Side Note: London

Day 1: In which I feel well-traveled and well-connected

After a late night spent going to the Concertgebouw, Skyping with my family and packing for the weekend, I dragged myself out of bed at 6 in the morning to go with Conny to the airport to catch our planes. I was going to London to visit Kristin, and Conny was going to visit a friend, coincidentally also named Kristin, in Florence.

Like the rest of Amsterdam the evening before, Schiphol was looking festive and Christmas-y, even though it was barely November (November 5th, to be exact). It was enough to put me in a happy enough mood, however, to sustain me through my uneventful flight to Stansted and my tedious bus ride from the airport into London proper.

Kristin had class until about 5 that evening, so I was originally going to entertain myself for a few hours before she was finished. A few days before I left, however, I managed to get in touch with a good friend of mine from Williams, also studying in London, to see if she had time to grab lunch or hang out for a bit in the four or five hours I had to spare.

As luck would have it, this friend – whose name is Yue-Yi and whose relationship with me I think we’ve managed to keep intact almost exclusively through lunch dates – not only had a couple of hours free herself, but had had a 3-5pm class canceled that morning, meaning she could stay with me from the time I arrived until the time I could meet up with Kristin. I love having friends in so many places.

Yue-Yi and set off through the streets of London, skirting the edge of Hyde Park and then walking down until we came to Harrods. The giant mall was decked out both in Christmas and in 160th Anniversary decorations, and since I wanted to see it and Yue-Yi wanted to buy something “typically London” before she went to visit a friend, we decided to explore inside.

I was obliged by a polite but insistent doorman to check my small carry-on suitcase for a fee, but I think the couple of pounds I had to pay were worth being able to gawk around the place. Unfortunately, I managed to leave my camera inside the suitcase, which means I have no pictures of Harrods’s splendor or any of our afternoon’s excursion.

We strolled through Harrods, getting lost a couple of times, buying fancy candies, sampling Christmas tea, and then getting pasties for lunch (Harrod's salesman: “We actually call them PASS-tees. PACE-tee is like… the complexion.”). We left my bag at the mall and strolled with our pasties (which are savory pockets of pastry dough/pie crust filled with chicken, vegetables, and a creamy sauce) down the posher streets of London, passing fancy bakeries, stylish shops, and of course, a Burberry store.

We ended up at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where we essentially just wandered around chatting with each other and admiring art on the side. A special Islamic art exhibition was charging a hefty ₤15 admission fee, but the rest of the museum was free (well, technically “suggested donation” but you know what that means to a college student strapped for cash).

When we had thoroughly toured all of the museum that was free to tour, we reclaimed my bag from Harrods and ventured down to the Tube, where Yue-Yi patiently explained/inquired at desks for me as to how I could acquire an “oyster card” (pay-as-you-go metro pass) for the weekend, waited while I bought and loaded money onto one, and then accompanied me onto the proper train. We were conveniently headed places on the same line, and Yue-Yi’s stop was just one before mine, so there was no chance of my getting lost somewhere strange underneath London.

After a short ride I reluctantly bade goodbye to Yue-Yi, hopped off at the stop after hers, headed up the long and crowded escalators, and found Kristin waiting just outside the station. We embraced, reunited for the third time during our European adventures, and then pushed our way through the busy streets back to the quieter neighborhood where Kristin’s flat is.

I managed to unwittingly pick the best night possible to arrive in London. It was November 5th, and as those of you who know anything about British History (or have seen the movie V for Vendetta), might remember, there’s something rather special about the 5th of November:

It’s Guy Fawkes Day! (aka Bonfire Night) Guy Fawkes Day is the day the British commemorate the foiled plot of a disgruntled citizen (Guy Fawkes) to blow up the Parliament building. The holiday is typically celebrated by festivals and fireworks and burning effigies of Guy Fawkes in giant bonfires, hence the different names for the date. Kristin had scoped out a good place to join the festivities, so after I deposited my luggage at her place, we bused over to them.

We arrived at the site (a little park-like area in a residential neighborhood) just in time to see the effigy of Guy go up in flames.

(photo courtesy of Kristin)

After that, we watched some fire-jugglers and sundry performers and little children scampering around with flashing bunny-ear hats, before pushing our way through a massive crowd to get a good vantage point for fireworks.

