greetings from the future!

this is the post from 2006 that floats magically atop the others so that i can be a controlling blogger and greet you all upon entry.

hello.

background: i'm living in amsterdam for six months. i was actually given money to do this. isn't academia marvellous?

below is my blog. i hate blogs. i would tell you why but some of you have blogs and i don't want you to think i hate your blogs. i just hate the idea of blogs. and it's really not the vehicle i would choose. but until i figure out how to make my own minimalist website, which has been sitting at the bottom of the to-do list for about five years now, this is just easier.

oh, and unlike the burning log, this one actually follows blog chronology. so it starts in the archives (down on the left column) on december 28.

cheers

p.s. the future is fantastic. flying cars, t.v. phones, everything they promised.

It’s four in the morning and I just can’t sleep. Last nite – which is rapidly becoming the nite before last – I went out with my language class to celebrate the course’s end. We spent a few hours at an Irish pub where, unlike in most Dutch bars, the alcohol came in full-sized glasses. Of course it’s still just as strong as the alcohol that’s served in small glasses. So if you aren’t paying attention, you’ve basically had six beers when you think you’ve only had three.

By two o’clock our international crowd was fully drunk and looking for a new scene. We had heard about a bar called Casablanca with dancing and no cover. Our small staggering mob headed toward the red light district, stopping en route to ask random passers-by for directions. Casablanca turned out to be ridiculously fun: it was, in fact, a cross between a young hip bar and a Dutch karaoke venue. The music included the standard embarassing 80s karaoke faves with a smattering of Dutch hits, belted out by whichever crowd of dancers happened to be on the stage at the moment.

I got home around 4:30, in time to get five hours of sleep before a few students in my international student group arrived for the breakfast I had, during a moment of regrettably poor planning, promised to make. I had a wicked hangover and could barely muster friendly conversation; when they left I went back to sleep. I slept for much of the day. What a waste.

And now my clock is all backwards. In appeasement to my body I skipped going out tonite and have instead been working. The hours after midnite can be so productive, and since tomorrow is a Sunday I can sleep in. It would be nice to be doing this work in studio though, surrounded by a few of my red-eyed classmates. Is it possible that after only one short month, I actually miss Lawrence Hall?

Tonight I learned to play lacrosse.

Natalie, Mariecarmen, Maria and I biked twenty minutes to the sports complex, where city teams can use public fields. All of these fields were uncharacteristically covered in snow, but no one seemed to mind. There were lots of soccer games going on with players of all ages. We were the only field playing lacrosse – half the field for the men’s team and half for us.

The men were considerably more numerous and more padded than we were – men’s lacrosse is a contact sport, and women’s lacrosse is not. Particularly the variety we were playing. The women’s team is brand new to Amsterdam; many Dutch have never heard of lacrosse. So we ran back and forth passing the ball, learning to catch and throw and scoop and… what would it be called? The lacrosse equivalent of dribbling.

It was a madly good time, crunching across the snowy field in the freezing cold, yelling encouragement in a mix of English and Spanish. Also I got to feel in shape for the first time in a while. Though I’ve been walking miles, I haven’t been doing anything very strenuous. And it didn’t hurt my fitness self-esteem to be surrounded by chain smokers. Slender and sporty as most of the team was, they were also sweaty and breathless. Not porn star sweaty and breathless. Emphysema sweaty and breathless.

Have I mentioned yet how everyone here smokes all the time? Before, during and after drinks, coffee, and meals. While watching TV. While walking. While biking. While talking on one’s cell phone. I don’t know if it’s all the Dutch – perhaps it’s more just the student population, both foreign and domestic.

Now I’ve always been something of an enthusiastic second-hand smoker. I enjoy cigarette smoke, and I seek out smoky bars and smoky curbside gatherings. But the smoking here is a little out of control for me. Sometimes after an evening of dinner and drinks I realize that I have not had one single breath of clear air in four hours. And I don’t think smoke enhances the taste of a meal. Even a Dutch meal.

Alas, it’s just part of the atmosphere. So I grin and bear it and breathe through my nose. The up side is that with all the ambient smoke, I hardly crave a cigarette of my own. And meanwhile I’m right at the front of the lacrosse team when we do laps.

