Go Orange!

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Queens Day is off the hook! (yo...)

I spent the morning shopping (city turns into a giant flea market because sales permit requirements are temporarily suspended), the afternoon dancing (city also turns into a giant club, with a new DJ around every corner, and quite a few in the boat parade as well), and a lazy hour with my feet dangling over a bridge watching all the boats passing underneath.

I couldn't believe all the great stuff I bought for cheap -- including my entire Queens Day outfit, orange pants, orange t-shirt, and orange high-top sneakers with fur lining (3 Euro or about US $3.50 total, sorry no photo of the complete look!).

It was a fantastic day, especially since my apartment is a block away from a major Q-Day location and I could go back home whenever I needed to drop off purchases or use the loo. But now as I type this, I am looking out the window at some poor guy with his head in his hands, suffering from what is widely known as Amsterdamage.

I feel for you man...

"The Little Devils"

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Les Diablerets, or "The Little Devils", seems like a classic Swiss alpine village. It is French-speaking and earns most of its income via summer and winter tourists who come to downhill ski and snowboard, hike, cross-country ski, parasail, canyoneer, rock climb, "mudbike", and otherwise test their health insurance policies. The little devils appear everywhere, including the Cafe LeCroix, whose logo is a little red devil with big boobs and which advertises a special kids menu for the customers' own "diablerets".

I spend my only full day in the village shopping its two open sports stores, then walking 20 minutes along the river down to Vers L'Eglise ("Towards the Church"). I like this name, especially after I arrive and find that the church is one of only 4 buildings in the village (the rest of the village are houses scattered on the mountain above). I also like the name of the town where I change trains for Geneva. It is called "Aigle", or "Eagle".

Glacier 3000

Today I took the bus to...(to be said in a booming voice) Glacier 3000 (cue loud echo, cue soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Glacier 3000 is well obviously...a glacier...in Switzerland. Perhaps the 3000 refers to meters? Anyway, every time I hear the name, I think of a glacier in the future, where all the snowboards are powered by little jet engines or maybe the glacier is virtually created and we ride it via stereoscopic head set and wired jumpsuit (since that seems to be the direction the world is heading, see Gore AL, Inconvenient Truth).

Actually there is a very fast cable car to the halfway point, and then another slightly-less-fast cable car to the summit. But then -- ugh -- you have to take a long catwalk to the bottom of what the Brits call a drag lift, and what we Yanks once called a T-bar. I say "once" because I'm not sure T-bars even exist in America anymore. Ha, maybe they should call it "Glacier 1970" instead.

I think I drove the old liftie a little bit crazy because I had such a hard time with the lift. He had to keep helping me pull the T-bar down (it's attached to something like a bungee cord that snaps up as soon as you let go of it). For most of the morning, it wasn't too crowded and I was boarding the lift alone. Then once when someone tried to get on the lift with me, I managed to get on it myself, but left the other guy behind, thus messing up the whole line because there were two waiting just behind him and you can't fit three on these things unless you have very advanced T-bar skills. Je suis desolee!

The next time there were two of us on the T-bar, the liftie broke protocol and offered the guy his end of the bar first because he clearly identified me as a T-bar idiot. Now with 2 of us on the bar, we got to ride up for 10 minutes, with our crotches and faces only inches apart. It is a strangely intimate contraption.

Later in the day, I tried to ask the liftie if the time on the clock was correct because it said 4pm, and I had to catch the bus at 5pm. "Le temps, c'est correct?" I repeated it more than once because I thought he just didn't hear me. But this really seemed to confuse the hell out of him. I realized later that I had been asking him whether the WEATHER was correct, not the time. Oops.

Though the lift experience was not ideal, the park was. It had three distinct lines of jumps including one line with my-size jumps, the sun was out, and the snow was nice and slushy. I spent all day there and would definitely consider going back -- perhaps with a bit more French under my belt first.

Jen discovers that fondue is not an entrée, and that entrées are not main courses

Click on photo to find out where the Swiss buy their tampons!

Montreux

It happened on Day 2 of my conference in scenic Montreux, Switzerland. After we piled into a two-car rack railway train up to Les Rochers-de-Naye, with gorgeous views of Lake Geneva, the woods, and the still snow-covered Swiss alps. We were served wine and beer on the way up. At the top, we were served a salad, followed by the best cheese fondue I've ever tasted, though the only item offered to dip in it was bread.

