Tao

In which we stay in a nice, but funky hotel near the center and play a concert waay out in the suburbs and wander around the city of many delights.

Past experience has taught me that Amsterdam hotel rooms are tiny, if you have a large suitcase you can’t move. So it’s a great surprise to find our hotel (Hotel Plantage, www.hotelplantage.nl) has decent sized rooms and is located a short walk from the center of the city. It’s also pleasantly run-down and funky and run by a guy who used to run a hotel in the red-light district. Downstairs is a nice pub and cafe and around the corner is the university area. Van parking is a kilometer away, but it’s a nice stroll.

The concert is next day and is out in Almere, kind of a satellite town of Amsterdam. We start driving out early, which is fortunate, because the new Amsterdam metro line project means lots of streets are being dug up and our satnav is trying to take us down them. Quite why the Dutch think it’s a good idea to dig an underground transit system through a city that is in large part water, in a country that is partly below sea level, is beyond me. Must be something they’re smoking. The project is way over budget and time and no-one I met had a good thing to say about the idea. Meanwhile, we do arrive at Almere eventually and it’s all brand spanking new with lots of parking and nice new buildings and fantastic concert hall, the Schouwburg Almere.

The hall was built only two years ago and they installed state of the art equipment for the stage so setting up goes very smoothly, sound is good, as are the lights. Strangely for such a spaciously laid out town and a new concert hall, the seating is all a bit cramped, going right up to the stage, with four or five narrow balconies around the hall. This means that Miten can’t invite the audience up on stage at the end of the concert.

Whenever we play Amsterdam there is always a few other musicians who drop by and sometimes get invited to play. Today there is Ravi, a multi-instrumentalist from the UK who has played many times with Miten over the years. Tonight he’s just going to sing and do some overtone singing. And we have a local resident, Praful, playing sax. Also a multi-instrumentalist, Praful has been responsible for some of the musical arrangements on Deva’s CDs. They both play for a few songs in the second half of the gig.

The next day is the luxury of a day off and have a lot of fun wandering around Amsterdam. Next day we head off to Hamburg.