Herring Hunt

I'm feeling guilty that I haven't posted anything in months, even though I must have thought at least a hundred times: "I should put that in my blog". So my new plan is to submit shorter posts more often.

This post is to announce that apparently both Hollandse nieuwe haring (i.e., "new herring") and Celine Dion will be arriving in Amsterdam this week. I can forgo Celine, but I will definitely be on the lookout for a herring stand.

Herring (usually salted and frozen, but not cooked) is considered a delicacy here. According to DutchAmsterdam.nl, the Hollandse Nieuwe is the "best herring" and is only available during a narrow time window (usually mid-May to the end of June). For 2008, no herring may be sold as Hollandse Nieuwe unless it was caught on or after June 3rd, has at least 16% fat, and was frozen for at least 2 days; those that break this law will be fined €10,800. So yep, the Dutch take their herring seriously.

You're supposed to hold the tail of the herring in one hand, tipping your head back to dangle it over your mouth, and then bite off the head first, before chewing towards the tail. Yum!

Also on the agenda for this week:

- Replace my mobile telephone which mysteriously expired last night

- Replace my computer speaker which is not quite dead yet but is emitting a static-heavy drone that will induce in me a nervous breakdown if I allow it to continue

- Go to a cocktail bar to try fancy Italian aperitivos

- Bike from Amsterdam to Haarlem

- Read further in my Dutch grammar book and the Namesake

- Make large batches of ginger lemonade

- Activate my first euro credit card

- Plan what to do with my remaining vacation days

- Cook something insanely delicious

Almost One Year in Amsterdam

February 20 is my one year anniversary in Amsterdam.

I was just thinking that tonight reflects how much Amsterdam has become a part of me in the past year. I biked home from work and met up with my apartment cleaner. He's from Brazil and doesn't speak any English, so we communicate in broken Spanish. Then I ordered some Thai food in my kindergarten Dutch, biked over to the restaurant to pick it up along with some flowers and chocolate from the night market down the street, and continued on to the hospital to visit my good friend from Australia, who just broke her leg in a bike accident.

A year ago, I didn't know anyone in Amsterdam. I didn't speak any other languages besides English. I didn't think I would ever ride a bike here, let alone ride across town at night dodging taxis, trams, and pedestrians with take-out dinner and a bouquet of flowers poking out of my saddlebags.

It hasn't been 100% easy, getting to this point.

There have been humiliations and frustrations galore. Work is more stressful. I have a longer -- and generally wetter, darker, and colder! -- commute to the office. The last time I remember 5 days in a row without rain was last spring (everyone still refers nostalgically to "those great two weeks in April"). And I still have yet to drive a car here, or drink a tall glass of whole milk at lunch, so I guess I'm still far from being Dutch-ified.

But do I have regrets about moving here? Sure, although they mostly center around things like not buying a multi-voltage food processor while I had the chance. The move itself, I'll never regret.

All managers at my company are put on a 5-phase management improvement program. Phases 2 and 4 involved intensive off-site training for 4 days in Noordvijk and 2 days in Siena respectively. It's the best training program I've ever attended, and along with the on-the-job experience I had this year managing a larger group in a different department, makes me feel that taking this position would have been worthwhile even if it had just been to a place down the street instead of a place in another country.

But since I did move to another country, I'm learning a lot outside of work too. My overall language skills have improved (although half the time I'm saying 'ja' when I mean 'si' or 'oui' or vice versa). In the past year, I've been to France three times, and am heading there again in a month. I've been to Italy and London twice. I spent two weeks in Spain, including Christmas, New Year's Eve, and my birthday. There were also visits to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and in next week I'm going to Portugal. While it doesn't compare (in my own twisted, snow-obsessed mind!) to a season of weekends in Tahoe, all this travel is still a nice consolation prize.

