Second Life becomes Real Life

Sunday evening, Heather dropped me off at my hotel near the airport. Of course we had to fight with her GPS to get there: somehow it thought the hotel was in the middle of the airfield somewhere. But we didn't believe that and kept driving along the perimeter road until we spotted it. Much as I am not a fan of hotels especially when I am on my own, I was glad to get a quiet meal, a really good shower and a comfortable bed in a quiet room.

Monday morning, I caught the HotelHopper over to Heathrow. One of the most interesting (and sometimes most infuriating) things about international travel is the airports. Each has its own unique character. That can be nice sometimes, but other times it's just annoying. Landing at Dublin, for example, I was overwhelmed by the crowd -- even at 0630 it was shoulder-to-shoulder people, so noisy and crowded that I had a difficult time finding the announcement board to determine what gate I should head for and what direction that gate might be in. Then I had to run the gauntlet of literally hundreds of tiny shops crammed into every nook and cranny as I walked nearly a kilometer to reach the long line for security and (eventually) my gate. Heathrow is a similarly crazy and distracting airport -- too many shops, not so easy to determine where one is going, long distances to walk. Fortunately at 7am it was not very busy, so I had no trouble getting to my gate.

Monique met me at the airport, and this was not a small feat. The real question was whether we'd recognize each other since we had never met in person. She and I had become friends in the virtual world of Second Life when we both discovered the Confederation of Democratic Simulators at about the same time and ended up settling next door to each other. What made us friends was the same thing that is often at the root of my friendship these days: music. Monique is a professional musician, a fiddler who plays in a number of band that perform largely eastern European gypsy/klezmer music. And of course I play mostly western European and American music. But listening to each other's CD's and performances in Second life and talking about what we were up to musically we discovered a lot of common repertoire. So early last summer when it looked like I was really going to be traveling in Europe, I mentioned that to her and we decided to try to get together in real life with Monique inviting me to stay with her in Utrecht.

As it turned out, we had no trouble finding each other, and it didn't take long for us to agree that the other was much as we had expected. I wasn't at all surprised: my experience meeting musicians has always been that the music forms a point of contact that makes it very easy to get to know someone. This is why I've long been comfortable hosting house concert performers overnight even when I don't know them well.

As we walked to the car, Monique told me that what she had in mind was to head out to Zaandam, up to the northwest of Amsterdam, where one of her best friends lives. Monique had talked Rudo into joining Second Life last spring when he had some serious medical problems. Second Life allowed them to visit and do projects together in Second Life even when Rudo was stuck at home and it wasn't possible for Monique to get out to see him. And they did some really fun things together: Rudo was largely responsible for constructing Monique's taverna in Second Life, and it really is a thing of beauty.

I had also met Rudo in Second Life although we had had little contact, but again I needn't have worried -- he turned out to be intelligent and interesting with a fun sense of humor. So we had coffee, which I discovered is a very different thing in Holland than in England. In England tea is always good, while coffee is something that you make by mixing boiling water with granules from a jar. In Holland "coffee" is always a shot of espresso with an equal amount of hot water -- quite a different thing!

After we had chatted a while, Rudo proposed that we go out to give me a look at his part of the world. So we headed for a nearby museum/park where the old Holland is preserved: windmills, the making of wooden shoes, a cheese shop, and eventually a stop for pancakes with a variety of toppings eaten with good Dutch beer. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon :-)

We headed back toward's Rudo's place, stopping along the way at the public radio station he helps to run. After more coffee (or was it more beer?) we headed into Amsterdam to meet another mutual Second Life friend. Alex is a Greek expatriate who has lived for many years in Amsterdam and seems to know everyone in the Greek community there. We met him at a tiny Greek restaurant in what looked like a mostly residential neighborhood, one of those place that you'd probably never find unless someone brought you there. The owner came out to greet us, ensured that we were settled with menus and rakia, and then headed back to the kitchen -- he was also the chef. And a great chef at that: the food was fabulous, probably the best Greek food I've ever eaten.

As we finished dinner, Alex took out what I think I would call a tzouras (one of many types of lute-like Greek instruments) and started playing along with the Greek music that had been playing in the background. It didn't take long before the owner came out of the kitchen, turned down the background music, and joined us at the table. So we drank beer and ouzo and Monique and I played drum and took a stab at playing tzouras along with Alex and his friend as they sang their way through some of the Greek folk repertoire. Very good fun -- as I said earlier, a common interest in music never seems to fail to provide a bond that makes for good friendships.

Rudo, Monique and I eventually left Alex still singing and playing and headed back to Rudo's where we picked up Monique's car and went over to her place in Utrecht, talking most of the way. After getting settled, we had to have tea of course, and that kept us up until later than I'd like to admit. Fortunately we had no particular agenda for the next morning, so we slept late and then got up and went out shopping. As always, I was interested in the supermarket, which actually wasn't a supermarket: it was a Turkish grocery store. This time the cost of living was much closer to what I was used to, perhaps twenty percent higher than prices in Pittsburgh. The store was great -- not just the usual stuff on the shelves, of course, but all sorts of interesting fruits and vegetables, Middle Eastern and Indian packaged goods, really good yogurt of the sort that you have to search out in the US. Next door we stopped at a little cheese shop where rounds of cheese ran literally from floor to ceiling. But when it came to picking cheese, the man behind the counter had only one question: did we want old cheese or new cheese? We tasted both, and ended up with a chunk of each. One of us thought to ask how old the cheese was and I discovered that this man (the owner of the cheese shop and the son of the former owner Monique told me later) probably knew everything about every round of cheese on his shelves when he told us that the new cheese was six weeks old and the old cheese was 10 months old. I loved seeing someone who was clearly so in love with what he was doing. And we stopped next to pick up some fresh-baked breads at a bakery where we saw the same phenomenon: people who were involved in creating and selling a product that they knew intimately and enjoyed sharing with their customers.

