It was a while ago, but there we were again, in The Blue Lotus, perhaps not the best, although I never eaten nasi goreng anywhere else, but certainly the best Chin. Ind. Rest. van Nederland: in a flat with a view over the ugly parking lot of Den Heuvel in Velp. Everything is just as beautiful as it was: the system ceiling with the yellow tiles, the smoke of oil, the large porcelain vases, the cash register in the back right, the glimpse through which you can see the Afhalers sitting with the shopping bags between the legs. We saw our neighbors more often at the collection than in the street. The cursing if it was too busy on Sunday after six so that we would miss the first summary of Studio Sport.
My daughters wanted to see the hatch of the liftje in which a burglar was once stuck, after which the staff decided to let him sit to punish him. A few hours, the waitress said, I told them it was a few days and that they also threw food scraps on him, but they would never do that at Blue Lotus. At the Round Table with a view of both Kennedylaan and the parking area where I would have preferred to have been, there was a family whose son wore a Vitesse shirt.
I received an attack from nostalgia and ordered children’s ice creams with fireworks, my mother always did that here when she thought she’s birthday.
“Do Oma Velp now also eat Chinese?” Asked my middle daughter (8).
“In heaven?” I asked.
“No, in her box.”
I saw an old neighbor. He recognized me, I didn’t.
He said, “I moved three more times afterwards, but that’s how things go.”
Then a medical treatise on the chronic illness of his wife, which I could not remember. He closed with: “The itch is the worst, then she scratches everything again, but still good food, you have to order the spring roll next time.”
He kept his hands half a meter apart.
“Such whopping.”
With the bellies full we left the building, the far too steep concrete stairs down, in full confidence that the next time I am in Velp still exists and that nothing has changed again.
Marcel van Roosmalen Writes a column on Monday and Thursday.