My Cat Misses Me

Sometimes, when Jesse leaves Icarus alone with the computer, the cat sends me messages of love. He's not very good at punctuation, but then neither are a great many humans.


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Impediments to Hypochondria

Winter is upon us here in Amsterdam, although to be honest I'm not sure I could draw a line between fall and winter, except to say that it's on average a little bit colder now than it was a month ago. We still have the same stretches of now-drizzling-now-pouring rain intermixed with drear, quiet cloud cover, and those stretches are still broken every now and then by dazzlingly welcome sunlight.

The one thing I'm not used to is the hail: in California we didn't have any weather at all to speak of, and in Boston precipitation was generally limited to snow, rain, sleet, and freezing rain (those listed in order of decreasing tolerability). So while I've quickly become inured to being buffeted by sheets of sudden rain while biking to classes, I'm never ready for the rain to turn mean. Hail gets you less wet, it's true, but it's far more painful to be pelted by pea-sized ice pellets than by water, especially if you are as speedy a biker as I am.

I'm not complaining about any of this, though: the Internets tell me that it's currently 28° in Boston, and on Monday forecasters are expecting a wintry mix, which sounds inordinantly more magical than it is, as I've mentioned before. Here, it's 43° and we might just barely catch an overnight freeze in the next week or so. This is one of the ways in which Amsterdam is superior to New England.

There are plenty of obvious differences between the Netherlands and the US, and plenty of small ones you would never notice unless you lived here. The contents of pharmacies fall into this second category.

One of the first things that happened upon my arrival here was me running out of ibuprofen, so one of my first shopping trips was to the first pharmacy I could find, a place called Kruidvat. The fact that the store's name means "powder keg" was unknown to me at the time; had it not been, I might have continued a bit farther down the street to find the slightly more upscale Etos. But in my happy ignorance I waltzed on in.

Chemical names are generally similar in Dutch and English, so it was easy to find the right product. It was in a little box, which pill bottles occasionally are, and it didn't rattle, which made me think: lots of cotton wool packed inside. When I got it home, however, I found no bottle. No, the Dutch pack their headache medicine in crinkly, environmentally unfriendly blister packs. There are many things wrong with that, but we need to keep moving here, because that's not nearly the worst thing about this product.
As pills go, these suckers are big. They may not look huge in this picture, but keep in mind that euro dimes are bigger than US dimes. Treating a headache here is not noticeably different from swallowing a Mento whole.

One possible reason the pills are so big: they're all 400mg. This saves me having to take two at a time, but makes me twice as worried about what would happen if a kid got hold of one of these packs. What do kids love? Popping bubbles and opening things. What do kids generally do? Put stuff in their mouths. What makes items all the more enticing for mouth-putting-into? How about if they're bright pink. My headache medicine was designed by Prescription Barbie.

I can only assume that the Dutch don't ever find themselves needing to nonverbally communicate things like "I am working SO HARD on this project it hurts, but will keep soldiering on no matter what" or "your presence is irksome to me, to the point where it physically hurts to be around you." Because both of those statements are severely undercut when the pill you're dramatically dry-swallowing is hot pink, candy-like, and likely to induce a choking fit.

Even familiar products here can still have strange packaging. Take this packet of gum, for example:
Let's start with the picture on the left. "Cover your teeth with this gum, for some reason," it seems to be announcing. Or, "Chew this gum, and your teeth will look like Mary Tyler Moore!"

But seriously, what is this symbol actually supposed to mean? You might assume, based on the fact that the second symbol seems to be prescriptive ("Spit your gum in the trash"), that the lefthand image must also contain some sort of instruction or advice. My best actual guesses are that it means either "This gum protects your teeth!" or "This gum coats your teeth with enamel-eating sugars!"

Although: if you don't assume the righthand picture to give gum disposal instructions, you kind of have to figure it's actually an important warning. Like, "CAUTION: When mixed with saliva, this gum produces an acid so powerful as to dissolve anything in its path—including your hand!"

In conclusion: if you're planning a heist, and need a getaway vehicle, some choices are clearly less desirable than others.

Shock and Shawl

I finished my most complicated knitting project to date: a fancy shawl. I also finally blogged about my concert extravaganza, Ireland trip, and Thanksgiving revelry, but a blog quirk posted it under December 1. Fun! For that post, scroll down past the Librarians' menu.

(I don't know what those two dark lines are on the right-hand side of the top picture. I blame the camera, because there are no big dark lines on my shawl.)

Menu for the National Library Association's Annual Conference

A lot of things happened in quick succession in the last couple of weeks, and then a lot of schoolwork and reading happened, and in the middle of all that was a big knitting project I felt compelled to finish, and with all of that combined with lots of news writing, blogging didn't really end up happening.

For the seven of you who follow this blog, my apologies.

Soon I'll catch up on all the recent shenanigans that have been going on around here, but until then, here is a list that didn't make McSweeneys (like this one did).

The National Library Association's Annual Conference: Preliminary Menu

Breakfast

Joyce Carol Oatmeal
Agatha Crispies
Leo Toastoy with Ralph Jellyson
Ogden Hash
Sir Francis Bacon

Lunch

Ralph Waldorf Emerson
Aesoup
Hams Christian Anderson on Rye Breadbury
Elizabeth Fishop
Rigatoni Morrison

Cocktail Hour

Edgar Allen Poi
Archibald MacQuiche

Single Malt Whitman
Christopher Merlot
William Makepeace Daiquiri

Dinner

Philip Broth
Percy Bisque Shelley
John LeCurried Tennessee Will-yams
Eugene O'Veal with Marquis De Sage
Salmon Rushdie with Aphra Beans

Dessert

Ezra Pound Cake
Flan-nery O'Connor
Elizabeth Barrett Brownies with Robert Frosting

The Concert, the Trip, and the Dinner

On the night before I left for Ireland (see below), I attended an Arcade Fire concert, which normally would be an awesome thing in and of itself. Except I got in for free. And helped build hospitals and care for sick children in Haiti (indirectly). And got a free shirt. And met the band after the show. Let me back up a bit.

