Wandering round the old town today it was pretty clear that everyone was still hiding in their burrows, or at in the deepest shade they could find in any cafe serving anything wet with ice in it.
We tried that last night ourselves. Dinner with Dave and Ria in a purportedly air-conditioned space (but which for all the world felt as though it had simply been heated to a lesser degree than outside), was splendid in every other respect.
Note to file;- if the temperature outside is thirty-seven degrees, setting the heater indoors to twenty-something will not help in the slightest! At some point during the evening we noticed that whenever someone ventured outside, or in from out, the waft of breeze from the opening door was ever so slightly less hot than the temperature within.
Dave, an ideas man and problem-solver to the core, asked our friendly host if he could have what for all the world sounded like a “choopcha”. This turned out to be an old menu folded several times in such a way that it would suffice as a door stop. With the door thus chocked open and the world suddenly half a degree cooler, and with “tjoeptje” rolling off the tips of our tongues for the rest of the evening as a possible solution to all of the problems of the world, how could we fail to enjoy ourselves?
FOOTNOTE -
Two days later, in the Netherlands, after noticing a fine tjoeptje comprising stacked beer coasters under a leg of what would otherwise have been a very rocky table, we asked the waitress what that arrangement was called in Dutch, since the Flemish and Dutch languages have identical roots. She looked vaguely puzzled, thought for a bit, and replied:
“We call them beer mats”
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