On Community

I'm stuck at home sick with the flu today, which is so frustrating, because Saturday is the only day that most of the shops are open on the weekends, and it's actually sunny. I consider it a great sacrifice to stay at home, because now that I found out my friend has Sudafed and is willing to deliver it, I could go out and get my errands done without anyone realizing that I am secretly infecting them with my germs. Ugh. But no, I'll be a good citizen, stay indoors, and write in my blog.

Anyway, today I have been thinking about community. Yes. Community.

I'm someone whose mother is Japanese and whose father is Taiwanese, but who was born in the United States and thus grew up mostly only knowing English. I'm someone who went to high school with kids who were predominantly black, Jewish, and Korean. I'm someone who has changed addresses at least 20 times in her life, lived in 8 different states, and now in 2 different countries. I'm someone who has never belonged to any church. In other words, for most of my life, I have never experienced real community. In fact, for most of my life, I've been an outsider, a tourist, an observer, a visitor.

That is one reason I appreciated snowboarding so much. Previously I had only experienced community in small doses -- during freshman year in college, a fall internship in D.C., the summer after college, in graduate school, and during a 4-month internship in Atlanta. Though I made some good friends during these years, these communities were built mostly on proximity and dissolved quickly once its members moved to different locations.

Snowboarding was my first taste of real community after 4 years of living in California (I lived there 8 years in total), and the only time I've experienced community based on a shared passion. Every season a group of us would rent a house in South Lake Tahoe, buy season passes, and then spend most weekends from December through April in the Sierras. It's not as luxe as it sounds. The whole season usually cost me about 1500 dollars, which is not that much more than a week's holiday here in Zermatt. The fun usually began ahead of the season, with gatherings to meet new house members, and with excursions to the latest Warren Miller film, pre-season sales, and Icer Air. Then during the season, there were carpools, group meals, parties, and of course, snowboarding and skiing together on the slopes. You get to know people really well when you spend 4-12 hours in a car with them, and all day riding the lifts with them. There's lots of time for conversation, and you also become familiar with their various little quirks when you share a home with them, just as you become familiar with the quirks of your housemates or live-in significant other. We were all usually quite different from one another, but because we shared a passion for winter sports, often that was enough to bridge our differences. And year after year, the circle of friends and acquaintances grew wider and wider, until spending a day on the mountain was a bit like taking a stroll down Main Street in a small town with all its plusses and minuses, where you are constantly bumping into people you know and where conversations revolve around the latest doings of other people you know.

I didn't really think I would ever experience a similar sense of community here. It's not that I don't appreciate the great things about Amsterdam, such as the pretty canals, the centuries-old buildings, the bike culture, and the legality of a lot of things that I feel should also be legal everywhere in the U.S. I just don't have a strong sense of connection with the majority of people here, however nice they are. We are too different, or maybe I've just lived in California too long. I think there's some truth to the idea that nature can shape your personality. Here, the elements are so harsh. There have been days with hail, rain, snow, and sun appearing in sequence and then starting all over again, the wind blowing each of the weather patterns through the city faster than you can say "mijn godverdomme paraplu is kapot" (my damn umbrella is broken). We're closer to the North Pole than I've ever been in my life, which means that on the longest day of the year (fast approaching on the 21st of December), the sun will rise at 8:48am and set at 4:29pm. By comparison, on the same date, the sun will rise over the Berkeley hills at 7:22am and will set over the Golden Gate Bridge at 4:55pm. Daily life here occurs 5-18 feet below sea level, depending on which internet site you would choose to believe, with most Dutch aware that if the dikes holding back the North Sea were to break, then we would all be swimming in ice cold water and rusted bicycles. And many of the Dutch have also seen Al Gore's movie "The Inconvenient Truth", as it aired on television here a few weeks ago, which showed that if current global warming trends were to continue, many Germans would have beachfront property and most of the Netherlands would be no more. On top of it all, the Netherlands is among the 25 countries with the highest population density in the world; and of those 25 countries, only South Korea and Bangladesh are larger in size.

So it's no wonder that the Dutch are generally stoic, practical, and cynical. They believe in honesty and hard work. Given their lack of natural resources and especially space, they are gifted at making the most of what they have. They, more than any other group I've met, seem to prize the virtue of "keeping it real", and I'm not just saying that because they are generally credited with (or blamed for) inventing reality television. Among their most commonly used expressions are "doe maar gewoon" (just do it in the usual way) or "doe normaal" (be normal). This is quite different from the California way of life, which encourages weirdness...(cough, cough)...I mean, individuality. Great dreamers, entrepreneurs, and inventors come from California. Everyone I knew there had ideas under development, if only in their brain; everyone had a plan for early retirement, even if they were too busy snowboarding, rock climbing, creating puzzle hunts (ex-boyfriend), challenge square dancing (ex-coworker), building an airplane in their garage (ex-housemate) and otherwise indulging in their grand passions, to put it into action. On the other hand, great designers, engineers, and financial wizards (making money from money is probably bred into the population when you come from a small country)come from Amsterdam. To put it in Myers-Briggs terms, I've arrived in a land of mostly ISTJs and I've come from a land of mostly ENTPs.

But back to the idea of community. As I sit here typing and coughing away, I await my friend who has offered to drop off some NyQuil from the other side of town (NyQuil, DayQuil Sudafed, and Extra-Strength Tylenol are all hard-to-get commodities here). Last night, I ordered in some Thai food from www.thuisbezorgd.nl, which I discovered via a tip from another expat friend. The expats here are unbelievably supportive of one another, and there are a lot of us (almost one-third of Amsterdam residents were born outside of the Netherlands). We notify each other when we'll be in the States, so that we can place special orders for things expensive or hard-to-find in the Netherlands (last time, I brought back Halloween costumes and Trader Joe's chai latte powder mix). We care for each other's pets. We lend our couches to other expats in need of temporary housing or to visiting friends of friends. We give each other tips on where to find English-language books and American-style pancakes with crispy bacon and real maple syrup. Via the expat grapevine, I found out how to register to vote overseas and even how to check whether my registration actually went through. On November 4, I went to an all-night election party, where the singing of the American anthem actually brought tears to my eyes for the first time in my life, because I really wished I was back in the States to see Obama elected, but at least I was with fellow Americans who felt the same way. Again, I feel as though I'm part of a close community, held together by our shared experience of being foreigners in a country that let us in, but keeps us at a distance.

So, these are some conclusions after almost 2 years of living here. I've made some sweeping generalities throughout this post, so feel free to comment if your experience was different. And now, maybe I'll take a NyQuil-enhanced nap. It's 3:56pm, the streetlamps will soon be lit, and this ENTP is hoping that she will be well enough to enjoy seeing the Gotan Project tomorrow night.