28 february 2005

I think I have a bar.

Like, the kind of place where I know all the bartenders, and they know me. I know when they work. I know what they serve, and what they make best, and what it costs. I know where each of them is from, and how long they’ve been here, and at least one version of why.

I know the other regulars. I can go there at 8 pm on a Monday or 3 am on a Saturday and enjoy it the same.

I can go alone.

My bar is called the Doos. It is pronounced, more or less, dose. It is an unglamorous, unmarked, illegal bar underneath a highrise. From the outside it looks like a big black utility door, but when you heave it open – which you never would – there is a bar inside. A poorly lit, poorly painted, marvelous bar I love. It feels like the basement that one of your friends had in high school, a big damp basement where the adults didn’t venture, where you could stay up all night and be loud and play bad music and smoke pot and watch movies and make out and throw parties. All of these things happen at the Doos. Except there is a full bar, just like you would have had in high school if you could have.

In high school, my friends didn’t drink. We dressed up in funny costumes and hung out at Barnes & Noble or Houlihans. Such is the curse of the suburbs.

But now I have a bar. I have never had a bar before.

From now on, wherever I live, I will have a bar.

27 february 2005

This weekend the Amsterdam Lions lacrosse team hosted an invitational tournament.

You forgot about the lacrosse thing, right? You read that a few months ago and thought, “What the fuck is Jenn thinking? This is going to be gone and forgotten in… let’s say, generously, six days.”

Not so! Every Wednesday nite since it all began, I have been biking to the soccer fields for lacrosse practice. The women’s team now has about fifteen members. We practice in the rain, the snow, the – well, these are pretty much the only options for February evenings in Amsterdam.

The men’s team has more than twenty members, and they are well established. They have happily helped us on our way. Lacrosse is largely unknown in most of Europe, so lacrosse players are eager to find and support each other. Running into another European lacrosse player is kind of like meeting another person who plays the accordion, or i.d.s ferns, or speaks Klingon. Instant camaraderie of the obscure.

The men’s and women’s teams now share the field, and the clubhouse, and the website, of the Amsterdam Lions. That’s right, there’s a website! www.alax.nl – which is actually quite a clever name, but I won’t get into why.

Anyway a while back a team from London contacted the Lions, probably because they wanted an excuse to come to Amsterdam to smoke pot and go to the red light district. They picked a weekend for the tournament, and then invited men’s teams from Utrecht and Masstricht, two other cities in the Netherlands. When the women’s team started shaping up, we were scheduled in against the Utrecht women.

Saturday was all men’s games. Men’s lacrosse is a lot more violent than women’s lacrosse, and a lot of fun to watch. It’s got some of the powerful anger of ice hockey. When the men aren’t slamming into each other, they also do lots of impressive stick work.

In the evening we ate spaghetti in the club house and went for drinks, eventually ending up at a little unmarked club on the Leidseplein. It was a cool venue but some of the British guys were being really obnoxious, and I was feeling cranky at everyone bumping into me. Then I met Dan, a civil engineer from London. “You’re a civil engineer?” I asked excitedly. “Yes,” he answered, “it means I design bridges, sewage systems…”

“I know!” I practically burst out. “Infrastructure!” I proceeded to tell him about how cool I thought infrastructure was. He listened with what can only be described as mounting skepticism. It was as if he had introduced himself as a personal injury lawyer, and I had warmly and gleefully declared, “Personal injury law! That is so critical and yet so undervalued by society! Tell me ALL ABOUT IT.” Which is pretty much how I reacted to civil engineering, only I meant it. I can’t believe it either, but apparently civil engineers don’t get this sort of thing very often. It saved my nite.

Approximately four hours after said nite ended, I woke up for our Sunday game. Amsterdam was covered in an inch of snow. The men had the first game of the day, so as they played we ran laps around the white field and worked through some drills. At noon we were on.

Let me call attention to two things:

(1) Lacrosse is played on a soccer field. A normal team has eleven players on the field at any time, but since the Utrecht women were short on players, we went nine-on-nine.

(2) Good lacrosse involves a lot of passing, because the field is large. Passing is faster, and doesn’t tire out the players. But passing and, more specifically, catching, require skills. Skills that we, as a new team, are still developing.

Consequently, our game involved quite a lot of running. A large amount of this running is done by the midfielders. I am a midfielder.