Scott had found out, through a series of events, that the band needed volunteers to stand at the entrance to the venue and collect donations for Partners in Health, an organization that does a lot of great things in the realm of sustainable health care in impoverished nations. So we showed up at the Heineken Concert Hall a few hours before curtain time and wandered the entrance area with collection boxes, repeating variations on a spiel in several accents of English. I quickly learned the imperative tactic, which is to maintain eye contact with a single person until they stopped to listen, at which point a small crowd would generally form around them. We collected quite a lot of money, mostly from the 20-somethings—the (surprisingly numerous) middle-aged couples tended to brush past while pretending not to hear—and the single complaint I got was from a man who found me to be "too enthusiastic." At that point I had been standing for two hours with a decorated tupperware box full of heavy Euro coins hanging from my neck like a cigarette girl of old, so I can only assume this man has a very low threshold for enthusiasm.

Then we went in to see the concert, which was amazing and high-energy and musically awesome. The Arcade Fire is a band that includes two violinists, two brass players, and a concert bassist who rotates among about four other instruments. Also they have an organ. Like, a pipe organ. The stage is full of band members (8 or 10) and arbitrary instruments (accordian, something I want to call a zyther but probably isn't, several miscellaneous drums) and manic movement.

The crowd was full of people smoking, something that I should have forseen but came as a chokey, unpleasant surprise. Between the smokers and the intermittant fog coming from backstage, it was a hazy affair. Through the smoke I kept seeing a mysterious red light bobbing through the crowd, at a little higher than head level. When it came closer I realized why I didn't recognize it from any of the US-based concerts I've been to: it was a portable beer dispenser, strapped like a backpack to a guy who was of course not checking any IDs, because they don't do that here. What they do do here, apparently, is beer delivery.

After the show we hung out with the band, who are, according to the volunteer coordinator, 'compared to other rock bands, more like a church choir.' That explains the No Crowd Surfing signs in the concert hall, and the fact that when we walked through the stage area a couple hours before the show everyone was playing pickup basketball. Really polite basketball.

So we hung out with the band, who poured us beer from champagne bottles and were amazingly patient and nice.

We all matched:
The one in the green shirt is Win, the lead singer. As you can see, he is very tall.

The next day I went to Ireland, the land of pretty Celtic churchyards,

Pretty Celtic public works elements,

And unused designated graffiti areas

(Unless you assume that the label itself is graffiti, in which case: the land of very subtle vandals).

Ireland is also the land of Aoife, and as it turned out that Kilkenny is not quite the town of vast interest, I headed over to Galway a half day early. We made my awesome risotto recipe and some amazing spicy green beans [If you are in my family I should clarify: I like green beans now! I think they're great and actually purchase and cook them for myself now. If you are not in my family, I should clarify: until very recently, I harbored a violent dislike for all vegetables.] and watched a movie and went to an art opening in a tiny gallery and in general had a Good Time. Then we got fresh doughnuts in the rain, and organic falafel, and I tricked a guy into revealing his name to Aoife.

On the bus to Dublin, I finished my socks:
The heels look funny here, but they fit perfectly.

In Dublin, I forgot to take any pictures, and therefore I have no proof that Aoife was with me, or that we saw a cringingly bad remake of The Playboy of the Western World, or that we stayed at Aoife's really cool friend's apartment and trashed the play; I'd forgotten how much I missed theater people.

In the morning I paid a much-needed visit to the Queen of Tarts for sundry muffins and scones, and then Aoife and I went on a mission of cranberry proportions. A fancy Irish specialty-food store had us waving the "mission accomplished" banner in no time, and I found a can of pumpkin pie mix as well. I only had a carry-on bag with me, since Aer Lingus now charges per checked bag (seriously!), so I began rehearsing my explanations to the security check guards:

guard: is this your bag?
me: yes.
guard, taking out and holding up 16-oz can of pumpkin puree: what's this then?
me: pumpkin pie mix. but don't worry - it's not a liquid or a gel.
guard: it appears to be a pas-
me: it's not a paste! it's a solid. you see, you have to add eggs and milk to get it liquidey. it says that right here on the wrapper.
guard: ma'am, the x-ray shows that this is definitely a paste. if this can exploded in mid-flight, there would be pumpkin all over the inside of the overhead bin. and we just can't have that, can we?
me: but - the wrapper - it's not a - if i don't make a pumpkin pie for thanksgiving kasia is going to kill me.
guard: i'm going to take this away from you. and also your knitting needles, which are tiny and made of flimsy bamboo. and also your hand lotion, which is under 100ml but you forgot to put in the plastic bag with your other liquids.

I was prepared for this conversation, thinking about when would be the optimal time to burst into tears, wondering whether I'd have a better chance with a male guard whom I could flatter, or a woman who might be a fellow knitter/baker. But I didn't need any preparation at all, because no one asked me anything at all. I walzed through security like it was 1999. Which, to be honest, leaves me with conflicted feelings about Dublin Airport.

But it also left me able to produce these little fellows:
And to provide a one-day-late Thanksgiving dinner to these lovely people: from left, roommate Ernst, former roommate and current Utrect resident Dusty, classmate and fellow knitter/cat lover/cafe frequenter Kasia, boyfriend of Heike and guy who has done everything Scott, classmate and debate/football enthusiast Ricardo, and fellow international student (but not classmate) Heike.
I set up the normal dining room table with the coffee table as the overflow kids' table, but the latter was so popular we all ended up sitting on the floor.