Fire jugglers (photo courtesy of Kristin)

Child in hilarious bunny ears (photo courtesy of Kristin)

The fireworks display did not disappoint either, and I even saw a couple types that I’ve never seen before. The crowd thinned out pretty quickly after the show, however, so Kristin and I decided to make our way back and grab something substantial to eat.

What better meal to eat in England on a national holiday than a traditional meal of fish ‘n’ chips? No better, that’s what. We went to an adorable pub called “The Cambridge” and proceeded to have the most British meal ever: fish ‘n’ chips with mashed peas on the side. It was simple and delicious and very filling, but I managed to save just a little bit of room for our dessert: typically British dish (and “Harry Potter’s favorite,” reminded Kristin) – treacle tart.

Although I’d heard of it before, I actually had no idea what treacle tart really was. I imagined it to be sweet and vaguely toffee-ish, and I wasn’t too far from the mark. We were served what was essentially a very dense slice of brownie-like cake, except instead of being chocolatey, it was rich with some unique flavor. I literally spent a good ten minutes trying to puzzle out just what the flavor reminded me of, cleansing my palette with sips of water in between bites and acting slightly obsessive compulsive. It wasn’t quite toffee, it wasn’t quite brown sugar… eventually it hit me – it was like really mild molasses. I looked it up later when I got home, and discovered it is indeed molasses-based. But I suppose you don’t really care about that – all you need to know is that it was delicious, and that it will surely be given a coveted spot on my “Most Delicious Desserts Encountered in Europe” list.

Anyway, full of hearty English food, Kristin and I made our way back to her flat. It was already sort of late, but we decided we would stay up for awhile longer, chatting and swapping music, because we both had our laptops. Considering I had been up since 6 am, this was a questionable decision on my part, but when I started getting a little loopy around 2 am we called it quits and went to bed. After all, we had to be rested for another day full of London fun in the morning.

Het Concertgebouw

Sometimes I actually stay in Amsterdam. You wouldn’t think it from reading my last six posts. But despite how it seems from all my traveling weekends and random day-trips with classes and such, I spend quite a lot of time just hanging out in Amsterdam, seeing things here and making sure I know this city better than any other place I visit.

IES helps a bit with that from time to time. Most of the excursions they plan are to places a bit out of the Amsterdam city limits – to places like the Zuiderzeemuseum and Hoge Veluwe, etc, that we might not normally get to see otherwise. But the week after I returned from Paris, Chantal, Eva, and Margarethe had planned a very cultured night for us in the city.

They had arranged for us to go see a performance at the Concertgebouw, with a nice dinner at an Indonesian restaurant beforehand. Now when I say “arranged” I mean we paid them to do this, but it was money well-spent for a classy night out. On that Wednesday night we all got dressed up and made our way first to the restaurant, which was called “Kantijl en de Tijger” and had a funny little shadow-puppet logo:

Dinner was served “rijsttafel” (rice table) style, which meant that many small dishes were passed around for the entire group to share. It’s a similar idea to a tapas restaurant. We had a huge variety of dishes, including different types of rice, fried noodles, satay, kebabs, salads – the dishes kept coming and coming. I tried a little bit of just about everything that came my way, and I can officially say it was delicious. The Netherlands is known for having some of the best Indonesian food outside of Indonesia, a quirky little distinction due to the substantial population of Indonesian people in the country (a result of its days as a colonial power).

We finished up dinner with coffee and some kek lapis – a traditional Indonesian layered spice cake that takes over two hours to make, as each layer is baked on over a griddle. It was a beautiful and delicious dessert.

Internet stock photo of kek lapis. Isn't it pretty?

Following that, we boarded a tram that would take us down to Museumplein and the Concertgebouw. Het Concertgebouw (which literally translates to “The Concert Building”) is a lovely old concert hall that is home to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. This orchestra has been voted “the top symphony orchestra in the world” for two years running, now, by top music critics in Gramophone magazine. In other words, they’re kind of a big deal.

That evening the orchestra was going to play four pieces of Mozart for us, but they were joined for two of the numbers by a guest pianist, Maria Joao Pirez, who is apparently also highly acclaimed. I confess I know very little about classical music, so I can’t attest to the subtle refinement of the performance or anything. I enjoyed it very much, however, and I can attest to the fact that a man sitting across the aisle from me was moved to tears by it, and both pianist and orchestra received a standing ovation.

