A man of little observations

[Val]

Since at Amsterdam the whole group has decided that the pictures taken by all the attendees  shall remain in the private domain, I thought I could write and give out  some details of the meeting in order  to let other people sense  more or less  what took place in the Dutch capital.  The decision to not share the hundreds of pictures that we took was unanimously reached primarily due to professional and/or ethical motives.  As simple as that!
And  the main reason I am doing this  is that at Montreal we, the Europeans, had plenty of details, pictures, reactions, criticisms and the like so that it was as if we were present at the Belle Province, as the Quebec Province is known.
Therefore, during this brief post I will do my best to forward to all of you "my general feelings" about our little group and our three day  meeting in Holland.  And I will take upon myself the oh so hard devoir of revealing some nasty secrets and stealthy schemes used by some attendees to achieve whatever they had at heart!  Just kidding, folks!

Our group in Amsterdam was a varied, joyful, cosmopolitan, intriguing and hetero/homo...geneous one at the same time.  It was heterogeneous, I believe,in the sense that most of us   came from very different walks of life.  Our backgrounds were as contrastive as it can be!  And basically, we were a bunch of earthlings from just about every corner of the globe...  For example, and just to cite a few cases, Water Duck  comes from Asia  and his upbringing is --- he is still growing up! --- Chinese even though he has been living in Europe  for more than twenty years!    As for me, I have always been divided between three continents: South America, Europe and North America.
This disparity in itself does not mean that  we do not have things in common, but instead makes for a lovely heterogeneous mixture!  However, our group was also homogeneous in that we all shared something special that I will call "Love", and we all  carried  the same bug with the exception of Jean.

When I said that we all came from different walks of life, I was not only referring to our backgrounds.  In fact, there were medical field workers in our group (Coen and Eirin),  flight attendant(Blond), Tour-leader/Manager/handy man/guide (myself), NGO employee (Markmt), student (Jean),  Doc(Water Duck),and  Director (Hermie).

Another detail that differentiated us regarding HIV was the fact that not all of us was taking medicines.  For instance, I realized that Coen (Bobik) has been taking medicines for almost  as long as I have!  Which, for your curiosity, is a lonnnnng time.  Water Duck , the merry-go-round type of dude, is not on drugs yet and is looking as fresh as the morning dew! Or like a delicate bud, if you prefer...  Blond, on the other hand, has just begun treatment and goes on this spiralling moods of ravishing glee which, I hope, will last a long time!

Amsterdam, of course, was not the place to complain about our miseries and daily sufferings related to either the medicines we take and their side-effects or HIV in general. And I was really surprised that no one made any allusion to it directly!  It seemed to me, in fact, that we were not concerned by any of the crap that HIV entails!  However, I did notice that we enquired often about each other's ways and different tricks to dealing with our daily problems!  Everyone was trying to obtain something out of something and, most importantly, sharing his/her own experience with the others.  All this, though, was done in such a jolly and mature way that I really thought we were just exchanging some title of a nice book we had read!

Now, the heterosexual members of our forum will have to excuse me for this one, but there was indeed something that, like a flash in the night, I perceived throughout our walkings and sprawls at some bars in the Dutch city: "Laughter is not always welcomed!"  And our little trip to Delft, just to cite one example, will serve me just beautifully to exemplify this subject.  It was early morning,  and I concur and understand it to a certain point, and myself, Herman and Water Duck  were having a cappuccino on the terrace of a bar located at the main square.  And even though we were a bit overexcited that morning, I realized  that some  people sitting next to us were not really happy with the boisterous laughs and comments we were making...!  The same thing happened at the restaurant where we had dinner after the concert on Friday night!  I suppose no one saw the young couple making gestures and comments about our group, right?  Were they in love and realized they had  chosen  the wrong restaurant to be intimately sharing something special?  Besides, the lovely owner of the restaurant was gay,  if I am not mistaken!
Anyway, this is something that can be debated over and over again and thoughout the world: "Heterosexuals find us too...gay!" and Amsterdam was, in my opinion, no exception.

There was something else that made me very happy about all the persons present in Amsterdam: "We looked very well, content and glad to be there."  And although the mood of the meeting was a festive, jolly one, I could not help thinking about the people who maybe have wished to join us  and, for some reasons e.g. financial reasons,  were not able to!  For the Montreal gathering, for example, there was financial help  availabe.  For the European gathering, zilch/nada!  And why am I making allusion to this "important" detail?  Because overall I noticed that we are a very lucky bunch of folks!  You can interpret "lucky" as "wealthy,"  if you will. 

So, there won't be pictures on this site of our gathering in Amsterdam, but at least I hope to have given you all that were not able to attend an idea of the atmosphere and euphoric ambiance we enjoyed throughout the meeting.  Our little group was composed of enthusiastic people from all walks of life with a lot of responsibilities and exposed publicly on their daily lives.  This, of course, was the main reason why the pictures were not posted on our site.
Once again, the overall feeling that we had before leaving this awesome Dutch city was sadness because we had to part.  But, joy, bliss and true friendship were  the  feelings that we will, for sure, carry in our hearts forever. 

Love,
Val
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[Alain]

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