I had to specially order the turkey from a "game and fowl" butcher (which, to my surprise, I was able to do in Dutch), and it cost 9,50 per kilo; I can only assume that our bird was hand-fed the choicest grain and provided with tiny gold nuggets instead of the gravel that most birds use to help digestion. But although dinner was costly in terms of money, I saved on potentially huge embarassment by avoiding making any of the other blunders that have become legend in my family: leaving the giblets inside the turkey; baking sugarless pies; baking twice-sugared pies. I also avoided overcooking the turkey (despite not having a meat thermometer) and baked two pies, the turkey, and the stuffing in one day despite having a single-rack oven that is just a hair smaller than the amazing turkey pan that Kasia found for me, in an illustration of what it means to be clutch.

Speaking of definitions, Free Rice is great both as an excuse for learning (or if you are most of my friends: bragging about your vocabulary skillz) and as a means of possibly helping the UN fight world hunger. And with that, I'm out, and when I come back it'll be with shorter, more rollicking posts now that all this news has been dispensed with.

Larch in Translation

About two-thirds of the way home from campus, I ride along a wide (for Europe), straight street lined with sycamores. There is something the city of Amsterdam would like you to know about this street, but I am not entirely sure what it is.


This is another fabulous example of European signage that screams for a close read. Here is a list of potential meanings for the sign, none of which could be true:

1. Beware of giant, truck-eating trees.

2. If you leave your dumbbells here, someone might put a big cube down on top of them.

3. Ground under the trees is extremely unstable! Trees might lean on your vehicle to keep from falling into the center of the earth.

4. In Amsterdam anyone is free to express their love publicly, regardless of race, sex, creed, species, make, or model.

5. Warning! Your truck might get stuck in a tree!
(This one is possibly the most ridiculous. As you can clearly see in the picture, these trees are big, and vehicles in Amsterdam are not. Even if you had a car lashed onto the top of a truck, you might just get leaves skimming the roof.)


Now here are some signs that would actually be useful on this street:

1. A biker passes under a tree as a sycamore pod hits him in the head, causing slight pain and great annoyance.

2. A biker passes under a tree as a clump of leaves falls on her head, getting wet gunk all over her hair.

3. A biker passes a city worker with a leafblower, which is shuttling street grit directly into her eyes.

4. A steady stream of bikes crossing the street, next to a car with its right turn signal on. The driver has died and become a skeleton while waiting for his chance to turn.

5. A girl on a bike, riding slowly and wobbling all over the path because she's talking on a cell phone and eating a sandwich at the same time. Other bikers cluster behind her, anger lines emanating from their heads. One of them is carrying a stepladder for no apparent reason.

Mixing Bowl, Flour, Sugar, Calculator

When I was in Boston, I would bake something—banana bread, muffins, scones—about twice a week, sometimes much more often. Since August 10th, I have baked one thing: brownies, from a Ghirardelli mix my mom included in a care package (thanks, Mom!!). I had lots of excuses: getting red tape straightened out, concentrating on my new classes, hanging out with my new roommates and new friends, biking. But mostly, I was gearing up for the extravaganza that is slipping back into the intricacies of European baking.

In addition to the excitement of adding conversion factors to each ingredient measurement, there's the fun fact that the Netherlands isn't really a baking kind of country. I'm sure that plenty of people bake things, but I'm equally sure that the prevalence of daily, fresh baked goods in all of the supermarkets, markets, and warme bakkers is because of (or in reaction to) a lower popularity of the make-it-yourself attitude that's so prevalent in Germany and Britain.

I'm basing this largely on the difficulty of finding, and strange quality of, baking ingredients. In my grocery store, which is conveniently right downstairs from my apartment, the sugar is kept in a cool cupboard along with the coffee milk. Lesson: sugar is meant for putting in hot drinks, not for baking.

Then there's flour. Flour was not one of the words I learned in my year of beginning Dutch classes, so I looked it up in a relatively decent online Dutch-English dictionary. "Bloem," the dictionary said. "Hah!" I said. "Way to spell, dictionary. Bloem means flower. Point to Katherine." I used another dictionary, which gave me "meel." Only I couldn't find anything called meel in the store, just heavy bags of "tarwebloem" near the pancake mix. After three laps of the store, I realized from the back of a pasta package that "tarwe" means wheat, and "bloem" does in fact mean flour. The dictionary had issued a coach's challenge, the language refs had reviewed the play, and my point was taken away.

The easiest thing to substitute, actually, was chocolate chips. Even though they don't sell bags of ready-made chips here (another indication of a non-baking nation), the selection of chocolate is vast and varied. A bar of 65% was duly purchased, chopped up, and baked into the best kind of banana bread: the kind with chocolate.

You Can't Have a Mohawk if You're Male-Pattern Balding

I went to the Concertgebouw today for a free concert; the symphony sometimes opens its rehearsals to the public. It only lasted about 20 minutes, which I assume means that the orchestra is pretty ready for opening night. Ninety percent of the audience consisted of retired ladies and gentlemen and small children and their keepers. The children here are clearly very well immersed in the world of music: the ones who were not miming violin bowing or piano playing [there were no keyboards in the orchestra] were air-conducting with all the vigor of college guys listening to Van Halen.