I bring this up specifically for the benefit of my friend Joshua who, upon hearing of our upcoming tournament, wrote to me… well, let me just paste in the instant messaging dialogue right here.

joshua : having a hard time picturing you playing lacrosse
jenn: why's that?
joshua : i guess my only athletic experience with you involved drinking & spinning aroung [sic] til we fall on the ground while trying to reach a ? (frisbee?)
joshua : not even sure i have seen you run..

So. Now I run.

In fact, by the end of the first half I had done so much running I thought I might DIE. But I didn’t, and then we won! I even scored a goal. I’m not sure I’ve ever scored a goal at anything.

24 february 2005

Today I went to bed at six a.m.

I woke up at one.

I shopped until 2, cooked until 6:53. That’s what time it is now. Soon between six and ten people will fill my little living room to eat shitake risotto and gnocchi puttanesca and drink vodka with lemon soda. It’s amazing what you can do with an unreasonable budget and all day to cook.

I like to share food with people. People like to eat, and they like company. You can meet someone from a different country and feel fairly confident that they will enjoy a dinner with others.

Also you need to get everyone a little drunk. This makes people who would otherwise be uncomfortable much more comfortable. You wouldn’t think it would be so easy, but that’s almost all it takes.

Food is how I have met many people here. Hi, I’m Jenn, here’s where I live with my books and my shoes and here’s the bread I like. I learned this from Jeff and Mia in Brooklyn. Thank you, Jeff and Mia.

It’s now seven on the dot. No one is here yet, but they will be here soon. Late is not so fashionable in the Netherlands. I think my bell will ring by 7:10. Of course, we won’t eat for a while yet, because Spaniards are involved. We’ll be lucky if the Spaniards show up by nine.

23 february 2005

Today I was a complete failure. After the first twenty minutes or so of being a failure, though, the defense mechanisms kick in. You can actually get used to being a failure with alarming ease.

I spent six hours in meetings that were held largely in Dutch. The other participants made a valient effort to begin conversation in English, but, understandably, it didn't last. Actually, I understood a surprising smattering of words. But this didn’t matter much. To me, it was something like this:

“I think the best way to start the project about the… mmm… (switch to Dutch) city dutch dutch big dutch dutch dutch dutch dutch. And I think that dutch dutch environment dutch if we dutch dutch dutch alone. But it is important to dutch dutch dutch dutch dutch. Dutch dutch dutch. Dutch dutch 1982. Dutch until dutch dutch canals dutch. True! True!”

And so on.

On the plus side, I am excelling at Spanish. Not just your garden variety Spanish – although I am getting good at the Spain lisp – but specifically your inexcusably filthy Venezuelan Spanish. I can now belt out, among other choice phrases: it’s fucking cold!, what the fuck?, let’s get the fuck out of here!, and give me that fucking thing!. This may sound simple, but Venezuelan Spanish is more colorful than English, so this “fuck” is not accomplished with a single Spanish explative. For example, “Give me that fucking thing,” translates, not so roughly, to, “Give me that little vagina!”

Yeah, I'm a fucking posterchild for the benefits of foreign exchange.

even kumquats

This morning I discovered something marvelous. The Noodermarkt, an outdoor market two blocks from my new flat, becomes an organic food market on Saturdays. While there are about a dozen outdoor markets around Amsterdam – specializing in everything from antiques to clothes to vegetables to books – this is the only organic food market. Vendors sell the whole pantry: jars of strawberry preserves, stacks of ripening cheeses, loaves of grainy breads, bottles of fresh squeezed apple juice, bags of dried pinto beans, mountains of mushrooms. Owing to my lack of familiarity with the metric system, I managed to spend four dollars on ten small clementines, but other than that it was quite successful. I also brought home broccoli, bananas, and a thick biography of Thomas Huxley. (There's also a book vendor.)

Up to this point I regret to admit that I have been doing much of my shopping at Albert Hein, a chain of generic, overpriced, and generally unpleasant grocery stores. Chain stores are not an Amsterdam phenomenon, and Albert Hein is the glaring exception: somewhere in every neighborhood is the glowing blue AH sign. I hate to shop there, but it was always the easy way out. Albert Hein is open late, the prices are clearly marked, and they are Amsterdam’s version of one-stop shopping. But of course, this all comes at a price. The produce is bleak and far too well traveled, the cheeses are bland and mass-produced, and the vast majority of food is buried under several layers of packaging.