I was having a hilarious conversation with my neighbor, who was a French doctor who happened to switch to IT at his hospital in the middle of Paris. He was describing his "Viet Cong tactics" for persuading his colleagues at the hospital to adopt global data standards for clinical data (what the conference was all about). French government workers are notorious for hating change. His first battle involved getting his colleagues to name their files in a more logical way (e.g., instead of "final.doc" and "final_2.doc", investigator-name_date.doc) This took one year, and climaxed with his creating a bot to send 75 email messages a day to those who violated the policy. And now his biggest opponent has become a supporter of the new filename system!

Oh, but I've now seriously diverged from my story, which isn't really a story -- more like a revelation. It turns out that the fondue was the main meal. But I didn't know this until the dessert came, so basically I ate one slice of bread with cheese for dinner!

By the way, later during the conference I noticed that what the French call "entrées" are what Americans call "appetizers". What we call "entrées", they call "les plats principals" or they list them under food type (e.g., "Viandes"). Of course, this makes perfect sense when you translate the word; I had just never thought about it before. I wonder if it has to do with the American preference for huge portions. In other words, at some point some American must have said "You call that a main course? Ha! To us that's just an entrée!"

I amsterdam, what about you?

The tourist bureau here has a new advertising campaign (well, new since I was last here, more than 5 years ago) based on the slogan "I amsterdam", where the "I" and the "am" of "Amsterdam" are always shown in red, and the rest is always shown in white.

So I wonder what it means "to amsterdam". Perhaps I was amsterdamming today, as I took the tram over to the other side of town to look at a bike (it was too tall). Or maybe I was amsterdamming when I stopped for cheap Indonesian food in de Pijp (pronounced "de Pipe" -- it's in between the neighborhoods de Bong and de Joint). Was I amsterdamming when I took a nap on the grass in the Museumplein, surrounded by other nappers, tourists, football...er...soccer players, volleyball players, a bunch of guys having a loud conversation in Italian, and a couple making out like they were on the couch in their living room?

Speaking of which, I have begun my hunt for a sleeper sofa.

And a cleaning lady my landlord recommended came by this morning to discuss a regular schedule and prices. I think my jaw dropped when she told me the cost. 10 Euro per hour. She is going to come by every 2 weeks.

Bjork

I'm going to see Bjork! In July! In Amsterdam!

A Classic Bike Through the Tulip Fields

Leiden to Lisse

If you click on the photo, it will take you to a Picasa web album.

Excellent weather, excellent company! And the biking was brilliant. The bike only had three gears and most of the time, I stayed in 3rd. Never thought someone who loves the mountains as much as I do would see any advantage to all this flatness. Now I understand why you can bike without a helmet, in a skirt and high heels.

And I am starting to collect countries (via new acquaintances) the way my brothers and I used to "collect" states (via license plates) when I was a kid. This group was from Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the UK, Scotland, Italy, Singapore, the Netherlands, Canada, and Germany. There was one other American. I love it!

Terrible Sex

Today I roller-bladed along the Amstel River with some new friends from MeetIn Amsterdam. They are from Estonia, Germany, India, and the UK. I learned that the word for "cheers" in Estonian is "terviseks". Or you can say "terrible sex" and that works just as well.

"terrible sex!"
In the evening, I went to a dinner with a lot of French people (plus one Italian guy who is moving to French Congo in a few months). At this dinner, I discovered that I have forgotten all of the French I learned in high school. C'est la vie...

Art, ruins, and rhubarb crumble

We got April 9 off for Easter so I figured it was a good time to visit a friend in Bristol.

I hatched a clever plan to fly into London first and see some sights there, then take a train out to Bristol and fly back from Bristol. I didn't think Bristol had much to offer tourists, but I was utterly wrong about that. It also turned out to be quite expensive and inconvenient to add the London leg, although I enjoyed myself immensely while I was there.

First stop after arriving in London Saturday morning: the Tate Modern.

Click on the photo for more
about Carsten Höller
The ultra-modern metal slides winding all over the atrium were designed by Carsten Höller, are made of plastic and aluminum, and reminded me of scenes from the movie Brazil. They are also possibly the reason there were busloads of children running and screaming all over the place. The place was a mob scene. I decided to skip waiting in line for tickets for the longest slide, but right before I had to catch my train to Bristol, I tried the 1st floor slide. Then I wished I HAD waited for the long slide!

