Total Eclipse of the Markt

Last night was the closing night of Uitmarkt, an open-air festival of sorts held on an island just north of Amsterdam's Central Station. I went because some friends wanted to go see the Cirque du Soleil show there at 10:30, a show for which some well-known Dutch DJ was supposed to be spinning. What it ended up being was the DJ alone in the middle of a stage, looking quite small and fairly dorky as he danced in front of a huge screen showing highlights from Cirque du Soleil shows. We stayed around for a while, hoping that at least one person in a garishly-patterned leotard would roll across the stage, or climb around on the trusses, but the only Cirque was du Video.

The most amazing part about Uitmarkt, therefore, was the show immediately before Cirque. I wasn't entirely sure what was going on when I arrived: several singers with giant puppets were putting on a spectacle on stage, and the entire crowd (a couple thousand, is my guess) was singing along to lyrics projected on the huge screen. This was confusing, since no one in the crowd was under 14 or so, and the beer tents couldn't possibly have been well-enough stocked to get that many adults to sing so enthusiastically along to a children's song.

Here are the lyrics to the song:

"Hup daar is Willem
met de waterpomptang
want Willem is niet bang
hooooooooooy!"

Then the MC started talking, and I understood enough of the Dutch to realize what was going on: this was a gigantic sing-along to various show tunes. I still don't know what the puppets were from (is there a Dutch Avenue Q?) but I recognized the next song, because "Age of Aquarius" is pretty distinctive, even when the lyrics are all in Dutch. Then came "I've Had the Time of my Life" from Dirty Dancing (with dancing!) and "High Flying, Adored," from Evita. The lyrics to the latter have possibly the best Dutch translation: "Hoog, vloog je te hoog." To really get the effect, you have to say it out loud, remembering that in Dutch, g is pronounced as a glottal fricative (like the ch in German "ich," but even farther back in your throat).

We all had certain songs we wanted them to perform, ranging from Annie (Allan, from Scotland) to Oklahoma! (me). But we were disappointed (though not much) when they announced they were going to end with Les Mis. I got ready to march in place to a Dutch version of "Do You Hear the People Sing," but they had another idea: depressing us with a 7-minute rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream." Not one person in the crowd held a lighter above their head, so I have to assume that the Dutch version of the song isn't INCREDIBLY SAD AND BLEAK like the English version.

All of this reminds me of the German musical "Tanz der Vampire," which was based on a Roman Polanski film and scored by Jim Steinman, who basically recycled all his existing music for the show. This resulted in what is possibly the most hilarious and ridiculous foreign-language version of a song ever. (It is because I like you that I am linking to the 4-minute version rather than the 7-minute version.) It's like Phantom of the Opera, only with more biting.

Tanz der Vampire is actually playing in Berlin right now, so Jesse and I could have seen it, but for some reason we failed to do so. This doesn't bother me very much at the moment, but I'm sure it will haunt me in years to come.

Or, not.

Now You're Biking

The Dutch are all about biking; this you probably know. There are probably more bikes than people in Amsterdam, though nobody knows exactly because it’s impossible to count. Bikes locked to racks, chained to bridges, leaning against trees and walls, mired in the depths of canals, abandoned by roadsides. Bikes with no front wheel, front wheels with no bike, locks chained bafflingly alone to poles and railings, seatless bikes rusting away in huge lots. Then there are the thousands of bikes in use at any given moment, in bike lanes and on sidewalks, across lawns and over tram tracks.

The Dutch have very strong legs.

I got my bike last Sunday, the day after I got here, and in the five days since I’ve saved dozens of euro on tram fare, started developing some fierce thigh muscles, and learned priceless cultural lessons. One of those lessons is that anything you can do in a car, you can do on a bike. I’ve passed people eating, fixing their hair, and dressing or undressing while in motion. So many people ride and talk on cell phones at the same time that it hardly seems worth mentioning. Parents scold the small children in seats on the front or back (or sometimes both) of their bikes; men pedal what I can only describe as bike-barrows; girls sit side-saddle on the back wheel-covers of their boyfriends’ rides; a man in front of me this morning was rolling happily along with a 6-foot ladder tucked vertically under one arm. Exactly zero of the bikers and passengers here wear helmets.