Other highlights of the evening (besides good food and beautiful music) included free beverages served in a posh concessions area during intermission (fancy!), being complimented on my “smart” plaid tights by my slightly crazy (but mostly lovable) art history professor, who was also at the concert, and seeing Christmas lights already starting to pop up over the city during the ride home. I returned to Funen feeling full, happy, festive and very cultured. Not bad for a Wednesday evening in Amsterdam.

Side Note: Paris (cont'd)

C’est ça Halloween!

Before I start this note in earnest, I have to explain that ever since I found out that we would be in Paris for Halloween, I had this stuck in my head (thanks to my French II teacher in high school):

So that’s what I woke up thinking about on our last full day in Paris, and what remained in my head throughout the day’s events.

We had planned, appropriately, to spend the morning in a cemetery – the Père Lachaise Cemetery to be precise. This giant graveyard is the final resting place of over 300,000 people, including such notable figures as Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, and Oscar Wilde.

The cemetery seemed to be doing its very best to be Halloween-like for us, too. The leaves were all yellow and orange and scuttling around in the wind, and a black cat even crossed our path at one point. It would have been kind of spooky if the weather hadn’t been so crisp and sunny and clear. Instead it was really beautiful.

After wandering through the cemetery all three of my travel companions went off to meet other friends who were staying in the area, leaving me with a couple of hours to kill before I was supposed to try to meet up with someone myself. I spent that time at the Musée Rodin, which had been highly recommended to me by my Dutch art history professor, my French friend living in Amsterdam, and my American friend studying in Paris as a place worth seeing. The rather small museum, which is a bit off the beaten path in Paris by the Hotel des Invalides, did not disappoint, and I happily passed my time admiring the sculpture both inside and outside the building.

I had been trying since Thursday to get hold of the American friend of mine who is studying abroad in Paris for the semester, and after a bit of crossed-signals back-and-forth, had finally made contact online. She had given me her phone number and we had arranged for a time to meet, but as my phone wasn’t working very well on the French networks, I never managed to get in touch with her to pin down an exact place to meet. I left the Musée Rodin a bit before I was supposed to meet up with her, and I took the Metro down to the 2e arrondissement (which is where she supposedly lives).

I hoped against hope that she would somehow try to call me and manage to break through the bad connections, but alas, that never happened. Instead I wandered around the 2e for over an hour exploring with less and less enthusiasm as it became clearer and clearer I was not going to find anyone.

I did however, see something that made me chuckle (and gave me small hopes of festivities later in the evening): a costume shop with a line of people stretching nearly an entire block out the door. Oh French people, I thought to myself, you’re still getting used to this whole Halloween thing, aren’t you?

I systematically tried calling each of my three friends to see where they were, and was met with voicemails, busy signals and could-not-connects all around. I tried to buy a crepe to boost my spirits, but was blatantly ignored by the vendor – who chose to serve a giant mass of people who barged ahead of me instead. I was frustrated, hungry, and more than a little tired – in short, pretty cranky, by my standards. I decided the best thing to do would be to go back to the hotel and rest until my friends returned from their adventures. So that’s what I did (I also got my crepe – at last – from a kindly old lady selling them at a little shop near our hotel).

One crepe, one nap, and one friendly phone call from Marie later, I was feeling in slightly higher spirits and was ready to meet up with my friends – all of them this time, including the group who had come later – for dinner back near Notre Dame/the Latin Quarter. We met up easily only to split up again, as half of us wanted to find food that was quick and cheap, and the other half wanted to find somewhere to sit down that would likely be more expensive.

Those of us who took the quick, cheap route, ended up finding a place to sit anyway – the basement area of a pita shop that was empty except for us. Dinner was uneventful – until the lights went out in the middle of it and we were momentarily stranded in the dark (we thought they had forgotten we were down there and turned off the light – turns out it was just a brief power outage). But it was cheap and filling and it was nice to sit down and just eat and relax for awhile.

After dinner Adeola accompanied Conny back to our room so that Conny could change into the epic Halloween costume she had made. The rest of us went into to a noisy bar/club place called the Latin Corner, where they served drinks with sparklers in them and played bizarre videos and loud techno music. We didn’t stay there much longer than it took to finish a drink, then we took to the street in search of a quieter and less expensive (I had paid nearly €6 for a soda!) locale. We didn’t really find one, but we did meet up with Adeola, and Conny – who was decked out in her costume.

