the world has turned and left me here

in search of bigass bread

Got my bigass piece of bread. It is quite bigass. I'd say it must be about 1 kg. Finished the half of it and couldn't eat any more. This and a coffee cost only about 3 Euros, making it one of the cheapest meals per nutritional unit that I could have possibly gotten.

It's funny--nothing of note happened this morning while walking around. (I'm never really myself in the presence of another person.) It was only after I sat down in the Dam Square not far from my hostel that I started to notice interesting things.

A Japanese guy sitting in front of a pile of 9 empty beer cans. He has one of those moles on his neck that has been dutifully exuding dense hair since the day of his birth (maybe) and has now reached a length of about 2 inches, turning gray at the ends like the hair on his head. But when he gets up and calmly walks over to join his tour group, I see that it must have been mere chance that placed him there. Soon after, some guy comes and disperses the neat pile of cans with a kick.

A little Japanese girl fascinated by the pigeons. Her older sister, noticing this, takes her by the hand, and together they gleefully cleared the area of birds.

Sitting eating my bigass bread. Black dude with way too much underwear visible, and gold chains, walks over and starts saying something. Pushing drugs, but all I catch are the words "the best." The best what? I chew my bread, then tell him matter-of-factly that I'm busy eating. He leaves.

You gotta watch yourself here, especially if alone and looking touristy. There's this one guy who tried to panhandle me once and I completely ignored him. Apparently this pissed him off. "You're so f*&#ing blonde," he muttered. Everything he said was in this quiet voice at this frequency one doesn't usually pay attention to, like he half-did and half-didn't want you to hear him. I think he wanted you to think he didn't want you to hear him, thereby lending importance to his words ("Oops did I only think that, or did I say it aloud?"). Anyway it was creepy. The second time I passed him I heard on his special frequency that I was "a d*&#head." "I want to see it when you're on the street and've lost everything," he said. The third time (no, I wasn't about to avoid him, or a confrontation with him if it actually came down to that) it was "oh, I don't f*#&ing believe this." The fourth time he wasn't there. I wasn't just walking up and down the street for exercise, I was looking for bigass bread. And I won out in the end.