Personal Words

In Amsterdam I read a bit of Eat, Pray, Love, which was awful. It was just too much god-talk for me from a overly politically correct New Yorker--might as well just come out with it instead of pussy-footing around the matter by throwing in 'Allah, Yaweh, etc...or whatever you may wish to call that great being in the sky'. Makes me want to gag.

However, the premise was nice; after a messy divorce she spent a year doing all the things she always wanted to do: language school in Italy, meditation retreat in India, etc. There were a couple things she wrote that I keep coming back to, despite the heavy-handed writing. An Italian man she met said that everyone has a personal word that is unique to them, and every city also has a unique word. Rome was Sex. New York was Achieve. LA was Succeed. If your personal word and that of the city don't match, then you'll always feel like a bit of an outsider.

I bring this up because I have never seen Kat react so negatively to anything we've seen so far as she did to Rotterdam. If the word for Rotterdam is Gritty, then Kat's must be Genteel, forever at odds with one another. Myself, I didn't see really see why anyone would want to vacation there and take up all the hotel rooms. But I did see that it was the most immigrant populated city in Northern Europe, super diverse. It was rough around the edges, and a little depressing, but it also seemed to have a lot of cool music and art happening; maybe like Paris in the 20's or New York in the 70's.