Alphonse Mucha
Print of a priestress with a druid. Some Celtic influence here. I like how colorfull the painting is.

Cup of chocolate
It is strange how I find here so many things Dutch. So do they use the word stoep in New York, though it is for something that is a front of the stairs and not as we use it for the sidewalk. Walking through the museums of fine arts and Metropolitan I found the Dutch paintings of Rembrandt, Den Uyl, Jan Steen and many others from who I sometimes didn't even heard of before. Ellis Island showed me an odd collection of the Dutch souvenirs from Delft's bleu porcelain. And I smiled when I saw a book called 'The art of Dutch cooking'.

I wish I could find a Dutch bakery and cheese factory.

Hate is love
Math must be imperfect. If it were perfect we wouldn't love it, as one wouldn't love something that would be so perfect... we would hate it or fear it if it was perfect.

Drug Policy
Drugs in the Netherlands are believed to be legal. The toleration towards soft drugs by the Dutch government and the society makes the urban legend easy to feed for the tourists and foreign people. It is still illegal to sell, export, import, produce or process drugs of any kind. However, in 1970 cannabis and hashish were decriminalized since the government of the Netherlands decided that the crime created by the illegal drug trade had to be decreased. The Dutch government found that the crimes caused by drugs were by far worse than the threat to society and public health from the drugs themselves.

Now an individual is allowed to have 3 grams of cannabis, and over 30 grams is seen as an offense and will be prosecuted. The coffeeshops are allowed to have 500 grams of soft drugs and can not sell more then 3 gram per day per person over 16 years of age. Coffeeshop may not advertise, can not sell hard drugs, sell wholesale or disturb the public. The coffeeshops are set in designated areas . Governments of each city can decide if they want to allow coffeeshops in their city and how many they want to have.
The coffeeshops divide the soft drugs from the hard drugs. This hinders people who want to use soft drugs from coming in contact with the hard drug criminals. This separation also makes garduation to hard drugs through soft drugs a little bit more difficult.

Drug addicts can easily find help, and the drug policy works through a close cooperation between the Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs and the Ministry of Justice at national level. Health care centres provide clean needles for heroine addicts and it is possible to get methadone for addiction treatment. Dutch schools talk openly about the cause and effects of using drugs and there are labels on 'smart' drug packages that explain what might happen if you take the drug.

The drug policy of the Netherlands didn't help to prevent people from using soft drugs and it's a myth to believe that less Dutch people are using soft drugs. But this wasn't the purpose of the Dutch drug policy. By shifting the soft drugs into hands of each city government, coffeeshop owners and health care center the social problems created by drug users are not present. The designated areas prevent that the drug users come into the more mainstreams of the city and the people who don't want to have anything to do with it don't have to see it. Drug addicts can get help without feeling afraid of being pursued and put in jail.

Overall, decriminalizing soft drugs in the Netherlands has not made it into an area with the highest level of use in Europe nor extra high use patterns.

Beloved, behold
Why have I to remind him of that? Let him see the past and that what might happen in the future? Show him the destruction of his emotions and see the harm in his pose. I tell him that I love him, while I can not explain the differences in nuances that I know in my own language. Not the once that he showed me in his of 'te quiero' and 'te amo', because that I know. Perhaps not everybody of the native speakers of my language see the nuances that I brought in the meanings of what we are really saying to one another if we are talking in love. So why try to pass that what I can not explain in clear speak not even to myself? Or is that the problem with all my love: That I analyze it too much, that I need explanations given by myself where there are no explanations.

There was just this frustration that came over me. I stopped writing. Stopped writing down what happened or what I feeled and it frightens me that I can forget everything in just a few moments. I should take notes. I should have a notebook chained on my hand so that I can write whenever I want without wasting time for searching paper and a fountain pen. This is not the notebook chained to my hand but at least it will be avaible at all computers with internet. Right?