kisses

I love the European kisses goodbye. I love them because they are at once totally casual and totally meaningful.

If, for example, you meet someone you do not particularly like, you can snub him or her subtly by shaking hands goodbye. This will be attributed to your nonEuropeanness, but really you will know what it means.

Or if, for example, you talk with someone and you like them, but you don’t get to know them well enough to exchange numbers and arrange to see them again, the kisses put a warm closure on your brief encounter.

Or if, for example, you hang out all night with your friend Chris and his friend Sven who is visiting from Germany, and you and Sven have nice chemistry and prolonged eye contact but Chris drinks too much and doesn’t have the capacity either to recognize your desire for a little one-on-Sven time or to get home on his own even if he did, you and Sven might give each other goodbye kisses that linger and are dangerously close to the mouth, thus at least leaving you with a slightly reeling head and giggly breathlessness for the bicycle ride home, if not Sven.

26 may 2005, p.m.

Today it was 27 degrees out, which for you Fahrenheit losers is pretty damn hot. Unfortunately, I slept until 2pm, missing much of the sunshine; fortunately, I got out of bed at 2pm to seek out the aforementioned quiche.

To my great surprise, Maria and Lance were sitting red-eyed in the Weesperstraat sixth floor kitchen when I arrived. Lance actually groaned when he saw me come through the door.

“Quiche?” I asked.

“Quiche!” Maria demanded.

Lance is Dutch, very tall and lanky, with messy, curly brown hair. He is a national chess champion. He doesn’t say a lot but what he says is very sharp, and you somehow just know that he is a genius, and that the mere mortals who inhabit the earth must be to him a constant source of exasperation. Between the weight of this reality and his height, Lance is usually stooping: stooping over a chessboard, stooping over a bar, stooping over a table holding a cigarette. Lance does much of this stooping at the Doos; he’s usually bent into the last barstool, unless he’s downstairs doing assorted drugs with the barstaff. Last nite was no exception.

At two pm in the kitchen, Lance got up to gather the ingredients with a tremendous show of strength.

I cut broccoli and mushrooms while Lance arranged the puff pastry. Maria went to shower. Maria is Polish-American, pale white skin, short jet black hair. Tattoos. Maria likes to put on the most innocent expression possible just before saying the most inappropriate thing possible in any situation. It makes her really fun to be around. You never know when a new customer will walk into the Doos and be greeted by Maria smiling, “What can I get for you, Sir or Madam? And how's that rash?” I attribute the high quality of the Doos clientele to the fact that everyone in there has been insulted by Maria and stayed for a drink.

Maria lives on the same floor as Lance, but in her room are six rats and a large collection of pills.

As Lance and I cooked, Blanche taped architectural drawings to the kitchen wall. She is working on her final project, making an animated film about a house. Then Peter showed up. He looks like the psycho blond guy who blows up the spacecraft in Contact. He is from Louisiana, but he hasn’t lived in the States for five years. He started playing guitar.

We ate a delicious broccoli mushroom quiche, warm and brown from the oven. We got on our bikes and went to Vondelpark, lay in the sun on Peter’s old curtains, threw a frisbee back and forth. Everyone came to my place for dinner.

I love my Doos friends. I think they have no idea how much they mean to me, and they would brush it off if I told them. They are older than my exchange student friends, and sometimes the difference between 22 and 28 is surprisingly insurmountable. And they are witty. They are linguists and travelers and musicians and so on, and they drink too much and they are just the right amount of mean to each other. If I were to stay another six months – which I will not be doing, but which I would like to do – I would stay to know them better.

26 may 2005, a.m.

It’s 8 am and I just got home, and I feel so disoriented that sitting and writing about it for a few minutes could hardly make things worse. I have come home many times when the city has been waking up, but this is the first time it was officially awake, with full trams and women in daytime heels and a man shooting noxious gas out of a trailer labeled “Gum Busters,” which I guess dissolves the chewing gum from right between the street bricks. My bicycle ride home was terribly dangerous, my reflexes slow and distorted, from beer and lack of sleep. This was the first night I closed out the Doos. It wasn’t part of my plan; originally I was just going to hang out at the Alto until three or so. But the jazz ended at one and my friends went home, and so I went to the Doos.

It was a good decision; I got to chat with Peter and Maria, and receive Onno’s ambiguous but flattering kisses hello, and watch Lance kick ass at chess. (Chess! It is like computer programming, this entity I will never understand, and I know that people who get it feel superior, and I’m ok about that.)