Amsterdam—its buildings, its events, and its people—is full of style and culture. Well-preserved relics of the VOC's Golden Age line the canals in the form of gorgeous gabled houses; acclaimed museums and unique festivals draw visitors from around the world; the most well-put-together and fashion-conscious bikers in Europe swerve in and out of little cobbled streets. The tourists, of course, bring down the chic a bit with their comfortable shoes and wrinkle-free pants (Horrible side note: I saw a woman with a denim fanny pack which was the same shade as her jeans. This resulted in a double take in which the first glance made me certain she had a bizarrely saggy pot belly, and the second made my eyes burn just a little bit.), but on the whole, Amsterdam is stylish.

And then, every once in a while, there's a dude wearing something so egregious that I'm sure he must be from Berlin.

Such was the case with the dude in too-tight cargo pants (cargo pants, like Manny Ramierez's uniform, are intended to bag as much as possible) and 20% of a mohawk. If I had had my camera with me, and I am now kicking myself for this failure, I would have evidence; as it is, you'll just have to belive me. This man, probably around 35 or 40, had the sides of his head shaved to about 2 or 3mm, leaving a mohawk-like strip of hair about three inches wide and maybe 1cm long running from his neck to his forehead.

Only his forehead started in the general vicinity of the central sulcus. And he had a generous bare patch right at the yarmulke region. Surely this man must know about the depopulation up on his scalp; even if he's never done the two-mirror trick to see the back of his head, he can't help but notice that his hairline has retreated from his eyebrows like the French from a Panzer.

So I'm left wondering: if you're determind to be hip in spite of what havoc Nature is wreaking on your follicles, punk-dude, why not be cutting edge and go for a reverse mohawk? That would effect the Bruce-Willis statement of "I didn't want this hair anyway," while still achieving the original aim, which as I understand it is to expose approximately half of your lumpy head so that we might marvel at your extreme, anti-establishment sentiment.

In Berlin, I probably would never have noticed this guy. In the same way that here, I have stopped noticing the women who incongruously bike around in stiletto boots and miniskirts, or the men who smoke while jogging.

Fast Writing and an Almost Sock

It's probably because I'm now writing for several hours a day for newser, or maybe my two-year hiatus from school just refreshed my burned-out scholarly abilities; for whatever reason, I barreled through my 10-turned-20–page paper this week. Between the paper writing and the exam studying I still didn't have too much time left over, but it was enough to make serious progress on a striped sock, for which the required yarn and needles were purchased at a heavy discount during last week's huge yarn store sale.

I would like to blame Kasia for most of my yarn splurge. And I would do so, if the precedent for my buying of large quantities of craft supplies weren't so damning.

I need knitted items, though, because it's suddenly turned decidedly chilly. This week has been full of heavy, slatey skies and the kind of cold air that, even after my sixth year in Boston, I continue to associate with Germany in the fall. Thankfully, the skies have contented to merely be atmospheric, and left us free of rain.

We've also been free of something else whose absence bothered me for a while before I could pin it down. Despite having more than its fair share of oaks and chestnut trees, Amsterdam has no squirrels. This wouldn't have seemed strange to me had I come here straight from Orange County; my part of California has basically zero wildlife.* But I came from Cambridge, which is so overrun by these furry little demons that I eventually stopped thinking they were cute.**

One thing they do have here that decidedly does not exist in Boston (except in Super Bowl commercials) is huge horses pulling wooden carts with kegs of beer. This probably sounds like one of the things I might make up to get Jesse to leave his Boston-based band and move here, but it's true. I turned a corner on my way to hit up the map library at school, and found myself face to nose with these two Clydesdales:

It's unclear to me whether this is just something done to delight tourists, or whether it's actually a viable way of transporting beer from one canal to another. It's really too cool to question.

Now that first period is over, I'll be starting a more traditional schedule of classes that will involve me going to school three days a week. I have clearly become much too accustomed now to my one-class-per-week situation: when I got my new course schedule I nearly snorted in outrage that one of them meets three times a week. I've since come to terms with this.

One of my classes is Archaeometry II Practicum; the other is Biological Archaeometry. What is archaeometry, you ask? I don't know.



*Every once in a while my mom finds a small lizard in the house, and this is always big enough news for me to hear about it, which I think only supports my point.

**Although in fairness, the incident of the fearless vampire squirrel probably had a lot to do with that.

Texellation

This will be neither long nor news-heavy, because I'm in the middle of studying for my first exam while writing a paper that I was sure would be quick and simple. Ten pages on the same type of subject I've already given three presentations on? I can whip that out in a couple of days.

But wait, that's ten pages, single spaced. A format I haven't written in since middle school, or possibly... ever. I found this out last Friday, less than two weeks before the paper is due, and on a day when the map library has closed for the weekend.


To fill those other ten pages for this paper (on the historical geography of the Dutch island Texel), I have to dig a lot deeper than I have been doing for the presentations, which means more time in the map library, and more consulting of heavy volumes on the history of archaeology in the Wadden Islands.

Half of my sources are in either Dutch or German.

This is both a) lucky, in that these are two of the three languages I can read more or less fluently; and b) and interesting twist on the "English-language master's program" I am enrolled in. Now is the time to ask me about all the different foreign names for mudflats, sea dikes, and sand dunes.

Other subjects to ask me about while they're fresh in my mind: a killer recipe for risotto (I made it two nights in a row, at the request of my roommate); the details of the sale going on at the better of the yarn stores in Amsterdam; my current, considerable internal conflict between appreciating the aesthetic appeal of brick or cobblestone streets and the immeasurably smoother ride provided by asphalt bike lanes.

The Dutch Method, Part II; or, When God Closes a Door, He Disables the Back Window Lock

If I still haven't fuly grasped the degree to which the Dutch philosophy is to just chill out when faced with disaster or red tape, it's not for any lack of examples. A couple of weeks ago, when I finally got access to my school email address, I found a backlog of messages warning me, with increasing seriousness, that if I did not register at the University by October 1, terrible things would happen.

