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.

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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.