I wasn’t even going to drink, because this weekend of lacrosse camp made me feel out of shape, and I don’t diet but I could do without some of the miscellaneous beer consumption that has become so regular here. So all I had was something with Malibu, because the day felt like summer and that seemed like a summer drink. But then around five am Maria started giving us free beers, just to keep us around for closing, because the company from six onward can be unpleasant or at least uninteresting. And in the end it was just Lance and I, talking shit as Maria counted out the register. And in the very end it came out that Lance makes quiche from scratch, and that I’ve never had a quiche from scratch, and so Maria and I are meeting at his place at 2 pm for quiche, if he doesn’t oversleep his 1 pm alarm, which he might. And I tried as hard as I could to confirm that this wasn’t just a drunk invitation, that in fact there will be quiche, and they both reassured me.

So I have six hours. I want to sleep, but it is a beautiful day out, and there is so much to do. But I think I need to sleep.

23 may 2005

This past weekend I went to LACROSSE CAMP.

Yes, that’s right, a sports camp. The kind where you go to some place with lots of other people who play your sport, and you sleep in dorms and eat at big long tables and spend the daylight hours running drills and playing tournaments. HA! What a bizarre thing for me to be figuring out at this point in my life: I love playing team sports. (I guess I knew that, but I didn’t realize that playing on a team was so possible as an adult with no exceptionally developed athletic skills.) Along with having a bar, this is something I am going to try to incorportate into my future life.

I’ll spare you the details, except to say I am so sore it hurts to change positions. And: I swam in the North Sea! How cool is that? (I don’t mean how literally cool is that, because I bet you can imagine. I mean, how life-experience cool.)

Much as I like Colorado and several other spots in the middle of the US, I think I will always need to live near the ocean.

19 may 2005

Well! That was successful.

Evan met me as planned. I hopped on the back of his bike and we went to his boat. Did I mention he lives on a boat? He lives on a boat! I have wanted to live on a boat ever since I learned there was such a thing when I was four years old and reading the Little Golden Book about the places people live, and one girl lived on a boat. I couldn’t believe it. I haven’t gotten over that yet.

Evan’s boat is just outside the walled city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a.k.a. Den Bosch. After about ten minutes of street biking, you turn left at the railway tracks, take the dirt path by the horse farm, walk on planks across the ditch, and follow the stone path along the waterside until you see a blue birdhouse. That’s where Evan lives. On a boat.

We had a tasty stirfry, got acquainted, and headed back into town for live music at one of Den Bosch’s surprisingly numerous venues. For a town about the size of Eugene, Den Bosch is – sorry, Eugene – exceedingly more lively. It just has that whole European street life thing going for it: cafes, outdoor markets, public squares.

The next day Evan had off work, so I was spoiled with a personal tour guide. After lounging around the deck in the sun for most of the morning, we took a bike ride through the farms, suburbs, and protected natural areas that surround the city center. Like most Dutch cities, Den Bosch is compact and walkable, and the suburban equivalents have their own mixed-use cores. There is minimal sprawl. New urbanist heaven – except, well, really old.

A few hours of biking in the sun and we were really hot, even though it was only about sixty degrees. Conveniently, we were near a beach. More conveniently still, it was completely deserted. Probably because it was a sixty degree Wednesday afternoon. The Dutch are pretty casual about nudity, so the fact that there were two people skinny dipping on a deserted public beach on a sixty degree Wednesday afternoon didn’t seem to phase any of the bikers going by.

The water was freezing. It stung for the first five minutes, which I think is a good way to make sure you’re alive. (Good news! I’m alive!) Evan got out first, pulled my camera out of my boot sitting on the shore, and took a photo of me. I’ll be sure to send that one to my mom. On the back I’ll write, Here’s me skinny dipping on a public beach in Den Bosch on a sixty degree Wednesday afternoon. With a guy I met on the internet.

17 may 2005

So here’s my life at 28 in the Netherlands:

A few weeks ago I was in my room, poking around the Hospitality Club website. The site connects people from all over the world who are either traveling or wanting to help out travelers. Basically you build a little profile about yourself and where you live, and what you have to offer: advice, tours, meeting up for a beer, or room for folks to crash. When I went to Bruges with my parents, I found someone on HC who lives in Bruges, and he invited me out for late-night drinks with his friends. Fan fucking tastic.

Anyway, a few weeks ago. I was poking around the site, looking at members from the Netherlands who had recently logged on. There was this guy Evan, in a town I’d never heard of, and he lives in a houseboat and he’s an environmental scientist. And I think, It would be cool to see a houseboat! I’ve always wanted to live in a houseboat. And I would like to hear about being an environmental scientist here. So I wrote to him. I said, How is Den Bosch? Is it a good place to visit? And he said, Come visit.

And here I am on a Tuesday afternoon on a train to Den Bosch. Some guy I have never met will meet me outside the grocery store at the station. I have a bookbag with a camera, a sketchbook, pajama pants, a sweater, and my toothbrush. Also some snacks, cause food is unreliable in these situations, and I hate to sugar crash on the road.