I don’t know yet where Amsterdam gets most of its food. The Netherlands is suffering the same pressures on agricultural land as most developed nations, and much of the remaining ag land is devoted to flower bulbs. Though the Noordermarkt looked like Eugene’s Saturday Market or Union Square’s Greenmarket, the vendors here did not always appear to be the growers.

But mmmmm. Fresh broccoli. Non-Chiquita bananas. Ten kinds of apples.

16 feb 2005

When I come home the traffic lights are black or blinking. Amsterdam is awake but not in cars – it is awake on foot and on bike, on last trams and nightbuses. It is awake tucked into the corners of small dark pubs and crammed across crowded discoteque dancefloors.

When I come home the streets seem empty but I hear the people; their laughter leaps between the buildings and off the water. Only at this hour could one mistake the Dutch for a boisterous people, and even then one can not be sure, in all the darkness, who the voices are attached to.

The bridge before my flat is too steep for my third-hand bike, so I straddle the frame and scoot it up with my feet, one step at a time, and at the peak I jump up and coast home.

vday

It is a sunny, windy Valentine’s Day here in Amsterdam. No conventional valentines for me, although I met a cool Dutch guitarist named Maarten at a club the other nite, and he was pretty impressed I could spell his name correctly. Also a cute girl gave me a rose while I was checking my email this morning. She gave one to everyone. It was nice anyway.

For now I have given my heart to the city. I have all the symptoms of new love… I walk around dreamily and laugh for no reason, my stomach flutters and my mind wanders. Amsterdam is not the first place I’ve fallen in love with. (For Nikki, Amsterdam is not the first place with which I’ve fallen in love.) The list is long. But that does not make the new love any less intense. Does this happen to everyone? Maybe this is one of the main reasons I like to travel so much. Socially sanctioned, intimate love affairs that are always fresh and never end badly.
I’m a serial geographist.

Dutch guys are not really my type. They are tall, blond, and straightforward, whereas I prefer short, sharp, and quirky. But Dutch streetscapes! (straatbeelden.) These leave me breathless. Bricks and cobble. Pediments, cornices, tiles, stoops, gables. Rows of outdoor window shades pulled down when the sun is bright, transforming flat rectangular façades into checkerboards of orange and yellow. Canals! Wide green canals spanned with lit-up bridges, and narrow dark canals lined with patched-up rowboats.

I’ve known Amsterdam long enough now that I can’t be completely naïve. The honeymoon period had to end. In an unfortunate continuation of a long-running (and perhaps worthy of further analysis) pattern, I have once again ended up with a lover whose drug habits I do not share. And, despite its late nites and urban opportunities, I would not call Amsterdam passionate. It is, by necessity, a little too practical for the kind of impulsiveness that feeds passion.

Still I am, for the moment, head over heels. I know we can’t last. I don’t care. I am sitting at my desk, looking out my window at the gray sky and the red osier dogwood and the rows of slick wet roof tiles, and I feel chosen.

Love works in mysterious ways.

10 february 2005

Thankfully the intro period has ended. Now everyone has started classes, except for me. The one course I planned to take turns out to be independent laboratory work, and when I contacted the professor to see if I could join, he responded in a whole page of complicated Dutch. The general message was: no.

So mostly I’m continuing my Dutch studies and reading for my thesis. I’ve learned lots of good Dutch design words: opzet, bebouwingstypologieen, vogelvlucht (layout, building typologies, bird’s eye view).

I found the most fantastic book about IJburg, the new city district I am researching. It is a series of islands that is being built in the middle of the water to accommodate the growing population. They are just building the land, out of sand. Building land is so commonplace to the Dutch that it is hard to find books about it, but I have been thorough. I’ve scoured architecture bookshops, historical museum shops, and the Amsterdam Municipal Archives. Once in a while as I am scanning a shelf I come upon a find like Amsterdam Planning 1928-2003, and I jump giddily and pull it off the shelf. The shopkeeper looks up suspiciously.

But my best find so far was the book about IJburg, called Zeven miljoen kuub zand – seven million cubic metres of sand, the amount it took to build phase one of IJburg. It is a photographic record of the first islands’ emergence, peppered with semi-technical explanations in Dutch and also, thankfully, in English.

