The Even Greater Tokyo Region

The Many Missteps of an Immigrant Labourer.
Part IIIII (That's romanic writing for "4")

5 Kilometres (as the crow flies) of Missteps, to be exact. "How exactly did it come to this?" I wondered as I was walking around the city of Rotterdam for more than an hour, well after midnight- And I hadn't been drinking at all.

It all began the day before when I agreed to work a day at a football stadium as a Verkeer Regulaator. This is a traffic regulator. These are necessary because Europeans are raving lunatics when they see 22 grown men running after a single ball. Especially in Rotterdam, where the Feyenoord fans are famous for being certified dimwits. Therefore, I had to sign several disclaimers in case, you know, I get killed. So, doing medical experiments to benefit sick people was too dangerous, but I can make an exception for a game.

Okay, I am not being completely fair. Football is one of my favourite sports to watch, and probably 95% of the Feyenoord fans are regular people like me- only they can afford insanely expensive tickets to watch the games live. I had to work.

I arrived early, which was not a good thing considering it was possibly the coldest day of the year so far. I bought some potato fries with mayonnaise while I waited. The guy overcharged me 50eurocent.

I was let into the complex, and had to wait a while longer with maybe 100 other people doing similar jobs as me. I was given an oversized purple Fila jacket and a snazzy orange vest, and was sent to a briefing room. It is all about the uniform...Traffic Regulator, or stripper dessed up as a Traffic regulator? It's hard to tell sometimes.

A man from a security company gave an instructional slideshow. I started now to comprehend the scale of the exercise, for today's match, and other large events. For the entire evening, all the roads in the area were to be strategically cut off to keep the traffic flowing. We were working in association with the police, which meant that we had some of the responsibitities of being in a position of power (Such as "not being seen taking a piss in public") without the advantages ("a prepared dinner"). There was a radio-HQ, people manning security camera's, cops on horses, a van of hard-core riot police, and 47500 spectators at a sold-out match vs. AZ, the current leader of the Dutch Competetion. Feyenoord, traditionally in the top 3 clubs in terms of winning record and spending, is languishing at 11th place.

As a semi-authority- in terms of not being able to pee publicly- we were warned that we might be a target for some hard-core fans, who I like to call "fuck-heads". Mostly though, my partner and I were human-road blocks. We had barricaded a road off, and we had to send the cars back, and give them directions. There were two kind of reactions from drivers. The first was a very cordial one. The driver was very sympathetic and understanding of the unusual circumstances, and politely thanked us for being here.

The second reaction was annoyed sarcasm, teary lies, or borderline rage.

"Oh, the football is REALLY important." (A nerd wanting to go to a movie)

"You're going to make me be late for a meeting" (As if she really had a meeting at 7pm)

"Fack man, dit is Facking Facked-up Man!" (This is a direct quote)

I can understand the frustration. Driving in a big city is never much fun, and if you have to make a huge detour into the heavy traffic, then rage-away if you need to. Luckily no-one was enraged enough to try and run me over. As it became later, the wind picked up, and the -2 degree temperature was piercing my snazzy outfit. I regretted wearing only one pair of socks, and I regretted listening to the instructions that I wasn't allowed to wear a hat. It was like being cryogenically frozen, except you remain conscious and time slows down. One time I tried giving directions, and I couldn't feel my face. It frozen and numb. I must have sounded like a Dutch-foreign Sylvester Stallone.

20 minutes after the game had begun, we could sit inside and chat while drinking coffee until just before the game ended. The coffee tasted so good, but whiskey would have at least kept me warm after going back outside. I bought more fries with mayo. My word, they truly do "drown it in that shit". I ate it all, including the cardboard container which had turned clear from the mayo-fat, in the hope I could build up an emergency layer of blubber.

Back outside, we heard the bad news. The game had ended in a 1-0 loss. We were hoping for a draw, so the fuckheads wouldn't be too angry and would go home to their mud-huts. But no, thousands of soccer fans- whose team had just lost- flooded out of the stadium, right past me, my partner and one police officer, swarming the road. The officer said "this is what 50000 people looks like". That was such an impressive and odd sight, and very intimidating after hearing some stories.

Everyone was reasonably well-behaved, except for the fuckheads who exited the stadium on the other side. Disappointed in their team's performance, they tried to remedy it by tearing up a round-a-bout garden, and walk down to the police station to wreck a police car. Can you imagine the conversation that would lead to that? I can. It goes like this:

Fuckhead A: "Üghhh"

Fuckhead B: "Argh! Ghummm"

Fuckhead A: "Üghmm Agh!"

Sorry for the profanity, but although they did not come our way, they held up the entire operation and were a big inconvenience to me. You see, we weren't allowed to leave our post until the police gave the all-clear. This came at much later at midnight, causing me to miss the last tram back home. Great. I was alone, and stuck in a metropolis after midnight on a freezing cold night. Well, not entirely stuck. The metro had already stopped, but I was pretty sure there would be night-trains. However, the smaller stations were closed, and Central Station was quite a walk away. Here is a map.

You could imagine that I was pissed off, and you would be wrong. Honestly, I really have nothing better to do that wander about. And I had never walked across the Erasmus Bridge, the "Swan". Magnificent isn't she?

I walked until my feet warmed up enough for me to feel them. They were sore. Just under an hour later, I arrived. There were trains that went my way every hour, only they didn't stop at my stop. I could technically waited until 6:30 AM, but not even I could wait that long. Great... So I had to cut my losses and caught a taxi.

So in conclusion, I worked about 7 hours in the freezing cold, and got home at 2:30, and 2 hours of my earnings went towards getting home. That is a lot of misstepping.