It’s 2:30 on a Monday afternoon. Hoske down the hall just woke up; he’s watching Robin Williams stand up on his laptop. I can’t hear the routine, but I can hear him break out laughing every 2 – 3 minutes. Natalie is making lunch. The three of us plus Chiake from Japan and Gail and Stephanie from Belgium were at Club Escape until 4 a.m. for their Sundae nite. We danced for hours and then we biked home, although I got a lift on the back of Hoske’s bike because mine was stolen. This is pretty common. In the spirit of Save the Earth t-shirts everywhere, in Amsterdam you don’t inherit a bike from your parents, you borrow it from its future owners. In any case riding on the back of a bike through the Amsterdam pre-dawn in lightly falling snow after a nite of dancing is about as good as it gets, I think. So the bike whatever.

Unlike Hoske and Natalie, I had to wake up today during what would conventionally be considered morning. Specifically, 7:45. Actually 8:15 after a few snoozes. My cell phone snooze button is only five minutes, so this involves snoozing six times. It doesn’t lead to a very satisfying sleep, but it does leave you with the impression you are getting a lot more extra snooze than half an hour.

I went to Dutch class and learned to give directions and use direct objects. The former is pretty useless since anyone I could conceivably give directions to in Amsterdam would not be speaking Dutch. But direct objects will no doubt come in handy.

On my way home I stopped on the Kalverstraat, the main downtown shopping street, to pick up a pair of sneakers, because I am apparently going to start playing lacrosse. I have never played lacrosse, or, if you want to get all technical, any field sport, but the team is so small they don’t seem to mind. When I was in Australia I declined an invitation to join the women’s Aussie rules football team, and I always regretted it. Not that lacrosse is a characteristically Dutch sport in any way. But at least I will get to run around once a week and meet some people.

I don’t know what’s going on with sneaker style in the rest of the world, but here it’s a disaster. Seventies sneakers are making a comeback: thin flat sole, no tread, no bridge, narrow toes, Easter colors. After stopping in about fifteen stores – every fifth store on the Kalverstraat being a shoe store – I managed to find some dark blue All Star reissues that were thirty Euros and not made in China. Lacrosse here I come.

I emerged with my new oldschool shoes into a huge snowstorm. Huge fluffy wet snowflakes came down in wide drifts and stuck to everything. They covered all the streets and roofs, and fell quietly into the canals. Real winter, for half an hour.

The first week was a week of disorientation. The second week was a week of exploration. The third week has been a week of working my ass off.

My intensive Dutch class happens every weekday morning from nine until one. We are expected to do at least three hours of homework each night. Already in six lessons we have covered about what I learned in two years of high school French. Have I mentioned recently my ongoing resentment for American language education?

There are eleven students in my class: two from the US, and one each from Peru, Cuba, Spain, Hungary, Kazakhstan, South Africa, the UK, Yemen, and Poland. Half of us are students at the University of Amsterdam, and the other half are people with jobs or significant others that require some knowledge of Dutch.

Each morning we gather in a small classroom to order hypothetical coffees and pizzas, and to speak in short sentences about what time it is and what kind of furniture we have. After about three remarks on any of these topics, our vocabulary is exhausted. Yesterday we wrote happy birthday postcards to each other. The one I received read, loosely translated, Dear Jenn, Happy birthday. How old are you becoming? I live in Amsterdam. Today is Tuesday.

Dutch is easier to read than other languages I have encountered, including Spanish. The conjugations, for example, are straightforward and regular. And you often encounter words like appel, melk, brood. But hearing or speaking Dutch is an entirely different matter. The pronunciation is completely unintuitive: every vowel makes a sound that approximates, but is not quite the same as, a different vowel in English. (I’m going to make a reference to at least one stunningly mediocre 90s movie each week. Does anyone remember the party planner character in the Steve Martin remake of Father of the Bride? It’s like that.) So a Dutch “ee” is almost like an English “ay,” but not quite. You can’t just read it as “ay” and get away with it. And while seeing the word “brood” on a textbook page under a cute little picture labeled “de bakker” might lead one to believe this is just like silly English, it is another matter entirely to hear it out loud, when the “r” is trilled and the “oo” sounds like an “oh” morphing into an “uh.” Likewise for attempting to generate the word oneself.

The upside to all this effort is that if you do manage to speak Dutch properly, it has the familiar cadence of German but with a bubbly Nordic musicality. It is really sexy. Not a candlelight Italian / French kind of sexy, but a cute, hot, Milla Jovovich in the Fifth Element kind of sexy. And Milla has been on the (explicitly stated or implicitly understood) Five People You’re Definitely Allowed to Cheat With List of, at minimum, two people I’ve dated.

