cold comfortable

It is cold in this city! And cold in my room. The thermostat is in a different part of the house, and on a different floor. So while the kitchen is always nice and toasty, my room is quite chilly. Brrr. I am also without mitts here, which I have since learned are very important, especially when one rides their bike through the city streets. (Does one need mitts yet in Canada? Not including Alberta, land of the early snows...) This point was further impressed upon me as I biked between print shop and cafe this afternoon. I spent an hour or two at a nice cafe at the start of the Singel called Cafe Cobalt. I'd been there once before. It's really close to the tourist-saturated streets, and yet just far enough off the beaten path to be, in my mind, a bit of a local gem. It has huge windows, nice, slightly mis-matched wooden chairs and tables, very high ceilings with thick, ancient, buttery-coloured wooden support beams. Nice food (two kinds of pie, and cute spelling mistakes on the English-side of the menu, i.e. where the Brittanica tosti comes with, among other things, cheese and union). Good coffee with a nice thin little almond buiscuit...

It was kind of an appropriate place to start leafing through the pages sent out for UvA's Culturalization of Citizenship reading group I've happily been invited to attend at the end of the month. This month we have the good fortune to peruse a couple of chapters from a book still being written by J.W. Duyvendak. The few pages I managed to read in the fading light of the autumn afternoon over a koffie verkeerd (literally 'wrong coffee', but basically a cafe au lait) and mozerella tosti, discussed the idea of home and belonging in the globalization era - where things, ideas and people have become increasingly mobile, what does it mean to call a place 'home'? While social scientists have for a long time been interested in how ideas of home and belonging have been thought about and expereinced by people on the move (myself included), we should be turning our attention back to the oft-overlooked populations of people who 'stay at home'. How are they now thinking about 'home' when everything around them is moving about? (It's amazing how many people I am coming across now who are all interested in the same questions that I am - when it rains, it pours, eh?) One interesting point was the example of Starbucks. For highly mobile people (and some less mobile people as well), Starbucks, in all its generic sameness, can be a space of comfort and home, no matter where you are in the world. But for the more rooted among us, the arrival of Starbucks in the buurt might be seen as unwelcome, and threatening the character of the neighbourhood and local shops, like the one I was in today. Kind of interesting to think about, as a metaphor for other kinds of changes, but also quite literally. Especially when most of the independently owned cafes I've been in here all serve just about the same thing (though Cafe Cobalt's chocolaade taart seems a bit special), and though the biscuit flavour may vary, you'll inevitably get served one with your koffie.