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.

Motherly Vindication

I never really, truly believed my mom on those occasional summer afternoons when she glanced into my bedroom and threatened to set the Cleaning Police on me. I knew there wasn't any such thing as cleaning police, and I was right... mostly.

There are no cleaning police in California. There are, however, in Amsterdam.

While Jesse and I were meandering through small streets and along canals, we had to pull over to let an official-looking vehicle pass by. The orange stripes on the side labeled it as a police car; the word on the side labeled it as something far more frightening: the Reinigingspolitie. Which means, yes, "cleaning police."

Street-cleaning vehicles make nearly daily passes, it seems, and city workers do their best to sweep up debris and leaves. If you didn't know better, you might think you'd landed in a Harry Potter movie.

The Amsterdam Quidditch team on the way home from practice.

Their Keeper and his trusty Cleansweep Seven.

First-years aren't allowed to have brooms. Filch has confiscated these.

You may think—and here you would be supported by the city workers I caught on film—that I'm a huge nerd. You wouldn't be wrong.

The Dutch Method

I do realize that I have been blogging far less often than I promised people (and by 'people' I of course mean my mom and grandma), but:
A. I've been very busy
and
B. My computer still being free of a working motherboard, I'm still dependent on the borrowed computer that wheezes horribly whenever I open more than one browser window. When I try to open the blogger website, it tells me cookies are disabled and must be enabled before I can proceed. This is a lie; cookies are enabled, and through a process which I would prefer not to describe except to say that it was not swift, I discovered that I have to switch off all of the JavaScript options in the Extra/Internet-opties/Beveiliging/Aangepast Niveau menu. The Blogger help screen says to make sure all the JavaScript options are switched on; this is another lie.

Also, the settings which make it possible to blog prevent Gmail from working, which would ordinarily be annoying, but in practice doesn't really matter because the aforementioned wheezing keeps me from trying to check mail while blogging.

So I may eventually go back and recap the introduction week, because it was fun and there may be interesting things to say about it. But for now, I'm moving on.

I have been busy because Jesse was here for a week, taking advantage of being on the continent (of Europe) before he flies back to Boston to be a rocker/office worker again. I have been busy also because it was the first week of classes at my university, the VU (pronounced foo, or for you German speakers, fü). Jesse and I were able to spend much more time biking around the canals and wandering the museums than you might expect, because:

I have basically no class at all.

This state of affairs deserves a full explanation, which has to start with the general Dutch attitude, which you would be critically mistaken to assume is similar to the general German attitude. Consider:

1. I was accepted to the VU, after sending in my application materials after the official deadline for international students, two months before I needed to arrive in Amsterdam. I was notified about my scholarship three weeks after that. Conclusion: the Dutch are not in too much of a hurry.

2. Upon arriving at the International Students Office on the first morning it was open, eager to get through all the requisite paperwork for my residence permit, registration, and enrollment, I was told to come back in a few days, and not to stress out, because the process would take a long time anyway. I am still not registered or enrolled, and I still do not have a residence permit. No one seems at all perturbed by this, so I try not to be either. Conclusion: the strict language of official documents and websites is a sham created to cover up the fact that the Dutch are not in too much of a hurry.

3. When I asked the professor in charge of my program about the seven "preparatory" classes that my official acceptance letter say I am required to take in the first 12 months of my studies, he said, "Well, it says 12 months, but you might want to take some of these next year. Also, some of these courses are only given in Dutch. Do you speak Dutch?" Ordinarily, I do like to claim that I speak some Dutch--I took two semesters in college, and can read it fairly well, though slowly--but unless the lectures for these intro archeology courses were going to focus on buying fruit at the greengrocer's or changing money at a bank, I would be very likely to find myself in the following situation:

Professor: [unintelligible] archeologie [unintelligible] dirt?
Me: Een kopje koffie, alstublieft. Koffein vrij, met suiker en een wolkje melk.
Professor: Nee, wij praten over [unintelligible]. Verstaan?
Me: Hoi, Piet! Het is leuk om je weer te zien. Hoe gaat het met Pauline?
Professor:

Conclusion: the Dutch are very optimistic.

But maybe they're right to be so positive, because things worked out remarkably well. The professor of one of my intro archeology courses seemed not at all surprised by my situation, and reassured me that since the book is in English, and class isn't really mandatory anyway, I would be fine doing independent study. She's going to translate the weekly assignments and tests for me, and I'll email her my answers.

For my other introductory course, the book is in Dutch, and the focus is on the archeology of the Netherlands. The professor for the course had a chat with the director of my program and they decided that I don't need to take it after all.

My third course, and my only master course this period (a period is like a semester, but there are six of them, two before Christmas, and four after) was scheduled to meet twice a week, but the Monday meetings have turned out not to be classes at all, but "working lectures," which just means that we could work during those times if we wanted, but the professor won't be there, and we don't have to be either.

So I only have class on Friday afternoons, plus the two three-day excursions later this month. For this week, that meant that Jesse and I had time for an extra museum (the Stedelijk Museum, full of strange modern-art video installations) in addition to the Rijks- and Van Gogh museums, and several afternoons spent biking around in search of pretty locations to draw (in his case) and photograph (in mine). Some of these photographs may make their way into the blog once the computer is resurrected.

Probably the highlight of the week was the coffeeshop we found near Museumplein, which I later found out is part of a chain (Bagels and Beans) but is awesome nevertheless. Pleasant atmosphere and good coffee aside, this particular place has a resident kitty. She is tiny and black, with white paws, and very small. She ran right up to me when I tapped on the floor, and within a couple of minutes she was curled up in my lap like it was her job. Jesse took some pictures of this, but since his computer also has The Consumption, they may also take a while to materialize.