Private Cities I (after Italo Calvino)

The city of Amsterdam is brown. The buildings are brown, the water in the canals is brown, the street pavements are brown. Nevertheless, you won’t notice this until you’ve spent a few days there: people in the street dress in coloured clothes, their skin is also of different shades. The most beautiful girls pass you, very straight in their bikes. They have red hair that leaves perfume in the air. They wear green clothes. Men are also handsome and tall. Chocolate colour skin and rasta hair neatly combed. They wear yellow coats.
There are a lot of babies in Amsterdam. People push them in special wooden cars made for them. They can be attached to bycicles or not. Sometimes they carry up to six children in one of these cars.
You can hear music in the parks. On sunny days, people lay in the grass and drink white wine or apple juice. Young men play the guitar.
When it rains people don’t mind. They go about their business as usual. They seem to enjoy being wet. For this reason one often wonders if they are amphibious.
People eat Vietnamese rolls and tea for breakfast. You can buy cheese, wooden shoes and soft drugs everywhere. You can also look through the windows into people’s houses, they like it.