I got my bike from an expat who was returning home, and paid 50 euro for bike, lock, two lights, and a receipt proving that it hadn’t been stolen. Since the lock and lights alone are worth 15 euro, and since secondhand bikes in the shops start at around 70 euro, you could say that I got an amazing deal. But you would be saying that without having admired the subtle rust color of its main frame, or having heard the insidious rattling and sqeaking noises that increase with speed. I have named my bike Lynette, as in Fromme.

Since the liberal application of WD-40 and a bit of bending of spokes and readjustment of the kickstand, Lynette has been a lot happier, and quieted down considerably. She still needs some attention, like the occasional tightening of the bolts that secure her front wheel, but she rides pretty smoothly now, and no longer seems to be in constant danger of exploding. And I think that her rusty coating will discourage would-be thieves as much as my heavy chain lock.

The traffic lessons I’ve learned on the streets of Amsterdam boil down to this: bikes do not fall into a middle space between cars and pedestrians—bikes can and will assume the functions and rights-of-way of both groups, as convenience dictates. This basically means that if you are walking in any given square meter in the city, you are in danger of being run down by a bike, and also that driving here is exceptionally frustrating, since cars have to yield (let op!) to bikes. As a cyclist, I love it.

What I don’t love are tourists, who think they can walk in the bike lane. Lynette only has so many swerves in her, so eventually I will be forced to plow on through a milling crowd when my nice loud bell fails to disperse it. I am secretly looking forward to this moment.

It takes about a half hour for me to bike to campus, but I’m working on shaving that down to 20 minutes. It’s about 10 minutes to Central Station along the IJ river, and 15 or 20 minutes across town to the museums and Vondelpark. My hair is now constantly a mess, and I have become very accomplished at riding into the wind in such a way as to keep my skirts from flying up into my face. Rain doesn’t deter most of the Dutch from riding, so it won’t deter me either. Snow probably will, though.

Once I’m back up and running with my (or a new) computer, I’ll provide some glamour shots of Lynette. And of lots of other things.

Nobody Said it was Easy

This post will have no pictures, though I took many. You’ll see why.

My 48 hours in Edinburgh went by quickly and coldly, and I managed to see four Fringe shows (including Aoife’s , which is fantastic and beautiful and haunting, as her shows tend to be) and get in some good time with the sister. We cooked a lot in her strange, unwieldy kitchen, and I helped her change a lightbulb. In other words, we had a good time.

After two nightmarish experiences on EasyJet (it’s never worth it, never) I made it to Berlin. Everything was almost exactly the way I left it two years ago: the unbelievably smooth transportation system hasn’t gone up in price, the falafel and pretzels are still cheap and ubiquitous, and all of the buildings that were previously under construction still are under construction. In other words, I lept right back into it.

My three days in Berlin were scheduled around meals: all the cafes, restaurants, and stands I’d most missed were in due course visited and enjoyed. I caught up on my reading while Jesse used my computer to continue work on his novel—his own laptop had suffered from a mysterious and swiftly disabling ailment and was being repiared.

We did our reading and writing in cafes, until Thursday, when we arrived in Kreuzberg and discovered that the laptop hadn’t successfully shut down before being loaded into a computer bag and bumped up and down stairs and through Berlin’s subway tunnels. My compter didn’t decline as rapidly as Jesse’s had, but in the end it succumed all the same. It’s now sitting in an Amsterdam computer repair shop, its ultimate fate uncertain.

The computer is in Amsterdam because I am in Amsterdam now. My pre-studies jaunt is over, my friends all decidedly not in the same city as me; the part of my life in which I deplete all my savings has begun.

I’ve met both my roommates at this point, and both my roommates are away for the weekend, so I’ve been hanging out in the apartment, checking email on one roommate’s old laptop and making occasional ventures into the city for food and supplies. The laptop has a tenuous relationship with the internet and runs all programs with reluctance, so it takes about 10 minutes to load Google maps, and crashes if nytimes.com spews forth a pop-up ad. I’m beginning to wonder if JK Rowling had laptops in mind when she wrote about how onerous it is for wizards to use other wizards’ wands.

My various introductions to the city and school start tomorrow and last pretty much all week, so I’ll soon be much more busy and have met lots of people. If I have any luck at all, the computer will be fixable and I’ll have it back by next Saturday. If you don’t hear much from me in the meantime, now you know why.