Next I will tackle Diemerzeedijk: Zand Erover, Sand Across the Diemer Sea Dike. This one’s just in Dutch. Luckily my brain always reads foreign languages long, long before being able to hear or speak them. So with my trusty New Routledge dictionary I think I will be able to glean at least some key information about the Diemerzeedijk, even though at this point I still get stumped at the part of the grocery store transaction where the clerk asks if I want a receipt.

6 february 2005

Last nite I ate pasta with eight international students at the house of Emile, our straightedge vegan group leader. He snuck tofu into the tomato sauce to fool the adamant carnivore from Peru, who turned down a dish at the introduction party when he found out there was no meat in it. Emile lives in a small flat in one of Amsterdam’s “bad” neighborhoods. We ate at folding chairs around a card table surrounded by books in six languages and hundreds of cds, under a Che Guevara banner. Emile also runs track and plays Nintendo.

The way people piece themselves together is so fucking fantastic.

Emile keeps a guest book. When he said, “This is my guest book,” I squinted with confusion at the idea of an individual unaffiliated with a hotel or museum doing this, and he thought perhaps he had chosen the wrong English words. But his guest book is splendid. His flat has hosted dozens of guests over the years – travelers, friends, animal rights activists, touring hardcore bands, randomly encountered wayward youths. They all sign the book, in Dutch or English or their own languages, and draw pictures and scrawl phrases like “vegan power”. It’s six years of who has slept on the sofa. And it’s so surprising at first, and then it seems so obvious. Why do people find it so hard to open up their homes? (Sidebar: does anyone else remember studying the guest / host relationship as a theme in the Odyssey?)

Filip taught us Swedish drinking games, which went over well with the three Spanish guys who are so young, dumb, and etc. that it’s hard to have any sort of conversation with them. Regina asked Emile to put on some music, and he asked her what kind. Your favorite, she said. He sat very still. That would scare you away, he said.

Around midnight we rallied for the closing party, charmingly themed “Heaven and Hell.” The theme idea is supposed to inspire costume-wearing, but a costume party is a stupid idea when the partygoers are international students who mostly arrived three days earlier with two suitcases each. Furthermore “Heaven and Hell” is a lame theme. It just doesn’t afford many options, particularly when language barriers make wordplay inaccessible. “Shit!” said one girl the first day when the party announcement was made. “I packed all my costumes except my angel and devil ones.”

Last term the theme was "Stoplight": red means I’m taken, yellow means approachable, green means jump me. Emile observed, “It might as well have been called 'Girls Wear Red, Boys Wear Green.'”

Overall the party was predictable but fun. When it ended at four I hitched a bike ride to my old residence for the tail end of Laura’s going away party. Sometime in the early morning I fell asleep on the couch of my old lounge, covered by a large abandoned towel. I am admitting this because I think it will make you laugh. I don’t care if you laugh with pity or joy or damn, been there. It was a really good time.

5 february 2005

I danced last nite until 5 am. I woke up this morning at 11. For a dance lesson.

Today’s intro schedule started with a sample class at the CREA, a student arts consortium. During the year they host yoga, painting, ceramics, drama, and a whole menu of other offerings for students and the general public. Today we had four choices, and since I didn’t think improvisational theater would be so successful with an international crowd, I went with hiphop / breakdancing. This was easily the highlight of the intro period, especially the part where I got to do the robot thing. The head balances were marginally less enjoyable with my general fatigue.

The program listed the afternoon activity as “Formal Welcome Reception,” which sounded about as appealing as two more hours of head balances. I tried to convince my dance class to skip out, but they all seemed to feel obligated to attend. I found this unsettling. No one wanted to go, but they felt it was important to do what the program told them to do. So I skipped alone.

I went to the office of De Key, the housing agency that handles student flats for the university. Housing in Amsterdam is extremely tight – waiting lists for rentals are years long – so when De Key offered me accommodation I snatched it up. What they offered me, however, was one apartment for January and one apartment for the rest of my stay. This weekend I had to move.

I left behind my big single room with friendly neighbors and a canal view for the unknown. But the unknown, as it turns out, is pretty fab. I now live in a student building on the Prinsengracht, one of the three canals that surround the city center. It is in the Jordaan neighborhood, one of the coolest neighborhoods to live in in the city. The Jordaan is like the West Village or the Left Bank… lots of small stone streets with cafes, galleries, bookstores, and boutiques. The Jordaan has become more upscale in the past few years, so it’s losing some of its grit, and the artists, as always, are fleeing or fled. But it’s beautiful.