Conny had decided to be a lion for Halloween, and had ingeniously crafted a costume from a hooded sweatshirt that she had died yellow. She sewed thick brown yarn and cloth ears onto the hood, wore some yellow tights and fixed a fabric tail to her shorts, painted a nose and some whiskers on her face with eyeliners, and voila! A cute (and stylish) lion costume for a Parisian Halloween. Note – originally I was going to be a lion tamer to go along with Conny’s costume, but a lack of time for crafting and a lack of desire to spend money on a costume nixed that plan. Conny rocked her costume nonetheless.

We did what we do best and wandered around Paris for awhile. There were a couple of other young people dressed up for the occasion, but not really anything else to do. The whole group of us (amount to about 8 or 9 people at this point) sat in front of Notre Dame for awhile, watching the crowds and some random street performers.

Eventually about half the group decided to head back and go to bed, while the other half stayed out awhile longer and looked for some more adventures. I gladly joined the bed-bound crowd and made it back to Montmartre with Marie. I stayed up only long enough to pack most of my things, and then crashed, eager to catch some sleep before our long bus ride back to Amsterdam the next day.

Side Note: Paris - Part Deux

On Day 2, we dragged ourselves out of bed bright and early to make it to the Louvre before the crowds. We had a delightful breakfast of baguettes and French pastries from the bakery across the street from our hotel, and then we hopped on the Metro and headed to the museum.

Adeola, me, and Conny at the Louvre (photo courtesy of Marie)

For those of you who have never been, you should know that the Louvre is ENORMOUS. It used to be the palace of the French Royal Family before Louis XIV decided to construct Versailles, and it shows. I had been to the Louvre once before, on that same French trip five years back, but we had only been allotted two hours there, after a full day of touring, no less. The rest of the weary, whiny high schoolers in my group wanted nothing more than to see the Mona Lisa and find somewhere to sit down, while I, fresh out of my very first art history class, wanted to see as much as I could.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen, so I was determined to make up for it this time around. Fortunately, I had Conny with me, and she was similarly motivated. We grabbed a map, split off from Adeola and Marie, and charted our course throughout the museum.

Dear readers, I am proud to report that we spent SIX HOURS in the Louvre. Yes, that’s right, six whole hours admiring art – and certainly getting our workout in as well. I’m not sure how many miles of walking we clocked in, but it was probably quite a few. We stopped once, about three-and-a-half hours in, to drink some water, eat the remainder of Conny’s baguette from breakfast, and chart out the rest of our course.

All told, we still probably saw only half of the collection, but we did get to see all the big things we set out to find. I’ll admit that in the interest of time I did once or twice resort to a very touristy move: stopping, scanning the room, spotting the most famous piece of art contained therein, literally pointing at it and proclaiming “THERE!” then charging toward it while ignoring pretty much everything else.

Not really my preferred mode of exploring a museum, but after hour five I couldn’t really be held responsible for my actions.

After the Louvre we were all pretty exhausted. We spent more time than we should have wandering around and bickering mildly about where we should stop for lunch, and in the end just wound up heading back to the mall around the Louvre to grab sandwiches. It was already starting to get dark by the time we were fed and rested enough at our restaurant. We decided to slowly but surely make our way to next big touristy attraction:

The Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower was just as beautiful as I remembered it being, and was actually a tiny bit LESS crowded than it had been during the summer I’d seen it before. This was probably because it was foggy and pretty cold out, but I’ll take a bit of a chill over a throng of people any day. Plus, this time, I got to go all the way to the top of the tower, which had been closed for some reason the last time I was there.

Terrible, blurry, foggy shot of Paris from the top of the tower. I'm putting it up anyway.

We had planned to eat crepes at the little restaurant on top of the tower, but were dismayed to find that, so late at night, it was already closed. So after we had had our fill of views of Paris at night, we set out to find some crepes that were a bit cheaper than the overpriced places around the Tour Eiffel.

We found them, eventually, in the Latin Quarter, a popular student neighborhood. We stumbled across a pretty pale blue bakery with a crepe vendor stand outside. We bought our crepes (mine was banana with Nutella) and sat under the shelter of the heat-lamp-bedecked bakery awning to eat them. There was lots of talking and joking and a stressful failed attempt to make contact with the rest of our huge original group of Paris-bound friends (they were arriving that night).