Scotland

I've left Boston, again, and for the last time as a resident of the city. It did look somewhat cleaner and more inviting in my last two or three weeks, but seeing as how August brings tourists and humidity to Boston, I can be fairly sure that the momentary pleasantness was mostly in my mind. So we parted amicably, and I got to packing.

The one upside of leaving the kitty behind for the time being (I'll be back in December to bring him, along with his Pet Passport, back to the Netherlands) is that I no longer live in fear that his astonishing feats of acrobatics, which surely are all part of a master plan; leading toward what, I am probably better off not knowing. Lest you think my fear is not warranted, please see for yourself what he did as soon as my shoes were all removed from the shoe rack in my closet:


Then I got on a plane and was elbowed by a sullen 14-year-old British girl for seven hours. Then I snuck out of Schiphol Airport during my 5-hour layover in order to leave the heavier of my carry-on bags at my new apartment. That all happened, from my perspective, between 2 and 5am, so I will withhold my descriptions of the city and the apartment until next week, when I'm back for good. I think I had a nice morning.

The airport at Edinburgh is, as Jackie promised, exactly like Long Beach Airport, but indoors. The entirety of the staff consists of three gate agents, one man with a mop, and an inordinately inquisitive Passport Inspection lady who probably now knows more about my sister and her studies than does the professor she's working for this summer.

The rest of Edinburgh aside from the airport is exactly like Ireland, if Ireland were staggeringly hilly. "But you edited the map of Edinburgh for Let's Go," my sister pointed out (logically and exuding no small delight at being able to contradict me) after I grumpled about the grade of Cockburn St. "Maps are flat," I said, gasping. "And I have one-fourth of all my worldly possessions on my back."

"Didn't you know that Edinburgh was built on an extinct volcano?" Jackie persisted, as she is wont to do. "Rrmgh," I said. Neither of us mentioned that my degree is in Earth and Planetary Science, with a focus on Volcanology. We couldn't mention anything, because we couldn't breathe.

I emerged from a long-awaited shower to find that Jackie had made bacon, brie, and tomato sandwiches, which is something the Scottish have invented as part of their pennance for thinking up haggis. Then we set off for the Fringe. We warmed up at The Elephant House, which is where Jo Rowling wrote the first drafts of Harry Potter, and I managed to completely avoid calling any of the staff muggles or ordering a butterbeer. Down the street from Elephant, I accidentally took a picture of the most-photographed statue in Scotland:


I took it because I liked the skyline and the way one street drops off precipitously while the other carries on flat (joke about which road leads to Loch Lomond will not be made here; Dad, you're on your own for that one). If I had been trying to photograph Bobby, this would be a very embarassing picture, since most of him is behind that woman's pink umbrella.

Oh yes, Scotland is rainy. It rains about a third of the time, which is to say, about 20 minutes out of every hour. This means dry (though not sunny) skies are never more than a few minutes away, but it also means you shouldn't have brought an umbrella that attacks you whenever you try to fold it back up.

The Edinburgh Fringe is in full swing: Venues like Festival Theatre and Bedlam Theatre and the Underbelly are filled with people and fliers. Jackie and I didn't go to any of those places. Here is Jackie standing in front of the tent that covers the stage of Udderbelly:
Yes, it's a giant purple lady cow.

Then we saw two one-man comedy shows at a venue called C Urban Garden, specifically in the Teehee Teepee. An urban garden is a yard containing a lot of bricks, and in this case, tents with small stages. The comedians were very good, the crowds depressingly small. This meant plenty of interaction with the audience, which made for a great experience. An even better experience was accidentally running into Aoife and her company in the bar area of the C Theatre. We had planned to meet up on the next day before going to see her show, but seeing people you know unexpectedly is what the Fringe is all about. Also, theatre.

We saw another show this morning, again in the Urban Garden, but this time in a bigger tent, which was necessary to fit all of the puppets. Yes, it was Breakfast with the Bickersons as told by muppets.

When not in tents or coffeeshops, we've been very cold all the time, becuase both Jackie and I seem to be holding on to the Californian notion that if we just wear skirts or sun dresses, surely the bitter wind will stop blowing in from the Highlands. Here I am, on my way back to Jackie's place to change into jeans, shivering in the shadow of another extinct volcano.

It's about time for Second Breakfast.