Tears in the Rain
Sailing with Refugees in the heart of Amsterdam
“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain.” ―dying replicant Roy Batty in ‘Blade Runner’
In the Netherlands where I have been living for almost ten years now, we sail for joy. Especially when the sun decides to show up, even if it doesn’t warm us ―oh, don’t you ever get fooled by the shiny rays, this is the North, the inhabitants of these lands built on water sail, and sail, and sail on the canals of their cities and proclaim gezelligheid. I am usually only an observer of this collective joy, it is also easy when I only need to pop my head outside of my living-room window to do so. I joined an occasional touristic canal tour with visiting friends and family, but that was a lot less gezellig.
Sailing carries a lot more emotion for me. It is a utopic nostalgia in my mind. In my imagination, sailing brings me to new worlds, explorations, timeless journeys far away. I try to capture that inexistent experience that somehow turned into a feeling when I go to Hotel New York in Rotterdam, where I day-dream of myself boarding a huge…