Also, a clown showed up and settled down with his non-clown companion at the table next to ours. It was... funny.

My discreet, paparazzi-style photo of Monsieur Clown

And so ended our second night in Paris.

Side Note: Paris

Getting There

At some point a long while back, a couple of my friends had proposed the idea of going to Paris for Halloween. I don’t remember who originally had the idea, or what they really expected to find there for the holiday itself, but I do remember that all of a sudden a huge group of IES students was interested in Paris. Word spread around, as word tends to do, and the next thing I knew, there were upwards of fifteen people expressing the desire to have a Parisian adventure of some sort.

After all the coordination stress and hassle we had gone through in Bruges, a couple of us decided it would be best if we split the group up into smaller parts based on when people were available to leave, and then let each of those smaller groups figure out transportation, housing, and the rest of their itinerary on their own. After all, we could always meet up with them once we got to Paris, and then we would skip the agonies of trying to coordinate so many different schedules at one time. My group ended up being trusty travel companions Adeola, Conny, and Marie.
Our original plan had been to take the high-speed Thalys train down to Paris, but we managed to miss the promotional deal that would have given us super cheap tickets, and decided shelling out 100+ euros just to get there wasn’t really worth the faster train. On a whim, I checked out the Eurolines bus prices, and found that we could get to the same place in twice the time, but at half the cost. We have time, right? I asked the group (we were planning on going Thursday to Sunday). Nobody could object to the more reasonable price, so we took a bus to Paris

The bus we took was an overnight bus, from Wednesday night to Thursday morning. In theory, this was great, because it meant that we could sleep while we rode down and arrive bright and early in Paris the next morning, rested and ready to take on the city. In practice, it meant that we were crammed into a slightly bumpy, slightly chilly bus for eight hours (except for the two obnoxiously long pit stops we made at the sketchiest gas stations in Europe), trying to tune out the cabin lights and the cheesy “easy listening” music that played nonstop on the radio.

Needless to say, we were a little cranky by the time we alighted in Paris at 6 am, but we hung out gamely in the bus station lobby until the sun came up, then we cast about for some breakfast. There was a little mall area outside the station, and we ended up eating at … McDonald’s.

Yes, that’s right – I ate at a McDonald’s for the first time since I’ve been in Europe. Part of me had vowed that I would never do such a thing, but part of me also couldn’t pass up a super-cheap breakfast and free Wi-Fi (which French McDonald’ses apparently instituted to make themselves seem like a hip hangout to attract the locals instead of a soul-sucking fast-food death chain for fat Americans). We waited in the restaurant long enough for some caffeine to kick in, then we braced ourselves to venture into Paris.

Five years ago I was also in Paris, during my first and only other trip to Europe. We were there for just two days, being led around in a giant tour group, but I remember having no idea how to navigate the Metro. Maybe the size and pace of our tour was overwhelming, or maybe I’m just more versed in the ways of public transport now, because this time the Paris metro seemed liked the simplest thing on earth. We bought day passes and hopped on a train, and twenty-odd minutes later we were in Montmartre, where our hotel for the weekend was.

Since we were in Montmartre, we had to go see Sacré Coeur. It was just as beautiful as I remembered it from five years earlier, and half as crowded. The view from the top was gorgeous too, even though it was a little foggy.

After that we descended the hill and poked around in some fun little Montmartre shops, then went back to find lunch near our hotel. Badly in need of a rest, we napped – all except for Conny, who was working on her Halloween costume. More on that later.

After our rest, we decided that we would go to Notre Dame for the afternoon. We set out, found the cathedral, and explored it until it got dark.

Following that, we walked along the Seine – taking in the loveliness of Paris lit up at night – and made our way to the Musée d’Orsay, for a 19th century art fest. The Musée d’Orsay used to be a train station, but it was converted into a spectacular museum. Like I said, it holds mostly 19th century art, which includes everyone from David and Delacroix, to Manet, Degas, Monet, Seurat, Millet, Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh. It’s probably the single greatest concentration in one place of paintings-I’ve-studied-in-my-art-history-classes. Ecstatic? You bet I was.

The only thing that kept my visit from being the perfect museum experience was a family of tourists (a mom and two kids) who were flying through the entire museum, pausing at any given painting only long enough to snap a picture of it and walk away. I saw the mother literally steering her children by their shoulders to the most well-known pieces, saying, “Oh, this is a really famous one,” and waiting impatiently for her son or daughter to take a quick picture of the work. The second they had finished, she grabbed their shoulders again and dragged them away, darting toward the next “must see” item.

