Bind: 2010

I was having some wine with a friend at a bar in Amsterdam centre one night. It was one of those 'brown bars' which means not many tourists go there and is normally enjoyed by local Dutch regulars.

We sat next to a lonely Dutch man, probably in his late 30s / early 40s. He had a bald head, wore a sports jacket and had glasses that probably belong to a middle-level office worker or someone from a bank. Not too trendy, with a stainless steel edge.

After his failed attempts in hitting on me, we had a conversation that went down more or less like this:

- Hi, where are you from?
- Estonia
- Aah, Eastern Europe. But you have really nice teeth?
- Yeah thanks... why shouldn't I?
- Eastern Europeans normally have bad teeth, because of the water you know..
- The water? There is really nothing wrong with our water. In fact, it is probably cleaner than in most countries.
- No but I have met prostitutes here that have really bad teeth. And it was in CSI once that they identified an Eastern European girl by her bad teeth.
- What if the prostitutes have bad teeth because of their work... y'know... Do you know what they feed her or what drugs they live on or whatever, to do their job? (I don't but..)
- No, they chose that job, believe me, it's the water. Why would they lie on CSI? Just google it, everybody knows the Eastern European bad teeth come from their water.

This is the distilled backbone of our endless ping-pong around bad teeth. A discussion that never concluded anything as neither side had evidence to prove the other wrong. Except for... we did google it and of course not even an urban legend of that kind exists.

I am not really offended by this incidence as I have come across this sort of random assumptions all the time. In the end, it doesn't matter. A lonely guy who's a bit too into CSI, late night at a bar just enjoying himself. But still makes me wonder...

So I should google 'Eastern European water' whilst I was born and raised there? In the end, which is more convincing? Which gives you a more profound idea of what is going on, a search engine or having my body physically exist in that environment for 19 years?

Of course Google is. If you can refer to a link that says the same as you do, it pretty much closes the case. I know that he knew that what he said was a crude generalization. That maybe there is better water in Estonia and maybe I am not a good example of the general trend. But when he walked out of that bar, he still had stronger beliefs in that CSI episode than he had in a person who is actually from there (and as it so happens – is not a prostitute). That really got to me, right there and then.

Sometime in the 80s fashion photographer Taishi Hirokawa drove around Japan's countryside with a trunk full of clothes, all from Japan's most prominent fashion designers. He shot farmers, pig breeders, cab drivers and other commoners all dressed up in Comme des Garcons and the like. The NY Times has written and others complained that it is unfair and evil tease for the poor people to be dressed up in luxury clothes.

I understand how that can be one way of seeing things but there's also the counter-argument where it feels like a fixation of the bold & the beautiful themselves, as if the only thing separating the poor man from the happy man is an Issey Miyake trouser suit. At times I'm more jealous of their lifestyles than the clothes they are wearing. And I really like those clothes.

In the end it's simply interesting people wearing interesting clothes, that's all.