I got these emails on October 3, so my first reaction was to hyperventilate a little. My second was to connect the warnings with the "Confirmation of Registration" I had received on September 29, which strangely (and, I thought at the time, erroneously) listed my tenure at the VU from 9/1/07 to 9/30/07. It looked like I had been registered, then unregistered for my failure to answer any of the emails I couldn't access because I ... hadn't yet been registered.

My go-to solution in previous instances of Dutch Circular Logic gave me the same answer as it has every time before: "Just ignore those emails," said the [extremely kind and infinitely patient] international office coordinator. "Just delete them; don't even read them. The registrar has probably just not received your proof of visa from the city, so they issued you a temporary
registration without telling the Student Office."

"But I met with the city visa people almost three weeks ago," I told her. "And they said it takes five days to send the papers over to the school." In my mind, I saw my papers stamped with 'INCOMPLETE,' languishing in a cabinet at the city hall.

"Well." Said the [EKIF]IOC.

"Well?" I said.

"Sometimes things do not happen so quickly here."

This had become readily and increasingly apparent to me over the past two months, so I decided to trust her. Sure enough, my student ID card and proof of registration through the school year arrived a week or two later. I still haven't gotten any visa paperwork or confirmation that I'm here legally, but I've decided to give it a couple more months before I start to worry.

------

If I do get any official correspondence from the government, I have a pretty good shot at understanding it, because my Dutch is getting noticeably better. This doesn't mean that I don't still fall into a German accent, and it certainly doesn't mean that my vocabulary is big enough to avoid the kind of "the metal dealie, that you use... to dig food with" sidestepping around basic words. But it has gained me a lot of ground with—and free things from—the Dutch: attempting to speak Dutch has gotten me an invitation to a knitting convention (by the lady in the yarn shop); a free bike repair (from the guy in the bike shop whom I asked to buy screws from, although what I really needed were bolts); and four extra cookies (from a waiter in a bruincafe after I impressed him by asking for no whipped cream on my hot chocolate).

To realize that this last coup is much more impressive than it sounds, you need to know the way the Dutch approach hot drinks. While the British revere their tea, the Dutch give equal status to tea, coffee, and hot chocolate. All bars, restaurants, and cafes here (bruincafes are a sort of typical Dutch neighborhood bar) serve this triumvirate at all times of day, and the act of 'having a coffee' is such a basic aspect of daily life here that on our field trips we stopped at least twice each day, sometimes three or four times, to have a sit-down in a gezellig cafe. Even when we were running three hours behind schedule.

So the Dutch drinking ritual is sacred, as is the fact that every hot drink comes with one, and only one, small cookie or piece of candy. The best, and most common, are crispy, cinnamon spice cookies; the worst and least inspired are miniature candy bars. If you want another cookie, you order a second drink: this is why my four-cookie hot chocolate was probably the second biggest language-related accomplishment of the week.

The biggest was making a successful joke, in Dutch, on the third field excursion. Instead of wondering what the joke actually was and whether it was in fact funny, please consider the primary non-mud-related trial we went through on our second trip, which I forgot to mention before:

After our second stop on the first morning (at a cafe, naturally), we returned to the van to discover that the sliding door wouldn't open. And wouldn't entirely close. Rain was falling, as it would continue to do for most of the morning, and the six of us not sitting in the front seat of the van were stuck on the outside. It took about 15 minutes to go through several repeats of a dumbshow I like to call "Another person walks up, sees that the door is stuck, but is fairly certain that if he gives it a try, it'll open easily."

At one point I climbed in through the back of the van to see if there was anything on the inside I could unlatch. There wasn't, but eventually the rest of the van followed me, dirty boots and wet coats tumbling over the seats. After everyone was in, we realized that the seats can recline, which drastically cut down the awkwardness and made me less worried about our ability to exit the van in case of an accident. Three or four stops later, we had actually become faster at our doorless exit than we had been using the normal way, though we were still glad when we arrived in Emmen for the night and the professors took the van to be fixed. Mostly, our happiness was due to the fact that the side door remaining just barely open kept us from being able to lock the other doors, meaning we had to bring all of our worldly possessions with us on each stop or risk losing them to the bands of backpack theives that roam the peatlands of Holland.

Getting Settled

My room has become a lot more pleasant now that I've found some pretty organizey boxes, bought my heather plant, and discovered an excellent yarn store just off the Herengracht. It's important that my room be a nice place, because it's where my computer is, and therefore where I do my few hours of Newser work and 0-3 hours of school work every day. Also because of Skype, which is a lovely invention that makes me look, but not feel, like a telemarketer.

Knitting makes things a lot cozier, especially with the cooler weather threatening to unpack and stay a while, and so far I've finished a hat and a pair of gloves, which have just embarked on a journey toward mittenhood, so a picture of them in their finished-finished state should be coming up in about a week.

I started on the gloves at a meeting of the Amsterdam chapter of Stitch 'n' Bitch, which is composed of several nice Dutch ladies and a few American and British expats/students. I'm sure I could have found a similar group in Boston, but I never bothered; there's something about having lived for a while in a city that makes it harder, I think, to decide to meet up with a group of strangers and really make an effort to get to know them all. Since my friends from school here don't knit, and the only other people I know are my roommates and Dusty, who is in Utrecht, the idea of joining up with other knitters seems like a brilliant one.

Also, the bar at which the group meets makes very, very good hot chocolate.

Muck, Muck, Meuse

My third class this period is an excursion course, consisting of two three-day trips around the Netherlands and a 20-minute presentation next month. The excursions were last week and the week before: the first to the province of Limburg, which consists mainly of a little piece of the Netherlands hanging down between Belgium and Germany; and the second to the north and eastern provinces.