I always wonder, when I see people like this in art museums, why they even bother coming to the place at all. It would be so much easier for them to sit on their computer and Google Van Gogh or Monet, and you can be sure they’d find some better images than their two-second snapshot will ever produce. It’s not about standing in the same room as a famous painting. It’s about getting a chance to take a proper look at some art.

So there’s my editorial for the day. In silent tribute to my annoyance, I refused to take any pictures of the paintings I saw. I just looked at them for a really long time.

By the time we were done, the museum was about to close (it was nearly 9pm). We were all tired and famished so we headed back to our hotel to grab some dinner there. We got sandwiches from a little shop on our hotel’s street that was about to close, then went up to our room and went to bed. So concluded our first (long) day in Paris.

Side Note: Brussels

After a week of short-distance adventures, it was time for another big trip. The destination this time? Belgium again, but farther south and farther east than we had been in Bruges, all the way to capital of Europe itself: Brussels.

I was traveling this time with Kathleen, Marie, Adeola, and for the first time ever – Conny (hooray for roommate adventures). Since most of us had already been to Belgium, we decided to make the trip a short one, leaving Friday morning and coming back Saturday night.

Our adventure began (as our adventures so often do) with an early morning trek to Centraal Station. There we went to buy some tickets, but were informed that the ones we purchased (weekend returns, which are a special deal) were valid only after 9 am… and the train we wanted left at 8:54. We asked around at the various ticket desks to see if those last six minutes would really matter. The salespeople insisted they would, and our only other option was to wait a whole hour for the next train to come.

On a whim, we went up to the platform to see if we could somehow talk the train’s conductor into letting us on with our tickets. The train pulled in not two minutes after we arrived, and we strode along its length trying to find someone to approach. Conny and I made it all the way to the front of the train before we found anyone, and then it was the train driver himself, who said we needed to talk to a “car manager.” So we scurried back down the way we had come, trying to find such a person. The first conductor-type we ran into just shrugged and shook his head. The second one referred us to his boss, who was rapidly walking away from us back toward the front of the train. I had resigned myself to catching the later train, but Conny ran ahead to catch up with the manager, and after talking with him for a minute or so, smiled and waved us onto the train.

We had an uneventful trip into Brussels, arrived on time and made our way to our hostel, which was called the Van Gogh because apparently Vincent van Gogh had briefly worked and lived there at some point. Pretty cool, but I think I’ve become a little bit jaded about that artist since I see his things in the Netherlands all the time.

The hostel room itself left a lot to be desired. It smelled vaguely of urine, the furniture was wobbly, and only one of the three bunk beds had a ladder to the top. There were also five of us in a room meant for six, which meant we would probably get an odd roommate later on. Not ones to be too bothered by any of this, however, we struck out to explore Brussels. This basically entailed eating our way through the city and wandering around with rather aimlessly.

We stopped to get lunch at a cheap falafel place near our hostel, where we discovered that a sandwich “avec frites” meant that the french fries were actually included on the sandwich. We ambled down a prominent-looking street basing our direction on whichever way looked most interesting. We managed to pass a couple of intriguing things, like a giant pillar (The Congress Column – national monument of Belgium) and a lovely old cathedral.

Belgium is very cartoon-oriented, since the guys who invented Tin Tin and the Smurfs were both Belgian. There’s a Comic Strip Museum in the city somewhere, and there are a bunch of “cartoon walls” where people have painted giant comic-style murals amid the normal buildings. They added a bit of color and fun to what was otherwise a fairly drab city, and give Brussels some of its trademark absurdity.

Fireworks!

And Zorro? Absurd.

After our brief bit of exploring we managed to find ourselves in a touristy center full of chocolate shops and restaurants selling all the french fries and waffles you could ever want. We bought individual bonbons at one of the chocolate stores so that we could at least say we tried some of the fancy chocolate, and then we sat around eating waffles and being entertained by a guy who was awkwardly drunk at 3:00 in the afternoon. This man – of some ambiguous nationality, though he was speaking in English – was stumbling around the square, standing on the bistro tables and swapping hats with random passersby. “I love your hands, they are so gentle,” he proclaimed to the exasperated shop-keeper who tried to help him down from the tables. “They are the nicest hands in the world.” Absurd.