I am trying to expand my already exceptional faith in strangers.

airports make me emotional

I don’t know what the fuck, but I got this sudden urge after dropping Paul off at security to sit at Burger King, to eat a bacon double cheeseburger and fries and a Coke. I have shit to do and everything about this burger and this Coke makes me furious, repulses me, and it doesn’t even taste good. But maybe I just want to be someone else for a few minutes – someone who does not throw herself into stressful situations, someone who eats at American fast food chains in foreign countries, someone who gives a shit that sportjackets are in right now.

I do not want to live in New York again, and this is making me deeply sad. I love New York and the big dreams and the things New Yorkers take on. But when it comes down to it I don’t mind waiting in line, I don’t get impatient, and all I prefer is to be in line with other people enjoying the anticipation and the company. I prefer to be in line with people who don’t notice what kind of shoes I’m wearing, and who would rather cook than eat out, and who could sleep in the airport if it was easier. People who would voluntarily help you move. These people do not live in New York.

I’m finished my burger. I feel gross. I guess I’m going to Croatia or wherever, and it will be lonely and scary and exciting, and that’s how I want it to be.

14 may 2005

(Ten days go by. My parents come to visit, we go to Belgium. We see Bruges, a walled medieval city, and at night some folks I met on the internet give me a whirlwind tour of Bruges nightlife and Belgian beer. We go to Brussels and get to see the royal glass houses, a series of impossibly big and blooming greenhouses that are open to the public only four weeks a year. I take the speedy Thalys train to Paris. I meet Paul from NYC. We stay with his sister Marcia, who is working there, and Paul generously accommodates my landscape architecture itinerary: Luxembourg Gardens, Tuileries, Promenade Plantee, Parc de la Vilette. The last is surprisingly fun despite much of the criticism in landscape architecture literature, by the way. In case you were wondering. We walk around for hours on end to the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, Notre Dam, and all the other expected places. We eat many, many crepes. Mostly with chocolate but some with cheese and mushrooms. Paris is fun and exciting and the store windows are marvels, but it makes me happy, once again, about the Netherlands, where the people are friendly and there are lots of bicycles. We take the speedy Thalys train to Amsterdam. We hang out and do that not-really-your-normal-life-cause-you-have-a-guest thing. We eat more crepes, but they are slightly thicker and we call them pannekoken.)

1 may 2005

Koninginnedag, Queen’s Day, is the Netherlands’ best effort at an all-out street party, and though I have had the bar somewhat raised by my recent trip to Spain, I must admit that for the Dutch they certainly made a showing.

Two million visitors flock to Amsterdam alone for the all-day all-night affair every April 30, marking the birthday of the previous queen, Queen Wilhemina. Queen Beatrix, currently on the throne, was born in January – a bad time for an outdoor festival. So while Beatrix’s birthday goes by quietly, Wilhemina’s is greeted with outdoor concerts, a city-wide flea market, and a LOT of orange clothing (in honor of the Dutch House of Orange).

As a gift to the people, Koninginnedag is a “tax-free” day: no taxes are technically required for informally provided goods and services. Consequently, people of all ages turn into 24-hour entrepreneurs. Blankets line the sidewalks, filled with old household goods. Children set up their drum sets in the park and collect change. My friends Miriam and Maria cooked ten Spanish potato tortillas and sold the slices at two euros each, grossing 90 euros towards their summer vacation.

The coolest place to be on Koninginnedag, however, is on the canals. Everyone with a boat loads up on beer, snacks, and music and spends the whole day cruising. The canals are so full of boats that you could walk across the water deck-to-deck. They crawl along, and impromptu ephemeral parties are formed at every bridge bottleneck. Some of the boats host wine-and-cheese type parties, while others become mobile clubs with turntables and dancefloors.

I really, really wanted to be on a boat. After roaming the streets all morning soaking up the festival energy and a few orange drinks, I optimistically installed myself on a low canal wall and hoped hard for an invitation. But the boats are FULL. An Amsterdam friend with a boat on Queen’s Day is like a New York friend with roof access on the Fourth of July. By the day of, Amsterdammers have worked all their conceivable contacts to secure a place on a boat, and few are left over – not to mention that these places, at such a premium, are hardly offered to the jolly, boisterous, numerous public. I chatted with several friendly boaters in full boats before realizing I had to be more proactive.

I went back to my room to get a bottle of wine. On the way I ran into Mugeh, a Turkish woman who lives in my building. She was trying to figure out what to do next, and was easily coerced into my boat plot. We made a large cardboard sign that read: “Room for 2 dancers? We have wine!” Five minutes later we were on a boat.

The boat we were on was fucking fantastic. They had a DJ and a lot of Heineken and about 20 friends who had been celebrating together on the boat for eight years. They were all wearing silver wigs, for the 25th annual Koninginnedag. We coasted around the canals for hours, dancing on the deck and waving to the thousands of people lining the canal walls and bridges. Oh, good trip moment.