The other exhibit I went nuts over was a huge collection of work by Amrita Sher-Gil, an incredible female Indian artist who died at age 28 (click elephants for more about Sher-Gil).

Of course, the web doesn't do it justice. I was totally mesmerized by both her life and her art. She was beautiful, independent, and talented. I wish she had lived longer; she was already producing masterpieces at age 20. Who knows what she could have done with another 30 years!

I managed to secure a sunset ride on the London Eye (by reserving my spot a week in advance), though my camera battery died just before I stepped into the bubble car.

Then I hopped a bus to Bristol to see my friend Clare.

Clare and her family live in a lovely home with a nice view of Bristol, and I was lucky that it happened to be a gorgeous sunny weekend. So we spent most of it outside seeing the sights, which are best described as charming and quaint. And I mean that with no negative connotation at all!

We walked up the stairs of two different little stone towers on tops of hills, one of which had a camera obscura and the other of which had a stone balcony and looked just like the tower where Rapunzel let down her golden hair. We had drinks on more than one outdoor terrace, rode an old choo-choo a few blocks along the river for 50 pence, wandered around a gallery with really disturbing art, admired a Banksy (click here for more about Banksy), and bought some books (English-language books are at least double the price in Amsterdam). Then we went back to Clare's for a home-cooked meal.

At some point during the day, perhaps after I sampled some rhubarb and custard ice cream and pronounced it delicious, it came out that I wasn't quite sure what rhubarb was, even though I *think* I may have had rhubarb pie once or twice in my life. It turns out that Clare's dad grows bushels of rhubarb on his "allotment", which is kind of like a community garden in the States but with much stronger traditional associations. Anyway, Clare decided that I must have rhubarb crumble with clotted cream that very evening -- which I did and it was good.

Angels climbing Jacob's Ladder,
detail from main cathedral in Bath.
Check out that third angel!
The last day of my visit to the UK, we did a day trip to the Roman bath ruins in Bath, watched a puppet show, ate Sally Lunn buns, and sipped tea inside a fine establishment (white table cloths, string quartet) while just outside our window we could see 2 male street performers in nothing but tiger-striped thongs forming themselves into human sculptures. I wish I had had the presence of mind to snap a photo.

Chinatown

Until yesterday, I'd never heard of a Chinatown in Amsterdam.

Then my coworkers took the Americans there for dinner and what a revelation! I love Chinatown (which incidentally, should really be called "Chinastreet"). It's small but oh so cute. And I just got a great half-hour massage there for 20 Euro. These Chinese massages are way different from Swedish. Besides actual massaging, there's also a lot of slapping and pounding and shaking involved, even some pinching. Wacky yet somehow effective. I'm definitely going for a full hour next time.

And to continue my obsession with menu English and weird food here: a few doors down, the section of the menu subtitled "Vegetarian" listed dishes with translations "vegetables with pork", "vegetables with beef", "vegetables with fish", "vegetables with duck", etc. Well you get the picture. Of the 15 or so dishes listed, only one was truly vegetarian! It was "vegetables with tofu".

All-American

Today at the local sandwich shop, I noticed that the special was "broodjes filet americain" for 3,50 euro. I figured what the hell, I'm an American so I'm sure I'll like it. I was imagining it would be a hamburger patty or something with velveeta. Instead I got a french bread roll with a rusty-orange colored goop inside. I've seen the same sandwich before in my office cafeteria but have been afraid to try it. The texture of the goop is not unlike diarrhea. I couldn't guess what it was, even after I had eaten the whole thing and liked it. And I certainly have never seen it in the good ole U.S. of A!

I asked my coworkers about "filet americain" later, and they told me it was pureed raw meat. None of them knew what gave it that weird orange color though. Maybe paprika? Wikipedia says that it's especially popular in Belgium, France, and Switzerland.

Perhaps it's called filet americain because the burnt orange color is like a sunburned American tourist? Any other theories?

Last week, a work colleague came to visit and ordered a "Hamburger American". This was the largest burger he had ever seen, and when he took the top bun off, he found a fried egg underneath it.

Then yesterday at work, someone told me that I dress very European. I said "how's that?" "Well" she said, "you don't wear your trousers up to here". She indicated somewhat around chest level.

I have to conclude that Europeans have some funny ideas about Americans. They're right about Bush though.