The first trip was by far the less pleasant: a combination of a mean wind and a near-constant drizzle saw to that. The first day was spent stopping at sites where archaeological consulting groups are conducting digs in advance of building projects getting started, and most of what they found was neolithic traces. That means, essentially, that they dug lots of big holes and found some spots of darker earth in amongst the normal dirt, indicating old wells, or post-holes, or hearths. Few to no artifacts survive thousands of years in the wet-but-not-boggy Limburg area, so there were no clay pots to put back together, no pieces of wood to do analysis on... just dirt.

It's a secret known to most geologists that certain kinds of dirt, when met by weeks of light-to-medium rainfall, create a substance called "mud," and that such a substance is a horrible surface to walk on. This "mud" was everywhere in the Meuse River watershed area, which was also the area that contained the bulk of our sites*. The freshmen who naively wore their everyday shoes were the worst off; at some points I regretted having left my wellies in Boston, but most of the time my trusty hiking boots did their job, which is keeping the outside world away from my feet.

*the other sites were the Roman ruins (see below), and a flint mine that would have been extremely cool if it wasn't a half-hour hike up what would normally be a dirt road but what a sudden torrential downpour was quickly making into a medium-sized streambed. I'm sure the flint mine itself was interesting, but I was forced to stop paying attention about five minutes in when I saw this:
Please keep in mind the fact that that egg sac was about the size of a ping pong ball, and that this guy was only one of literally thousands of the mine's inhabitants. 40% of the others were gnats; 30% mosquitos.

My boots, incidentally, have now undergone trial by fire (Hawaii volcano camp), ice (glacier hiking near Calgary), water, and mud, so they've led a pretty full life at this point. The mud we had to wade through to reach the interesting parts of the dirt had the consistency of frosting and added a couple of pounds to each boot, and probably bumped me up to an even 6' in height, by the end of one stop.

Despite the muddiness, I really like the southern corner of the Netherlands is nice because it reminds me of the region in Germany where I lived. There are what the Dutch call "mountains," which are hills, and lots of chestnut trees, and little towns with cobblestones and streets that wind up and around. Our hotel was called "Bergrust," which means "mountain rest," an idea that is apparently extremly funny if you're Dutch, as about half of the kids in my program are.

By the third day, we finally had some dry things to look at: Roman ruins in the town of Tongeren, Belgium. There were lots of walls and some temple foundations, but the interesting thing for me was a cross section of a Roman road, which is completely not what I have always imagined them to look like. The Roman army, a group of men who wore sandals and marched dozens of miles a day, built themselves roads of... gravel.


The other highlight of the trip was a group of friendly ponies living in a field near an excavation. They seemed very interested in the plants growing just outside of their fence, even though they were definitely the same as the plants they could easily access. The babies had very soft noses.

Slightly less friendly was this sheep I found in the gift shop at the Hunebedden museum, during our second trip:
We were very excited about the Hunebedden, both because the existence of a museum automatically cut down on the number of hours we would spend outside in the drizzle that day and because the Hunebedden are basically the Dutch Stonehenge: huge dolmens (neolithic tombs) made of boulders left behind with the glaciers retreated to Scandanavia after the last ice age. At one point, they were like creepy, dark houses, all covered in sod and totally cut off from the outside world, but now all that's left are the huge rocks making up the framework:

The second trip was better all around, since the weather got better after the first day, and the sites had more artifacts and much less mud. We drove across the Aufsluitdijk, the dike that keeps the ocean out of the manmade inland sea (and therefore keeps the water out of the Dutch people's backyards), and all the way across the northern part of the country, nearly to the German border. This proximity to Germany allowed us to catch some German radio stations in the van, which meant a rollicking afternoon of pretending to sing along to a lot of accordion music. There is also Dutch accordion music, which is very similar to the German kind, but instead of singing about drinking, the Dutch sing songs with lyrics like: "my dentures are loose, / my dentures are loose / my dentures are loose / they have fallen on the grass."

This was actually the real chorus of a song.

We also saw probably the greatest statue in Europe, which I unfortunately wasn't quick enough to get a picture of. It consisted of a bronze set of legs, either briskly walking or slowly running, cut off at the waist. To put it another way, it was a statue of a butt.

In place of photographic evidence of the butt-statue, I'll give you this sign from someone's yard in Essen:
It's even funnier if you don't know that in Europe, a red circle means "don't do this."

Once it became sunny, the field trip was like a romp in a fairy tale, since the northeast of the Netherlands is full of German-style forests and magical plants that I have never actually seen in real life, like these adorable mushrooms.
They're sitting on a pile of slag, which is the molten ferrous silica waste that runs off from smelting furnaces. This particular slag is several thousand years old, but that didn't stop our professor from encouraging us to take some home. "There's plenty for everyone!" he might have said (but didn't). Or, more accurately, "no one but geo-dorks would even know what these drippy-looking rocks are, let alone want to take one."

Then, for some reason, we went to a castle, which had no geological or archaeological relevance, but had some terrifyingly big grey koi fish in the moat.

Sometimes it's hard to tell by appearances why a place might be interesting, though. This next picture, you will probably say, is of my class standing around a woodland pool, learning about the geological significance of it. No, it's an archaeologically important pool, since it was dug by humans to fill a brook (also dug by humans) that would then power a water wheel, that would in turn run several paper mills. We visited one of the mills, but couldn't get too close because it's now someone's house. If they had been home, we would have been able to tell them that they should really do something about the huge hornet nest in the tree right next to the door, but I'm guessing they already have some idea about that. Hornets are much, much bigger than whatever I used to think were hornets, and what I now assume to be just normal wasps. Despite my deliciousness to bugs of all kinds, I somehow avoided getting stung, so that was a high point.