The travel did include some snowboarding of course -- 6 days in Cham, 2 days in Switzerland, 2 days in Austria, 6 days in Les Deux Alpes, 4 days in Sainte-Foy, 1 day at SnowPlanet, 1 day on the conveyer belt (see my previous post: "Snowboarding IN Amsterdam"), and I have an upcoming week in Cham. So that makes the count so far 25 days, compared to roughly 35-40 during a typical Tahoe season. Not too bad, except when you consider that only 5 of this year's days involved riding powder.

By the way, here are some things I learned about snowboarding in Europe:

1. Indoor snow is like cold sawdust.
2. You can only survive an avalanche if they find you within 15 minutes.
3. Glaciers have crevasses that are hidden under a layer of snow.
4. Drag lifts are appropriately named.
5. You must be aggressive in lift lines (NB: Unlike in the USA, the liftee is not there to organize the lines. He's there to help Americans get on the drag lift. Otherwise, he's in the booth smoking a cigarette).
6. You need to buy supplemental health insurance for snowboarding trips, or you won't be covered at all.
7. Health insurance is a good idea (see points 2, 3, and 4)
8. Guides are expensive (350 Euros/day to hire "Fred" in Sainte Foy), but worth it.
9. Helicopters are expensive (120 Euro/person for a 10-minute ride to the top in Switerland), but worth it.
10. When I'm pulling my snowboard bag around the airport, the person who asks "you got a body in there?" is invariably British.

Well enough about lessons learned...

Whenever someone asks me how long I'm staying, I say another year or so, maybe a little longer. It's never once crossed my mind to actually live here. Then again, right now, it's hard to imagine going back to my old life too. It's hard to imagine owning a car and having to fill it up with gas, and not being able to bike anywhere in town within 15 minutes. It's hard to imagine not walking on cobblestones and not seeing canals every day. It's entirely possible that someday I'll miss Amsterdam as much as I miss San Francisco now.

Luckily, I still have at least one more year to figure out my next move and it should go by fast, with more travel and lots of visitors (at least 8 already confirmed from Feb-May). Once I quit my job, I'll probably put off looking for another job right away. What the hell. 2 years has always been about my limit for being a corporate slave. And then maybe by the time I actually make it back home, I'll be able to afford to buy more than a shack in the Bay Area.

I bought a Lonely Planet book called "A Year of Adventures", hoping it might inspire me. So far, it's convinced me that I should look into airfares to Corsica and the Sinai Peninsula. But the book is a bit too hardcore for me. For instance, I've already decided that I'm NOT going to do the Ironman Triathalon (p. 164), swim the English Channel (p. 111), climb Mount Everest (p. 156), or visit Chernobyl (p. 126). I haven't ruled out flying into outer space (p. 50), though; in fact I'm definitely going to do so as soon as I have a spare $102,000 in my pocket.

My research into possibilities continues, and ideas are welcome. Maybe I'll have some more epiphanies to share this summer...

A Tribute to the Amsterdam Public Library

Last week, while I was visiting my parents on the East Coast, I spent a few hours browsing through the 20 pounds or so of Time, Transworld Snowboarding, and Travel and Leisure magazines that my mom conscientiously saved for me while I've been living in Europe for the past 9 months. Catching up on my US-centric news made me feel as though I had just arrived in the future via a time machine. When did Al Gore get the Nobel Prize? Who were the Jena 6? And Dog the Bounty Hunter had to apologize for using the N word? How come none of my so-called friends have kept me up-to-date with this important piece of information?

Also: buried on page 78 of Time's special issue on the Best Inventions of the Year was a blurb titled "Reinvented: The Hand Dryer". It stated simply that "[b]y forcing unheated air through a narrow gap at more than 400 mph, the energy-efficient Dyson Airblade dries hands in just 10 sec. flat". Well, finally, a piece of news that I actually knew about before the readers in America did. These are the hand dryers that can be found in the basement restroom of the main branch of the Amsterdam Public Library.