My building is a ten minute walk from Amsterdam’s famous Vondelpark, and for the landscape architects among you it is also close to Katherine Gustafson’s new Westerpark. I live one block from Anne Frank’s house. This is strange.

My room is on the ground floor – no more view – but there are huge windows. It is supposed to be a double, so there is a little loft-like balcony for one of the residents, but so far no one else has showed up. It is possible I will get to live alone. The woman I was going to live with, a Russian named Natalia, found out just last week that her request for a room change had been granted. Perhaps, since she is moving last-minute, they didn’t put anyone else in her place.

Natalia’s move was a close call for me. She seems friendly, but she describes herself as “pathologically clean.” As I was moving in, she excused herself to “go disinfect the new room.” As many of you are aware, I am rarely mistaken for “pathologically clean.” I find most cleaning products far more objectionable than the dirt they are designed to eradicate. I separate cleaning activities into the essential (taking out the trash, rinsing the cutting board) and the neurotic (mopping, laundering denim). I don’t like too many dishes in the sink, and I hate hair in the bathroom. But my things tend to congregate in small and numerous piles, and my shoes prefer to roam freely about the house. (It’s hardly my fault if my possessions are gregarious.) I like to live in a space that looks like someone lives there. So Natalia’s move was definitely for the best.

My small collection of personal belongings hardly fills the two-person space, so I did a little garbage looting. (I shutter to think what Natalia would say.) Brooklynites did this all the time, but I haven’t seen any Amsterdammers do it. But I could hardly help myself when I passed a small succulent plant in a terra cotta pot sitting on top of a pile of garbage bags. Little Sander now lives on my coffee table. I also found a small orange rug and three of those reed beach mats, neatly rolled and tied up with a bow on the curb. Home sweet home.

4 february 2005

I am in the midst of the International Student Network’s introduction period for new arrivals. UGH.

As it turns out, some time in the past five years I have become old and bitter. This has come as quite a surprise to me, and I resent the ISN intro days for bringing it to my attention. But don’t get me wrong. There’s lots of other stuff I resent about the ISN intro days too.

The average age of the 150 students doing the intro seems to be about 21, and the general range is 19 to 23. There are exceptions, of course… a handful of over-25ers. But the organizers – Dutch students in the 19-to-23 range themselves – assigned groups randomly. So our ten-student groups are entirely arbitrary: nine women, or six Italians, or one master’s student.

To be fair my group is made up of nice people. They all think I am really old. And, although at this point in my life I think of “old” as “over seventy,” relative to my group I am old. They really like to get drunk. (Not in a dark way.) They think of everything as flirting: if a guy and a girl talk or dance, everyone is like oooo! a couple! And they don’t have much patience for things that don’t involve either drinking or flirting. They are friendly, funny, and… did I say nice already?

I’m not such a fan of “nice” anymore. I appreciate many qualities that get confused with nice: polite, generous, punctual, open, helpful, enthusiastic, etc. But just nice? Nice creeps me out.

Additionally I don’t respond well to anything that involves a group of 150 people doing the same thing. I am constantly thinking, “Baaaahhhh.”

We all met Thursday morning. We got in our groups, drank weak coffee, and introduced ourselves. We did the what’syournamewhereareyoufromwhatareyoustudying thing. At this point I was about ready to go, but I decided to stick out the day, mostly out of bitter curiosity. We had a tour of the city, which I am by now familiar with, and drank a beer in a bland bar. In the evening we had drinks at the Atrium, a centrally located university bar / cafeteria that serves as a main student meeting place.

Some of my friends arrived after a while – international students who have been here since September. They wanted to come check out the fresh meat. I sat on a table drinking my beer, scanning the room for anyone who looked like they didn’t want to be there. I really wanted to meet anyone else who thought this was annoying. But even the meaner looking characters just seemed like kids dressed angry.

Around two we finally took off for Paradiso, a dance club in an old church. I love dance clubs here: the crowd is almost always an interesting mix of very different people. Regardless of the venue, there are guys who look like they’re in a motorcycle gang and girls who look like they’re at a beach party, vice versa, and everything in between. And the music is similarly varied. Though the bigger clubs are house on most nights, it is common to hear a 70s disco hit or a salsa number thrown in every ten minutes. The crowd pauses for a second, reorients, and continues dancing.

