Tempo Doeloe

Wednesday, I had a great dinner in Tempo Doeloe , one of the better Indonesian restaurants in Amsterdam. We had a “rijsttafel” basically a collection of lots of smaller dishes combined with varieties of rice. The food was sorted from slightly spicy all the way up to mildly spicy ;) To accompany the food, the restaurant had an extensive winelist to choose from. In the end we decided for a Beaujolais, which surprisingly was a good match with the menu (though no probably not so interesting on its own). At the table next to us was a famous face from Eindhoven, Guus Hiddink. He reminded me of the second long-distance trip I ever undertook for work. It was in the beginning of 2003, a trip to San Jose in the US. On one of the evenings we ended going for dinner in a Korean place. The owner, after hearing we were Dutch, could only keep repeating two words over and over: ”guus hiddink” “guus hiddink”. He had, just the year before, helped the Koreans to come further in the world championships soccer then they ever imagined and had become a local hero of sorts.