I've already been raving like a lunatic about these hand dryers to all of my friends in Amsterdam. First of all, instead of rubbing your hands under the airstream to dry them, you stick both your hands into something that resembles a toaster oven. Then, there's the noise, like the sound of a jet engine revving up for take-off. In the meantime, the skin on your hands is being subjected to g-forces from the heavy duty vacuum-cleaner-like suction, which -- thanks to Time magazine -- I now know is what it would feel like if you stuck your hands out of a car window while someone was driving the car at 400 miles per hour.

When I described this to my friend Jim, he was appalled. "I'd never do it. Don't you ever watch horror movies? What if I pulled my hands out and instead of hands, all I had left were bloody stumps?!"

It's true that I had my reservations when I first tried it. But now I'm a fan. Ordinary hand dryers seem so pathetic now next to the public library Dyson Airblades¹.

In fact, ordinary libraries seem pathetic next to the Main Branch of the Amsterdam public library, which I also rave about. I'm not alone in this (although I seem to be somewhat alone with the hand dryer obsession, so far). This branch opened on 7/7/07, and I'm guessing that it is the nicest library in the world. Although I haven't been to the one in Dubai, and who knows? -- maybe that one has a monorail that takes you through the stacks.

The library was designed by the Dutch architect Jo Coenen, not to be confused with my photographer friend Jo² who took this gorgeous photo of it that Flickr won't let me download except in thumbnail size (click on the thumbnail to be linked to a larger photo).

There are 7 floors (or 10, if you also count floors 0, 0.5, and -1; yeah, it's a European thing). On the first floor, as soon as you walk in, there's a bank of television screens. Most of the times I have been there, the screens are displaying a video of swimming dolphins. This seems to be totally unrelated to the reading of books, although dolphins are supposed to be pretty intelligent. I just read in Time magazine that they have recently been observed using sea sponges to catch fish. So maybe the point is that we can strive to be intelligent like the dolphins if we read a lot of books.

All the librarians have nicely designed uniforms. I read in the newspaper that these were controversial amongst the librarians when first introduced; I quite like them though. At least they are not ugly, and it makes it easier to identify the librarian when I have a question and he is trying to sneak off to the restroom to use the hand dryer.

There are escalators and a futuristic elevator and lots of ultra-modern chairs that look uncomfortably like plastic, but are actually soft and fun. On the top floor, there's a La Place restaurant, which serves cafeteria-style gourmet food (or gourmet-style cafeteria food, take your pick) and offers tables on the terrace, with a fabulous view overlooking central Amsterdam and the Ij river. They have 600 computers for free internet usage, a concert hall that seats 270, and "pods" for individual private study. They also have a gi-normous selection of CDs, DVDs, and computer games, which one may rent for one euro per week. Books are free and may be borrowed for 3 weeks at a time, although this is all on top of the yearly membership fee of 23.50 euro.

Hey, you gotta pay for those hand-dryers somehow.

Note: I plan to supplement this post with photos eventually, though my camera has been a serious disappointment to me lately, and I have no plans to go to the library in the next few weeks. Now that the nights are cold and dark, I am definitely less motivated to make excursions outside of my neighborhood.
¹Although with a name like "Dyson Airblades", it's easy to make the mental jump to "bloody stumps". Someone in Marketing really should have thought of that.
²I think Jo's photos are brilliant. If you want to see more, click here and prepare to be AMAZED. I also have a permanent link to her Flickr photo site on my blog sidebar.

It's not just rain...

...sometimes it's rainbows!

After leaving my apartment this morning, I stepped outside and saw this. Of course, I ran back inside to get my camera. Then I biked to the metro station in a nice light drizzle, feeling very hardcore (from biking in the rain) and warmfuzzly (from the memory of "my" rainbow) at the same time.

Snowboarding IN Amsterdam

Yes, it's actually possible. You can snowboard within the city limits at Indoor Ski & Squash Watergraafsmeer. Can you believe it took me this long to actually do it? It's only a 25 minute bike ride from my place, it cost 12 Euro to participate in an hour-long group lesson, and they supply all the gear.

But there's a catch (of course there's a catch!) The catch is...there's no snow. The "hill" is a carpeted conveyer belt that is sprayed with stuff to make it slippery.

