was pretty cool. We had seen this guy painted brown and dressed like a cowboy robot-dancing to Daft Punk for money earlier, and while we were there he came in, already drunk and ready for more. He was pretty harmless though. He didn’t talk to us.
There was this moment during the movie that seemed just perfect. We’re sitting in the second front row and no one knows what’s going on and suddenly I feel a hand grab my foot. Jenna, one of the new friends, was crawling out for popcorn. And when she came back and offered some, it had ketchup and white cheddar powder on it. She had explained her obsession with popcorn earlier, but I hadn’t quite understood till then. Probably one of the strangest experiences of my life.
Saturday was spent packing, hugging and on the bus. It was already dark when I finally got to the apartment. Bado had just started “Lady and the Tramp” so we watched it together and then ate pasta for dinner. Julia came over and Thomas kicked all our butts in Dutch Blitz. Sorry for not representing properly, people. I blame it on the day of travelling.