Chocolate!

Waffles!

After waffles, we did what we do best – wandering! We had a acquired another map for young travelers, which was similar to the one we had in Bruges, but unfortunately not as reliable. Many of the places it mentioned were either closed or not where they were supposed to be, but it was helpful in directing us to some Brussels staples like the Mannekin Pis and the Grand Place, where the UN building and some fancy old guild houses are located.

Mannekin Pis. Absurd.

Le Grand Place. Pretty typical, actually.

We continued our wanderings in and out of various stores (one devoted entirely to Tin Tin, one devoted entirely to beer, most devoted entirely to chocolate) until we started to feel hungry for dinner. After some fruitless questing for a so-called “food street” we saw in our map, we settled on a reasonably-priced Chinese restaurant. There, we were served heaping portions of food, and I had a plate flung (and shattered) in my direction by an oblivious small child who was related to the proprietors in some way. There was also something called “basilisk” on the menu. Absurd.

Mmm. Basilisk!

We decided to give our map one last chance by following its directions to get to a nearby parking garage. From there, it said, you could catch a spectacular view of the city, and you wouldn’t have to pay for any of it. The view was indeed spectacular, particularly at night with all the buildings lit up. We stayed on the roof taking pictures for awhile, and then returned to our hostel for the evening.

The next morning, at my request, we set out for the Musee des Beaux-Arts/Magritte Museum, where I was pleased to discover that even a year and a half since my last French lesson, I could still read 90% of the text on the walls. We also saw some very weird art (typical of Surreal Magritte) and some very amazing art. The best part for me was seeing Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, a perennial favorite of art historians and regular historians alike.

Morbid? Maybe. Awesome? Absolutely.

Plus, Marie and I even managed to stumble upon our first real Rachel Ruysch painting! A happy surprised after all our foiled questing earlier in the week/semester.

We spent several hours in the museum, and afterwards we were ready for lunch. We managed to find a street that was literally just cheap Greek pita shops, and picked one at random to go to. After lunch, we began to wander some more, but there wasn’t a whole lot else we wanted to see. We found a couple more interesting statues and went into a couple of semi-interesting shops, but it was probably a good thing we had only intended to stay for one night, because by the end of Saturday afternoon, we were running out of things to do, and mostly wanted to head home and sleep.

Godiva window display. Absurdly cute.

So after stocking up on some Belgian chocolate at the most reasonably-priced place we could find, we grabbed some fries for dinner and headed off to the train station. The train we wanted was listed on the boards, but instead of a platform number, there were simply three asterisks (***). Knowing this could not bode well, we cast about for some more information, alternately eavesdropping, schedule-scanning, and battling our way to the ticket counter, only to be referred down to the information desk on another floor.

En route I saw a station employee (a maintenance worker of some kind, I think) who seemed to know something about what was going on, as he was pointing to one of the schedule boards and talking at the crowd of people milling around it. Unfortunately, I think he was speaking Flemish or a very strongly accented sort of Dutch, because I couldn’t understand anything he said, and my inquiries (first in English and then in French) yielded nothing but apologetic blank stares.

When we eventually found the right information desk, we were given helpful advice by a young-ish man who was surprisingly cheerful for having to work the Saturday night shift at a train station. No, he didn’t know the reason our train had been held up, but he recommended we hop aboard a train to Antwerp and then try and catch a different train to Amsterdam from there. If all else fails, he reminded us, we would at least be that much closer to where we wanted to be than if we stayed in Brussels.

Eager to trust in the friendly, smiley information guy (and honestly having nothing better to do), we got on the incoming Antwerp train and made it to that station without issue. We had about half an hour before another train headed to Amsterdam came in, which was just enough time to use the bathroom and get waffles out of the vending machines (one of my favorite European commodities). The train to Amsterdam was incredibly crowded (likely because the train we had wanted – and all other trains using that stretch of track to Brussels – had been canceled), but we all managed to find seats scattered throughout it. Adeola and I actually sat in little fold-down seats in the in-between compartments, but it worked, and we had a long and engrossing conversation until we made it back to Amsterdam.

We reached the doors of Funen a few minutes before midnight – just in time to see some of our friends heading out to start their Saturday evenings. We were all exhausted, though, so we stowed all of our Belgian goodies and settled down to sleep.