Check out the photo. There were six of us snowboarding in this tiny space at once!

Our instructor started by putting long metal bars down, and then had 3 of us stand behind the front bar and 3 behind the back bar, all in what he called "gliding" position, as if we were pointing straight downhill. He pressed a big black button on the side and suddenly the ground started to move away underneath us.

Gradually, after we all got used to the idea that we could stand upright while the conveyer belt was running, we did exercises to learn how to slow down on the mountain. In other words, we turned the board so that it was perpendicular to the slope to simulate a heel-side stop. We did the same thing facing uphill to simulate a toe-side stop. Next we did some toe-edge and heel-edge turns, but we could only angle the board enough to move from one end of the bar to the other. Then some of us were able to let go of the bar, and do the falling leaf in place. The final part of the lesson -- strictly for those of us who already knew how to snowboard -- was to move the top bar further back and have us do linked turns from one bar down to the next.

The instructor warned us that even seasoned snowboarders would have trouble at first. He wasn't kidding. 12 of us participated altogether, and 9 were complete beginners. Even the three of us who had been snowboarding for 7 years or more fell on our knees, butts, and backs a few times.

One main difference was, the belt didn't slow down or stop, so you never really got the feeling of how being perpendicular would actually slow you down. Also, it was very weird to be in such a constricted space with a metal bar at waist-level and two other people on either side. On a snowy hill with that kind of slope I wouldn't normally be afraid of falling, but with the conveyer belt constantly going, you had to trust the instructor to stop it before you hit the back wall.

That said, I'd say it was a fantastic way for beginners to learn the body movement required for snowboarding. It was cheap, it wasn't cold, we didn't have to drive or fly for hours to get there, and the bar was literally three steps away from the hill. And of course, this being Amsterdam, the apres-ski was especially good! We shared a few bottles of wine and pasta at an Italian restaurant in Rembrandtplein and then mega-strong cocktails upstairs at Harry's Bar. Just like after any other day on the slopes, we talked about the best falls of the day and our future snowboarding trips. We'll probably hit a few of the other indoor slopes in the Netherlands (there are 4!) within the next few months so that the beginners will have a chance to give it a try on real snow. Having never been to one of these indoor snow domes, I'm really curious about what they are like. So watch this space for more about indoor boarding in the near future...

Giant Disco Ball from Outer Space

I feel compelled to post about my night at the Sugar Factory, a club off the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. "Interactive Disco Opera" was the collaborative masterpiece of artist Eric Staller, filmmaker Miss T, and costumer Nepco. It was described as "Fellini-esque" in the paper, so I knew it would be surreal. But since I've never seen a Fellini movie myself, I wasn't sure what to expect. I will definitely go out and rent one now.

The theme of the night seemed to be alien B-movies from the 50s. When I walked in, they were showing the short film "Strip Tease on Mars", which was basically a gorgeous woman getting naked to 50s cocktail jazz on what seemed to be a desert planet, while eyeballs attached to long antennae quivered behind every rock. This was followed by a live saw harpist playing along to a film of vinyl records hovering above the Nemo & other obvious Amsterdam landmarks, a really clever localized send-up of the horrible special effects that make B-movies so fun to watch. Along those lines, I never realized what I was missing in life until I saw a cross-eyed Godzilla melting a toy windmill with his fiery breath in the wildly exciting action-horror short "Godzilla vs. Amsterdam".

There was also the Burka Boogie Woogie Band, where women dressed in burkas played in a band, with the burkas strategically fastened so that the shapes of the trumpet, trombones, bass, and other instruments poked out from the sides. One of my favorite pieces involved 4 women just standing still on the balcony in the darkness wearing beauty parlor helmets with lights that blinked in rhythm with the music; they looked like deep sea creatures. And there was a bizarro film featuring pink plastic breasts each moving separately, and then you were gradually made to realize that each breast was actually a woman wearing a huge plastic ball and a hat resembling a nipple. The grand finale, which was truly magnificent, involved 4 beautiful women in white glittering leotards, high heels, and disco ball helmets dancing around a shivering mass of silver, which eventually jelled (to the tune of "Last Dance") into an enormous disco ball man, about 3 times my height in diameter and at various times seeming about to roll off the stage into the transfixed audience.