Amsterdam clubs are also surprisingly unintimidating. Most of them don’t do the whole look-you-over-at-the-door thing, which is probably one reason the crowds are so diverse. I really hate that shit, and it kept me from going out to clubs during the seven years I lived in NYC, where, rumor has it, there are some pretty good places to dance. Dancing in Amsterdam is more like dancing in Eugene: if you show up and you move, people will smile and give you space.

Paradiso is great because the main dance floor is in the former church sanctuary, so the ceiling is miles overhead. The stained glass windows have been incorporated in the lighting effects, so they flash on and off with the beat. It is a very celebratory atmosphere. And no one asked me what my major was.

plant moment

A few days ago I was walking home from class by a new route when I passed a high metal fence with a French garden behind it, occupying an unusual amount of space on an otherwise densely built-up block. A small plaque informed me that this was the garden of the Willet-Holthuysen canal house, open to the public. I walked around to the front entrance.

One of the best finds of Amsterdam is the Museumkaart. Thirty euro gets you this multicolored plastic card, which grants you free entrance to hundreds of museums all around the Netherlands for an entire year. Ordinarily I might have walked right by the Willet-Holthuysen canal house, or the Maritime Museum, and for sure the Bible Museum – but all of these and more have been little treasures I have initially explored because of the free ticket in.

The three-story Willet-Holthuysen house on the Herengracht canal was left to the city in 1895 by its last owners, Abraham Willet and – this is the best I can do – Mrs. Willet-Holthuysen. Much of the original interior has been preserved and restored, so it is a glimpse into the life of the wealthy Amsterdam elite around the turn of the century: hand-made flocked wallpaper, immense chandeliers, and imported table service for 24.

For me, though, the best part was the garden. The original garden was destroyed during WWII, but afterwards a French garden was planted, since this was the style in late nineteenth century Amsterdam. The design was symmetrical and not particularly exciting, and the statuary was covered up for the winter. But the plants… the plants were the surprise.

There they were in predictable rows, wearily drooping with January: Digitalis, Lonicera, Vinca minor, Acanthus mollis, little hedges of Ilex aquifolium. Not the most stunning or rare plants, and certainly not my favorites. But: plants I knew.

I never knew the names and faces of plants until a year ago, and so I have never had this sensation of recognition before. It was like running into old friends far from home. Even the Hedera helix made me smile. They all live in Oregon, and here they were abroad, just like me. I got to the Camellia sasanqua and thought, this might be blooming! And sure enough, at the bottom in the back were a few small pink flowers.

I ran into a familiar plant thousands of miles from home and knew if I looked I would find flowers. Fantastic. Thank you Ann Bettman, plants teacher extraordinaire.

typical 24 hours

3 pm Monday sitting in my room, reading big glossy books about Dutch urban planning.

6 pm Go into shared kitchen, search cabinet and fridge for something besides pasta, throw together dinner from pre-packaged pancakes, strawberry jam and chocolate spread while three-year old episode of ER plays in the lounge.

8 pm Meet up with Marie Carmen and Cris and walk to the Dos, a bar under another student flat that shows movies on Monday nites.

8: 30 – 10:30 Watch Polish gangster flick, dark and very funny. During the movie, arrivals include Laura, Gianluca, and Kiko, all Italian.

10:30 – 1:30 Hang out around a table at the Dos, drinking one-euro Grolsch beers and trying to stay with the conversation as it veers thru Spanish, English, German, and Italian.

1:30 Head to the birthday party of some Spanish student that someone at the bar knows someone who knows.

1:30 – 3:30 Drink sangria dipped from a giant white plastic trashcan while enduring Spanish dance music; check out boys at the party with Gianluca. “I come from a small village,” he says. “I was the gay community.”

3:30 Tire of the party, head back to the Dos, where a new post-party crowd is gathering. Meet Peter the bartender from New Orleans. Watch Maria from Poland / Florida beat a guy at chess.

5 Return home, sleep.

11:30 Wake up, shower, breakfast of buttered crusty bread, computer time.

1:30 Meet up with the Italians for a trip to the Allard Pierson museum of archaeology.

1:45 Stop in a cafe for a quick cup of coffee before the museum.

3:00 Still drinking coffee.