Our last stop may have been the most pleasant: a landscape of shifting sand dunes in the Veleuwe, where wild heather has all but taken over. The heather pretty much obscures any geological features of interest, but it's really a cute little plant, so when I got back to Amsterdam I bought a little pot of it for my room.

Surrounded by gigantic men in stretchy pants

The school year is now in full swing, the days are crisp and clear, and in Holland that can mean only one thing: Football season is upon us again.

By "us" I mean "me and the handfull of American tourists who stumbled across the Satellite Sports Cafe in Leidseplein." And by "upon" I mean "available provided you bike across town at strange times of day and purchase a beer and maybe also a strange object the Dutch call a 'hamburger' in order to sit in a smoky upstairs room surrounded by several sports games on dozens of screens."

It is much more fun than it sounds.

Watching three NFL games at once is an interesting challenge, especially when they turn on the sound for one game suddenly, causing me to wonder why the Pittsburgh announcers would be talking constantly about Joseph Addai; figuring out why any given table is cheering at any given moment is another fun test. The advantage to watching football amidst so much mayhem is that I never do the thing that I did embarassingly often while watching at home in Boston, which is: fall asleep during the third quarter. It's not that sports are boring, it's just that I had a very comfy couch.

So far, the slate of people I've met at the bar has consisted entirely of Scottish rugby (and, weirdly, baseball) fans and people from places I used to live. I watched last week's Steelers game with Brian (or Mike? maybe Dan? he was exceedingly generic), a National Guardsman from Riverside, CA; last night I chatted with Chad and Sean, from Costa Mesa and Boston, respectively, while waiting (in vain, as it turned out) for the bar to turn on the Cardinals game. All three of them embodied everything I hate about tourists—they plan a trip to Europe, then get here and complain about the prices and how everything is different than at home—but I enjoyed watching the growing unease on their faces as it became more and more clear that I knew far more about sports than they do.

What they didn't know is that I'm a sportswriter now. Sort of—check out www.newser.com and you'll see some of my stories; you won't be able to tell which are mine, but it's a good source for all types of news.

The Rise of Sarah Jane

Some punky 13-year-olds crashed into Lynette's front wheel, causing her to become more balky than before, and although the guy at the Fietsenfabriek did something with a monkey wrench that made steering a lot easier, I couldn't pretend that it wasn't time to get that friend I had been thinking about for Lynette.

I was able to identify the mechanic's request for a monkey wrench, incidentally, because of its appearance in one of the strange puppet songs at Uitmarkt ("hoop daar is Willem"). So that was a minor coup.

But anyway: Lynette. I had been thinking for a couple weeks that I should get a slightly better bike when a good opportunity arose, and save Lynette for use when I have visitors who want to go biking with me. (Come visit me in Amsterdam! I have a bike for you to use...) Somewhat surprisingly, I found one within a day of starting to look. Sarah Jane (as in Moore) is a bit more stable and much less rusty than Lynette, and it's still amazing to me after a day of riding her that the bell never slips down the handlebars, and the grips don't gradually slide off, and the kickstand never starts rattling agains the spokes.

I took Sarah Jane out for a long ride today (30km round-trip) to the Muidenslot, a castle (and falconry center?) south of Amsterdam. Again covered in sunscreen and protected by a hat ( ) I set off. The bike path was a lot more pleasant than the one to Haarlem, all tree-lined and smooth and much to Sarah Jane's liking:
Then there was a less-fun part where it went next to the highway (on the other side of a big wall, Mom, don't worry!) and then it opened up into countryside again:

I got to the castle in about 45 minutes, waltzed in for free with my Museumjaarkaart, and wandered the gardens and grounds before stumbling on the falconry area. No one was actually doing falconry, but a man was answering questions about the two falcons (I think? in Dutch he was calling them "hunt-birds" so they could be some non-falcon type of bird for all I know) tethered to little posts. One of them had a cute little bird hat on to make him think it was night, only he obviously knew it wasn't night, since he could totally hear all of us talking and could probably smell all the delicious, juicy children sitting on benches. (If birds can smell? I'm pretty sure they can.)

Anyway, the "awake" one kept trying to fly away, which of course failed after the tether pulled tight three feet from the post, or in this case, the falcon-guy's arm. Twice—twice!—kids asked the man why he was wearing a thick glove. "Because the hunt-bird's talons are very, very sharp," the man explained both times. Then a third kid asked him what would happen if he didn't wear the glove. I didn't really understand the response, but I'm pretty sure it would involve huge gashes in his arm and probably some sort of bird disease.

The castle itself was okay. I've been to a lot of castles, so I'm pretty clear on the concept of murder holes and toilets that open directly into the moat. It's required that Dutch castles have awesome moats, by the way; you'll find a lot of normal houses with moats as well, if you look hard enough.
It's not really as big as it looks in the picture, or possibly I'm just much bigger than I was in the heyday of my castle-visiting.

Thigh of Relief

Since I got here I've been biking for an average of an hour a day, so my legs have become very strong. So strong that I thought "surely I can bike all the way across this tiny country and be back by dinner time."

And essentially, I was right.

Last Sunday I biked with five other international students to Bloemendaal-aan-Zee, a beach on Holland's west coast. Bloemendaal means "blooming dales"; that's how easy Dutch is. We didn't have a map more detailed than a Google printout, and our printout was useless anyway because it highlighted the route one would take from Amsterdam to B-a-Z if one were driving in a car. We were on six bikes of various degrees of ricketeyness, some of us armed with cameras, some weighed down by towels and bathing suits and hopes of warm water, one of us toting the tacky Map-of-Amsterdam shoulder bag we each got during orientation, and one of us protected from the sun by a Pittsburgh Pirates hat.