So we had breakfast (or maybe it was lunch by this time) and then took some time to play together. OK, it was really fun -- I knew enough of Monique's repertoire and she knew enough of mine that we found lots of ways to combine forces. So we did that for quite a while before Monique had to reluctantly quit to do some real work.

When we saw Alex the previous evening, he had invited us to come into Amsterdam to hear a performance he was involved with that he rather vaguely described as "avant garde classical music" in which he had a small part, having created a machinima (a video filmed in Second Life) to serve as a backdrop for a newly composed piece that was to have its premier. Monique had a Balkan choir rehearsal to run, but I was free so I cheerfully agreed to meet Alex around six so we could grab a bite to eat before the 8pm performance. So Monique walked me down to the nearby train station and I took the train into Amsterdam.

Like many European central stations, Amsterdam Centraal is big, noisy, and confusing to those who don't know it. So I arrived on some track or another, and had to find my way to tram line 4. Everyone speaks English in Amsterdam, so language was no barrier, but asking was no help -- the first two or three I asked where to find the trams hadn't a clue. I finally found someone who pointed me out the right door, but figuring out where the #4 came still wasn't so easy -- all of the tram lines terminate at Centraal, and as it turned out the one I wanted was kind of around the bend where I couldn't see it until I was on top of it. Oh, and it also took a while before someone was able to tell me that I did not need a ticket and could pay as I boarded.

So I found the tram, got on, paid....and then had to figure out where to get off. Alex had mentioned two stops to Monique, but hadn't given further instructions from there to Amstelkirk, the location of the concert. "Everyone knows where it is, just ask" he'd told me. After consulting with several of my fellow riders, none of whom seemed to have more than a vague idea of where this Amstelkirk might be, I chose the second stop, got off, and looked around. Hmm, nothing like Amstelkirk was obviously visible. The first person I asked didn't know where it was, nor could he tell me how to find Amstelgrad, the square where Amstelkirk was supposed to be located. Fortunately the second person was able to point out a narrow cobbled street where he said that about a 250 meter walk would bring me to the square. Which it did...but I saw nothing that looked like a church. I texted Alex, knowing that he was probably rehearsing. "Hi, I think I'm close, but where exactly is Amstelkirk? No one seems to know." He texted back "OK, we're rehearsing so I can't talk now. Text me when you get to the door." Grrr....I asked another passerby for help, no luck. There was a big white building on the corner of the square that appeared to have a restaurant in it, so I walked over there and asked inside. They told me I was in the right building, wrong entrance -- the entrance was around the side. I walked around the side, but the only entrance I saw looked like the entrance to a youth hostel, and the door was dark and locked. Hmmm....I texted Alex again: "Alex, I THINK I'm outside the door now." And he appeared smiling.

The rehearsal was still going on, so I watched for a bit, and then realized that it was unlikely that they were going to break anytime soon. So I suggested to Alex that if he could point me in the right direction, I'd go out and grab something to eat and bring him something back if he liked. No, he couldn't possibly eat now, he said, he was too nervous. As for where to go....hmmm, all I got was a very Greek shrug. He had no idea. Ah, but afterwards, he assured me, we'd all go out together. OK, no problem.

The performance was amazing. (Note: I'll add in the details on the name of the group and the performers when I get a chance to dig it out of my luggage). It turned out that this was another one of Alex's Greek connections. Two of the pieces to be performed had been composed by a woman who is a fellow Greek expatriate and one of the leaders of the avant garde music community in Amsterdam. A trio of three women performed, two on a variety of recorders ranging from soprano to contrabass, and one singer with a clear, beautiful voice. They juxtaposed baroque repertoire that one would expect from such a trio with modern pieces that utilized the same three musicians but with very different harmonies, rhythms and even ways of using the instruments. They moved effortlessly through the space as they played and sang, and in that beautiful acoustic space the sound moved with them and around the audience. For one of the modern pieces, the singer was blindfolded, singing as the two instrumentalists used their sound to beckon her and following one or the other with her ears. It was beautiful to watch and beautiful to hear. And Alex's machinima was an intriguing backdrop to one of the other avant garde pieces, playing off the music very effectively.

Afterwards the audience and performers milled around and chatted for a while, and when I looked at the time, it was well after 10 and I realized that there was no way they were going to be ready to go find food in time for me to be able to still catch a train back to Utrecht. So I asked Alex to walk me back to the tram. "Oh, but it's still early, we haven't had a chance to go out, the trains run all night." Well...not true, there was a last train that stopped at the station near Monique's place and I didn't want her to have to come rescue me in the middle of the night. So I explained to Alex that it would be best if I went back now since I had to navigate myself through a tram system and train system and streets that I wasn't entirely familiar with and needed to do that before I got too tired. So he walked me back to the tram station, thinking to ask me if I wanted to stop for a cup of coffee and a little smoke along the way (we were in Amsterdam, after all), but never thinking to suggest that we grab something to eat. I just laughed to myself -- he was SO much like what I expected him to be that I couldn't have imagined him behaving any other way.

I made it back to Monique's station without further adventures, but then couldn't remember exactly how to get from the station to her door, so exercised my option to phone a friend and she came out and rescued me. And then laughed when I told her about the adventure and sat me down and fed me while we laughed together about the crazy Greek.

All right, enough for one evening. I'm actually writing this while watching the election returns, and NPR just called Ohio for Obama, so I think we're about done for the night and I'm going to sleep. More sooner or later...