Now that I'm typing all of this out, I realize...well...you really had to be there. There's just no way to describe it in a coherent way. It was abso-#$%@-ing incredible. I'm so going to all of Eric Staller's future disco operas. And you should too, if he ever comes to your city.

I can also highly recommend Hans Eijkelboom's photography, which is on exhibition now at Foam. Not nearly so dramatic, but also very interesting.

What's French for "whiplash"?

In the summer of 2005, I parted with 100,000 Northwest frequent flyer miles in order to attend McNab Snowboarding Summer Camp at Les Deux Alpes, a glacier in the French Alps. It was such a great experience that I knew I'd do it again once I moved to Europe.

I just came back from my second trip to Les Deux Alpes (and second post-McNab side trip to Lyon), and once again, thoroughly enjoyed my holiday, though it meant consuming half the box of ibuprofen I'd bought at the start. 6 days of repeatedly throwing oneself off a jump in a desperate bid to land a cool trick is a joyous yet painful experience.

Thanks to the marvelous coaches at McNab (including Jenny Jones, who might well turn up as one of the few non-American women invited to the X-Games this year), I'm now nailing frontside 180s. Sadly though I seem to have mysteriously lost my ability to perform switch 180s -- which I could do, albeit not beautifully, before this trip. There was one day where I managed three gorgeous backside 180s in a row. It's all on the McNab video; okay, so I don't have a copy of said video, but there are witnesses to back me up. I need proof, since one day later, I couldn't replicate the feat.

Again, I was hanging out with a crew of Brits & Scots, all very friendly and sweet. There were only three female campers, and two of them were there with their boyfriends. So it was perhaps a dubious honor when I won the Women's Big Air competition on the last day (similar to when I won "Best American Camper" 2 years ago, and I was the only American camper there!) The prize was a brand-new North Face jacket, so I'm not complaining.

In addition to the trick contest, on the morning of the last day, the coaches held their infamous McNab Derby. This was no ordinary speed competition. They clicked all of our boards together in a big pile, and then they faced us in a line. When Neil called "Go!", they tackled us as we dove for our boards. Then we had to race down the mountain to the train, ride the train back up, and tag one of the coaches who was wearing a bright orange jacket. I had trouble extracting my board from the pile but made a decent showing in the race portion -- despite a number of slow-moving obstacles on the hill such as the people riding the t-bar. Boarding the beginner-strewn runs with my speed-addicted skier friends at Heavenly is good training, as is weaving around trams, cars, other bikes, and tourists on my bike in Amsterdam.

On Saturday, while almost everyone else either stayed in Les 2 for another week or took a flight back home to the UK, I went to Lyon. It was my second visit there, and I really love it. It reminds me of Philadelphia, where I grew up. A small city, with acres...sorry, meters...of shops and restaurants and bars and cafes. No major tourist attractions like the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, so it's often overlooked by tourists. I didn't have time to do the tour of the covered walkways or the silk-weavers house. I did have time to watch Die Hard 4 dubbed in French though. Um, why did the bad guys kill off all the computer geeks? Oh never mind, I'll watch it again in English some day.

I also rented an electric bike. You can turn the dial to "Off", "On", or "Eco". I never figured out what "Eco" really did. But when you clicked to "On", it felt like someone was giving you a tiny push from behind every 30 seconds or so. Fabulous for biking uphill. Not so good if you start with the "On" setting, like I did once accidentally; the bike started to go without me so I almost fell off it. Once I got the hang of it, it was no problem. I even answered my mobile phone in the middle of biking to the park and had a 5-minute conversation, during which the other bikers on the path gave me hard stares. They all had two hands firmly on both handlebars. I guess it makes more sense to do so when you have hand brakes. In the Netherlands, I could be cradling a baby in one arm and smoking a cigarette with the other and hardly anyone would notice.