I guess the other part of the upside is that I will actually be able to communicate in Dutch, and to understand some of the Dutch publications I am rapidly accumulating for my thesis. At some point I hope to graduate from Papa Wapper en het rode vrachtwagentje (Papa Wapper and his little red firetruck) to Vier visies op een waterfront (Four visions on a waterfront).

When I am both Milla sexy and well versed in local urban planning issues, then and only then will I feel that all this pizza ordering has paid off.

it’s 2:30 a.m. and you’re sitting in a room in amsterdam with a guy cutting his sixth line of coke with a mastercard on an imposter delftware plate and a girl obsessively twisting her hair to the sounds of the blasting yeah yeah yeahs video playing on a dell laptop and you have a 10 a.m. train ticket to the hague and the guy says to you we’re going to this punk club don’t bring anything you don’t want stolen don’t wear anything you don’t want beer on try not to pick any fights want to go?

and the answer i guess is how often are you young and awake in amsterdam with an invitation to a club that’s not in your already well worn lonely planet guidebook, so you get up and go put on your boots.

I got home ten minutes ago from five hours in a bar with a South African, a Russian (from Kazakstan), a Hungarian (who grew up in Transylvania), and a Peruvian. Then a Polish boy walked me home. Between the six of us there were approximately fifteen languages. Of course, I could have left and that would have remained true. Fucking Americans.

I am sitting at my computer about to write about it all, but a guy just popped his head in and said they’re having beers down the hall. So.

This week has brought lots of changes. For example, I am no longer the only person living at Plantage Muidergracht 20. I now share the six-story, fifty-flat building with Natalie from Venezuela and Hoske from Iceland. I don’t see them often, since they both immediately started classes, but at least I occasionally encounter them in the kitchen, ending my Twilight Zonesque solo existence. Another big perk is that last night I actually went out after dark. During the past two weeks I’ve mostly come home by seven or eight and stayed in. I was exhausted from walking around all day, unsure of where to go, and generally using nighttime as a chance to work on my Dutch and my thesis. But shit. I was going a little crazy, being in this great city and not going out at night.

So Hoske from Iceland, Gail from Belgium, and I went to a few bars and talked about geography, language, and how much better the food is in the parts of the world where we are not currently living. Namely, everywhere but the Netherlands. Dutch cuisine comprises three key dishes: (1) pea soup with ham, (2) raw herring, and (3) stamppot (lit. mashed pot), which is exactly what you might think it is, unless you are an eighteen year old stoned English tourist in which case it is not at all what you think it is, but you’re probably laughing at the name anyway. Mashed pot, the Stoned Wheat Thins of the Netherlands.

We drank the requisite light beer, served in small glasses packing a deceptively high alcohol content, and bounced around two major nightspots, Rembrandtplein and Leidseplein. We returned a bit after 2, which made my 7:30 wakeup a little unpleasant.

I’ve found a new route to my class that lets me leave fifteen minutes later, when it doesn’t feel quite so much like the middle of the night. About ten minutes into my walk the streetlights and bridgelights pop off, which is a little like being in a movie. Like the end of As Good As It Gets.

My new route also brings me across the Dam, a large public plaza, just at nine o’clock when the bells of the towering Niewe Kerk are sounding. The sound fills the plaza and echoes off all the stone walks and buildings and rings in the air. Again, movie.

Several years ago I spent six hours in Sienna, and I instantly wanted to move there. Not hypothetically or metaphorically or eventually, but really and immediately. I felt a pull to live in Sienna so strong that I would have picked up and relocated with the flimsiest excuse. The main cause for this force was the big wooden doorways. The doorways were so out of proportion to the tiny streets, and I could imagine living there and going through one of those doorways every day, and it making every day magic. It is how I felt living in New York City and walking into Prospect Park each morning, and how I felt living in Monteverde and walking across the Rio Guacimal each afternoon. Certain places have a set of colors, textures, and sounds so completely unlike anywhere else that passing through them gives you this self-contained moment, when everything feels complete and right and perfect. And it is near impossible to pass through a place like this every day and not become acutely aware of the blessing of your life. In case you weren’t already.

Walking across the Dam as the sky is filling with light and the church bells are clanging is that place in Amsterdam. Hordes of Dutch commuters pedal by on their bicycles. Pigeons coo and scatter. My footsteps crack on the small cold stones where people have gathered, traded, judged, worshiped, and celebrated for seven hundred years. (It was maybe just like this – maybe almost exactly the same – walking across this square in 1500.)