The one in the hat, who was also covered in sunscreen except for on one inexplicably forgotten stripe on the side of her neck, was me.

We set out from Leidseplein at 11am, following helpful waysigns toward Haarlem. The countryside was like a moister, ditchier, corn-free Nebraska, or like a flatter Ireland. I didn't take any pictures of it.

By 2pm we were in Haarlem, some 25km from where we had started, and a half hour later the rollingness of the landscape and prevalence of dune grass told us we were nearing the coast. We stopped to eat at a portable food-truck (what are those things actually called?) where every option on the menu was fried and we were hungry enough to find it delicious. Here is a picture I took of the others four minutes after we got our food:
From left: Kasia (Canada/Poland), Ben (Germany-Konstanz), Jacob (Oregon/Switzerland), Heike (Germany-Heidelberg), Dominik (Germany-Berlin).

About a half hour of biking uphill and directly into the wind later, we were at the beach, which was not really at all different from beaches in Southern California, except that people seemed to be enjoying it more. Also there are portable fish stands right on the sand:

There was a sideways-flowing current of foot-deep water, then a sort of wide sandbar to cross before you got to the waves. I took this next picture looking back toward shore from the sandbar. Behind the Fish Specialties truck you can see the dune, on top of which are a bunch of cafes. Please don't ask why I thought it would be cool to tilt the camera.

This one is also taken from the sandbar. It took everyone else a little while to decide to follow me across the shallow area, possibly because they were taking off their shoes and rolling up their pantlegs, or possibly because they were afraid of very tiny sharks.

I would have liked this sign better if it lacked text, actually, but it's still pretty good as far as strange European warning signs go. It makes me think that the sandbar situation isn't always the case at this beach; it says "Warning! narrow beach during high water!"
It's strange that they're warning you about something pretty obvious, because the Dutch aren't nearly as worried about covering all their bases as Americans are. For example, there are numerous places where it would be very, very easy to ride or drive right into a canal, if you weren't paying attention (probably 60% of canal banks have no rails or other obstacles next to them). And, most buildings (including many restaurants) in central Amsterdam have retained their super-steep staircases, so places like the sports bar where I can watch NFL games are human avalanches waiting to happen.

I'm going to that bar tonight, actually, to watch five NFL games at once. This soccer-loving nation will never get the better of me.

At Last

My computer has returned to me. It was gone exactly five weeks, which was about four weeks longer than I would have told you I could stand to be computer-free, if you had asked me in July. But now that I'm back online, let us never speak again of motherboards or whether or not Jesse actually did swallow an electromagnet while in Berlin. Instead, here is a photo-essay chronicling my trip so far. Why make a blog almost entirely out of photos? Because I can.

This is the view out my window: a real Dutch windmill. I know it works, because I watched guys climbing all over it and rebuilding the arms for about two weeks.

My living room, which faces the opposite way.


A random house on a canal. I spent a lot of time taking random pictures while Jesse drew things, and I don't remember where or why I took most of them. It's very Amsterdammy, though.


Another canal with cool buildings. Amsterdam became very prosperous in the 16th century, and stayed pretty wealthy for a while, so the main canals in the center of the city (Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht) are lined with examples of all sorts of architecture.


This is a pretty big intersection, with a fun building on the corner. The water in the canals is more brownish than it looks here, because lots of gross things drain into the canals. More on that soon.


Jesse, with a nearly completed drawing of the previous intersection. I put it up on my wall, despite my roommate's insistence that I should "sell it." To Jesse's left you can see a baguette bag that contains our lunch: the greatest sandwiches ever. We ate them every day for a week; I still eat them most days now. They are basically just good cheese and good meat on great bread, which is a deceptively simple recipe.


Jesse in front of the Rijksmuseum, which is a huge building but has a pretty small collection at the moment, at least by major-european-museum standards. Part of it is under construction, though, so we're guessing there will be more paintings of rich old Dutch dudes available for perusal once the work is done.


At a tiny proeflokaal ("tasting place") called Wijnand Fockink, we sip lemon brandywine (me) and orange-cinnamon-vanilla liqour (Jesse) the correct way: lean down to slurp off the meniscus before picking up your flute to finish the drink. If you try to do things the other way around, the bartender-lady might yell at you for spilling.


Disaster! We're way on the other side of Amsterdam from where I live, and after liquor and coffees, Jesse has a problem. There's no way we can make it home in time... but what's this green, metal contraption?


It seems to be called a "urinoir." I later found out that the reason all the urinoirs are located next to canals is, of course, that that's where they empty into. Great.


Jesse doesn't care that this whole idea of having semi-enclosed public urinals is not really fair to the gender that includes me.


In fact, his self-satisfiedness continues to the Stedelijk Museum, which is super-modern. This isn't even part of the museum itself; it's just the entryway. Jesse says this picture makes it look like he's from the future. I point out that it was my idea to shoot it.


I could post a bunch of cute-animal pictures from the Amsterdam Zoo, but then you would never realize how incredibly dangerous these adorable creatures are, so instead here is a ubiquitous warning sign. This sign is both intelligible in every language and understandable in none. "Yield to animals with eight teeth!" it might be saying. Or, "Your donation today will pay for a year of orthodontic work on a marmot." Or maybe, "Watch out for sock puppets!" Even context doesn't help much, since this sign can be found on the cages of the meerkats and the fossa and the blind cave-fish, but not on the crocodiles or the chimps.

I wanted to put my fingers through the bars of the chimps' enclosure to test whether the lack of sign meant that it was safe to do so, but Jesse wouldn't let me.