Lyon has a great bike path along the Rhone River, with floating beer gardens along the way, and a giant park that compares favorably with Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The park has a little zoo, so I'd turn the corner on my bike and suddenly be within a few hundred meters of some elephants, lions, or a giraffe. There's also a beautiful Vieux Ville, with quaint narrow staircases going up into the hills. And while most people are willing to speak English, they were also willing to speak French, if it looked like I wanted to speak it -- and even if I spoke it badly. A nice change from Amsterdam, where I'm thrilled if I can convince a shopkeeper to speak to me in Dutch for 2 minutes. My French improved by miles...oops, I mean kilometers...in just one day. Though I have to admit, I had a 15-minute conversation with my taxi driver during which I was convinced I understood everything he was telling me about his mother, only to find out that the whole time he wasn't talking about his mother at all, but the mayor of the city. In other words, "le maire" and not "la mere".

Oh. Merde.

"ick ben moo"

That's how you say "I'm tired" in Dutch. So what do the cows say then? The cows say "booooo". I also found out that a Dutch pig is a "big".

Whores are "hoeren", to rent something is "huuren", and to hear something is "hooren". So you have to be careful when you say: "Yeah, I hear that". If you're a man and you mispronounce "ja hoor" (which is actually a very common way of voicing agreement here in Holland), then you just might get pushed into the nearest canal.

Speaking of canals, to the Dutch, the Panama Canal is still a canal. But a canal in Amsterdam is actually a "gracht". You might also have a favorite "kanal" on television. And did you hear the one about the tourist who accidentally dropped his camera into one of Amsterdam's (famously dirty) canals? When he was finally able to fish his camera back out, the film was already developed.

Barumpdum.

Just a sampling of the many random things I learned last week at "the nuns course": the famous language school in the southern part of the Netherlands, which was founded by the Sisters of the Holy Order of St. Augustine. When my company first told me that they were sending me there, I pictured sleeping on a bare cot with a wooden cross hanging above it, stoically surviving on a diet of bread and water, moving silently through open courtyards, and studying rigorously from morning until night.

The only thing I got right was the last. It was indeed 5 days of intensive Dutch language learning, but we slept at a luxe hotel nearby, and every morning a bus picked us up at 8am and dropped us off at a modern new building with a very corporate feel. During our frequent coffee breaks, we were offered cappucinos, espressos, and fancy tea. During our afternoon snack breaks, the spreads included such delicacies as steak tartare and salmon mousse.

We had classes all day from 8:25am (the Dutch would literally say: "5 minutes before half 9 in the morning") until 7:15pm, at which point we were served a fabulous 3-course gourmet dinner accompanied by excellent wine until the bus returned to pick us up at 9pm. Back at the hotel, most of us would gather at the hotel bar and talk until after midnight.

While Americans were the biggest group, there were still only 5 of us learning Dutch. The rest were from: India, Taiwan, Germany, Finland, Libya, Sweden, Romania, Kyrgyzstan (okay, I'll admit I had to wikipedia that one), Chile, Uruguay, Australia, the UK, Scotland, and South Africa. There was also a large contingent of Dutchies learning Italian, French, Spanish, and German.

One of the Dutch guys who joined us a few times at the bar was a dairy engineer trainer. He asked me whether I knew that California had recently surpassed Wisconsin in the production of cheese. I told him that I didn't know that. "Well..." he said, "Wisconsin knows".

So how much Dutch did I actually learn? A lot. But still not enough. It's still a struggle to form sentences. I only started learning past tense on the last day, and my vocabulary is very limited. And I still don't get word order at all. Last night (back in Amsterdam), I tried to carry on an entire conversation in English, but using the Dutch word order. I was only able to handle about 5 minutes. I want Dutch really to learn but think I that explode my head will if it I try it too long to do. My friend claims that the language was invented by Yoda.