So. I was going to write about Dutch class, but I’ll save that for later. I’m now going to sit back and daydream about hoop skirts.

Let me start by saying that the Netherlands is, unquestionably, a nation of designers. More design hours have been invested in the average Dutch child’s sock than are spent in the design of a typical American art museum.

This reality makes the Dutch toilet even more of an enigma. Why, for God’s sake why?, I ask myself each time I use one.

Toilets in America and in much of the free world, as you may be aware, have a deep, rounded basin with a hole in the back. Dutch toilets have a shallow, flat basin with (here’s the kicker) a deep hole in the front. This has two main consequences, neither of which have any apparent design advantage.

The first consequence is that pee entering a Dutch toilet from someone in a sitting position shoots down a deep abyss, finally splashing into a pool of water at the base of a ceramic cylinder. It is shockingly loud. This is a small country, and from my room I can tell when someone in it is peeing.

The second consequence is that solid matter deposited in a toilet does not disappear anonymously down a secret escape hatch, but instead remains there, displayed as if on a plate, until the toilet is flushed and a jet of water struggles to send it all the way across the flat surface and down the front pipe. It is a long and rarely successful journey. The subsequent re-flushing negates any sort of water conservation that I can only hope was the impetus for mass-producing such an irritating appliance.

Ah, the glamorous life of a student abroad in Europe.

My alarm – which is actually my cell phone, since I have no clock – goes off at 7:45: a synthesizer-swing melody that, when accompanied by the rattling of the vibrating phone on my night table, jolts me awake. Even though, once again, I was up until 3:30 tossing and turning.

One wall of my room is a floor-to-ceiling window, and it is pitch black. Welcome to winter in the northern latitudes.

I fumble around and check my pockets twice: cell phone, pen, a few euros, photocopy of my passport, strippenkart for unexpected tram rides, map, keys. After the little mugging incident I decided not to carry a bag anymore. I also refused to carry a bag in New York, so I never got into the habit, but Erin gave me this really fantastic one for my birthday last month, with lots of pockets. I filled it with drawing implements and gum and bandaids and almost anything I or anyone in my vicinity could possibly need, and I really enjoyed it for the week it was in circulation. I felt so prepared. Alas. Now my book and my sketchbook rest in my left arm, and a bright orange clementine dangles in a bright red mesh bag from my right. Walking down the street I try hard to project an appearance of confidence and complete worthlessness.

Three concentric U-shaped canals cup central Amsterdam. I live on the top right of the outer U, and my Dutch class is on the top left of the inner U. An average American crow flying in a characteristically crowish straight line across the U would complete this journey in about fifteen minutes. Alas, this is not how a biped experiences Amsterdam (wait... are crows considered bipeds?). Despite it being a dramatically longer route, meter-wise, I travel down and then back up the U, avoiding the numerous canals, dead ends, and unpredictable turns of the central city. It’s like going from Florida to Baha via the Great Lakes, in order to avoid the mess that is Texas. Hypothetically, of course.

Down three flights of stairs and out the door onto Plantage Muidergracht. It is dark and quiet on my street, with just a single bicyclist pedaling by. In my sweater and scarf I am warm enough. A left turn over the first canal onto Niewe Kerkstraat. A few more bicycles, including several parents pulling over to drop their children at Dikkey Dik, a nursery school. I reach the Amstel, and the sky is showing the faintest hints of morning. On the horizon are a few streaks of pink.

I cross the Amstel on a wide white bridge outlined in large yellowing lightbulbs and walk along its west side. The street follows the canal, but the water itself is obscured by houseboats. I meander around Christmas trees that have been abandoned on the sidewalks during the past week. At Herengracht, the inner U, I turn left and begin my circuitous journey. As I move west the sky lightens, and more people walk and pedal by. Homes and offices share the same blocks, so there is as much coming as going. At intersections with the streets that radiate from the center – Utrechtstraat, Vijselstraat, Leidsestraat – cars pass and trams clang. Between these it remains quiet, the narrow brick streets sending the small shoe shuffles and bike tire clicks out over the water.

At Huidenstraat I turn right, and after a narrow, dark block of overhanging buildings, the street opens up into the (rhymes with “Mao”) Spui. The Spui is my favorite square: cobbled and open, scattered benches, surrounded by a book shop, a magazine shop, and a bar that in the morning serves coffee to tables of people sitting in front looking out.

As quickly as the sky opens it closes again and I am back down Spuistraat, with the strip of sky overhead now light blue and clear. A few blocks down is my building.

I wish this commute upon everyone.