By the way, in Dutch, I could never say "my friend" unless I meant by that "my boyfriend". If I said "me and my 5 friends", I'd be admitting to leading quite a promiscuous lifestyle. I have to remember to say instead: "a friend" or "some friends".

Well it's now 8 minutes before half eleven at night (that is, 10:22pm), and I'm getting moo-er by the minute. Goodbye for now and "slaap lekker!"

Ooh Naked People!

I didn't hear about this until after it happened. Not that I'd get up early to get my picture taken naked in a parking garage.

Check out more photos and a press release here and video here

And if you want to be immortalized as a work of art and you're not shy like me, you can sign up to be part of future Spencer Tunick events here.

I wish I could title this post "Only in Amsterdam", but it looks like Mr. Tunick has already been to Bruges, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Sao Paulo, Newcastle/Gateshead, Vienna, Barcelona, New York City, and Mexico City (where he somehow persuaded 18,000 Mexicans to voluntarily strip in exchange for nothing but a signed photo).

He hasn't hit San Francisco yet though. I figure it's only a matter of time. However, given that saran-wrapped nudists running in Bay to Breakers is ho-hum now, maybe no one would blink an eye at 5000 naked people blanketing the Golden Gate Bridge.

Purchases

I bought a omafiets (grandma's bike) and slaapbanken (sleeper couch) right before my mom's visit.

The bike has no gears and no hand brakes; you brake by cycling backwards -- a very weird concept, but surprisingly not that hard to ingrain. I bought the bike from a legitimate dealer, used, for 119 euro. I also bought two heavy-duty bike locks for 65 euro. I could have bought a bike from a junkie for 10 euro, but I decided that at least my first few bike purchases should not support the bike thief industry. People tell me that I might change my mind after I've had my bike stolen more than 4 times though.

Last week I biked to and from work for the first time. It took me 45 minutes vs. about 35 via public transport. The bike paths are great. I hardly have to cross any streets and my route is mostly along the Amstel River. I won't be truly Dutch until I can do it in a skirt and high heels, in the rain, balancing my umbrella in one hand and talking on my cell phone with the other.

Did I mention that no one wears a helmet here? And they would definitely laugh and point if you wore black cycling shorts with butt pads. I've seen people cycling with a friend sitting side saddle on the back tire, or a rolled up rug on the front handlebars, or a bass violin strapped to the back. Today I saw a guy slowly biking with three beautiful dogs leashed to his wrist and trotting along beside him. One of these days, I'm going to spend the whole day sipping coffee and just photographing the bicyclists as they ride by.

As for the couch, it's comfortable. Come visit!

Another Sort of Stereotype

Two things I neglected to mention in my last post about Austria:

1) When I entered the country, the train conductor asked for my passport and flipped through it. She also asked me if the snowboard above me on the luggage rack was mine. I said yes it was. She looked at the snowboard and then she looked at my Amsterdam work visa (inside my passport). Then she asked whether I smoked. I said no I didn't. "Do you smoke other things?" Hmmm...what "other things" might she be talking about? She didn't believe me, I could tell. The combination of snowboarder AND living in Amsterdam is just too evocative. This blog should really be about reviewing the coffee shops, shouldn't it?

2) It dumped the night before I arrived in Innsbruck, so there was 2 feet of fresh on Stubai Glacier -- and hardly anyone else interested in it.

Racism in Austria

At first I wasn't sure if it was real. Maybe I was just reacting to a cultural tendency not to smile or laugh. After all, you can't expect everyone to be like Californians who smile at everyone and everything. Then it morphed into more of an instinct, a feeling of being unwelcome. But then after two incidents with the old lady cashier at Stubai glacier (the first was when I said "Hallo" and got the complete silent treatment, she just waited until I saw the price on the cash register. The second time, there were other people around, so she said the price, but then became very impatient when I was hunting around for exact change -- and glaringly dropped the change into my tray), something clicked and I realized that I was (and had been for days) experiencing racism in a very institutionalized non-overt form. The only other time in my life that I've ever experienced the same sort of racism was in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Don't get me wrong. I've experienced overt racism before, and that's not fun either. But at least then it is very obvious that it's racism. This type of racism is much more uncomfortable because it is subtler. It is a lack of eye contact, or a mocking tone of voice, or a rolling of the eyes. At first, you doubt yourself. You wonder if you did or said something culturally offensive. And also because you doubt yourself, you don't react as quickly. You spend precious minutes going over the conversation in your head, trying to puzzle it out, and by the time you realize what it was, the person is gone or the moment is over and you would look silly trying to respond.

It wasn't just the cashier. It was also several of the ticket salespeople at the main railroad station in Innsbruck, the woman at the hotel counter, one of the waiters in the hotel restaurant. The latter actually said to me that Chinese eat in the other room and pointed to a side room away from the main part of the restaurant. I told him that I wasn't Chinese; I was American. This confused him. Of course I was Chinese. To him, it was like an elephant claiming to be a bear. I think he finally gave up because I was obviously stupid, and he said I could sit here, there, wherever I wanted. I was too stunned to confront him on the real question, which was "why do the Chinese have to eat in the other room?"

My experience was validated after I got back from my 9-hour train ride last night. I googled "racism" and "Austria" and got a number of hits. These are the most interesting of those:

Extremist Groups in Austria
Racism on "Wife Swap"

Clearly, the blacks, Muslims, and Jews who have immigrated to Austria have it even worse. The Japanese and Indian tourists who arrive by busloads in Innsbruck are tolerated because they spend a lot of money there, but I'm pretty sure that after they leave they are talked about derisively.

I will probably never return to Austria, which is a shame because the town was lovely and a few people were extraordinarily kind. For example, the harmonica player who had invited my mother to Austria picked her up and dropped her off every day from her hotel 20 minutes away in order to give her free harmonica lessons. Then he and his wife drove her to Innsbruck and gave her VIP tickets to the music festival where he had been invited as a judge. They were both warm and friendly to us throughout the weekend.

Another consolation of all this is that on the train ride back, I had the thought that I really couldn't wait to get home -- and for the first time, I felt that "home" meant Amsterdam. Today I reveled in smiling shopkeepers and public transportation employees and didn't mind the rain one bit!

Uitje

"Uitje" literally means "little out" in Dutch, or in other words, "an outing". Every year the head of our site plans an all-employee team building day. It's always a surprise. In previous years, they drummed, painted, did a scavenger hunt in the center of Amsterdam, and went to a shooting range.

This year, we all piled into a bus and ended up at a charming cottage restaurant in the woods. From there, we biked to the beach and built a bridge made out of bamboo rods and rubber bands. Then we split up into groups to learn how to power kite and compete with each other in sand sculpture building, volleyball, shotputting, and javelin throwing. I don't think this is really a "Dutch" thing. But I just find the photos kind of funny. So these are the sports alternatives I have available to me here in Holland! You know, I could possibly get into the power kiting. Once I've mastered that, I'll only be 4000 US dollars away from a kite boarding kit and the opportunity to injure myself on the water instead of snow.

Oh and I'll go ahead and answer the inevitable question now: sorry to disappoint, but there are no photos are available of me in the blue space suit.

Scary Bridge Crossing at Keukenhof

Click on the photo to view the web album.

My mom was just here visiting for 4 days (my first US visitor!) and on Saturday we took the train to Keukenhof, which is a huge flower-themed park in Lisse. It was much more fun than I expected. I thought we were just going to see some pretty flowers, but the park designers were creative. There's a windmill, funky sculptures, a giant chessboard, a kickass English garden maze, a petting zoo, and all kinds of other good family fun. We took about a hundred photos between the two of us, but my favorites are of each of us taking turns to cross a roller-coaster shaped bridge over a pond. Hmm...Mom's probably not going to like that I posted these on my blog!

Oh yeah, there were pretty flowers too -- so I threw in some photos of these at the end, in case anyone wants new wallpaper for their laptop.

Go Orange!

click photo to view web album

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"

click on photo to view web album

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!