The Top 5 Strangest Things

Note: I wrote this post several weeks ago, but didn’t want to publish it until I had finished writing about the things that happened before it. You can blame any weird anachronisms on the delay.

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I can hardly believe it, but last week marked the halfway point of my time here in the Netherlands. It’s been a good term, full of lots of fun and travel and adventure and hardly any of the homesickness and emotional craziness that I had prepared myself for. So in honor of a successful first half-semester, I present to you (in the order that they occurred):

The Top 5 Strangest Things I’ve Seen in The Netherlands So Far:

1. “Proud Sons of Maastricht”

The weekend Stewart and I went to Maastricht, we did a lot of people-watching while we were wandering around. On our second night in the city we happened across a group of young male Maastrichters congregating in a corner of the square. They were all just sitting/standing around and drinking while one of their number wore an Arab-style costume and stood over a kiddie-pool with a snorkel on. They were accompanied by a boom box playing an upbeat soundtrack of Michael Jackson’s greatest hits. Naturally. Stewart and I were convinced that the guys were street performers or something, but we later deduced that it was some strange sort of bachelor party, because all of the men (who weren’t wearing ethnic costumes) had on black t-shirts with “GAME OVER” under a picture of a man and woman standing together.

Sort of like this.

The entire group seemed intent on the task of filling up the kiddie-pool with water, but perhaps they had come ill-prepared (or were simply too drunk to function), because they actually seemed to be making negative progress during the time that Stewart and I were there. We were watching them closely, intent on figuring out what on earth they were trying to do, when all of a sudden we heard loud military songs and turned to see a parade of uniformed soldiers literally marching down the tiny street behind us. Stewart and I had seen a couple stray soldiers wandering around during the day, but the whole brigade seemed weirdly out of place.

What made it even weirder, though, was the fact that the soldiers weren’t Dutch – they were American. I didn’t think they looked like American military, but they were definitely singing something about “Gettysburg” and “Bunker Hill.” They chanted their way brazenly through the street (drowning out strains of “Billie Jean” in the background) as Stewart and I looked on bewilderedly.

I was waiting for the guy in the Arab suit to do something political and symbolic, but he totally missed his chance. Meanwhile, the soldiers marched on around the corner without any explanation, and nobody else in the square seemed very phased. To this day we have no idea what on earth was going on.


2. A Royal Promenade

The last of our IES orientation activities was a mandatory lecture about the evils of plagiarism. En route to that lecture, I had to trek along Prins Hendrikkade (a busy main street) with a couple of my friends from Centraal Station to the International Students building (the one of “blue brick road” fame). We were hurrying along, trying not to be late when we were distracted by a pair of policemen riding down the median of Prins Hendrikkade on large brown horses. “Mounted police officers,” we remarked, amused. “Didn’t know they had those here, too!”

But as we continued down the road we saw that the policemen weren’t just on patrol – they were escorting a series of 5 or 6 horse-drawn carriages full of people in fancy hats. The women were in stately flowery affairs, and some of the men were actually wearing top hats. They rolled casually down the center of the street, taking in the sights of the city. A couple of them smiled and waved to the people staring at them from the sidewalk.

I never got a confirmation on this, but I’m pretty sure some members of the royal family were in those carriages. It happened on a day when Queen Beatrix was supposed to be addressing Parliament about something, so apparently she was in town. She may or may not have been in one of the carriages, but other important people definitely were – cruising around Amsterdam in their classy top hats as if it happens every day. And who knows – maybe in the life of a Dutch dignitary, it does.


3. The Old Man and the Stone

The weekend Kristin came to visit, we took her to see some of the most touristy places in the city. As we were passing through Dam Square, a large area surrounded by the Royal Palace, Madame Tussaud’s, and other high profile attractions, we saw an Amsterdam Souvenirs shop with a giant yellow clog outside. Naturally, we had to take our pictures in it.

There was a crowd of people around the oversized shoe, more or less patiently waiting their turn to hop in and declare their dorky tourist status. Kristin, Conny, and I waited as well, and when some of the crowd had cleared out a little, Kristin and I walked towards the clog to get in. We were trying to settle ourselves into a sufficiently camera-worthy pose when a concerned-looking old man approached us, as if trying to get our attention. Worried that he might be trying to tell us to stop playing around on a piece of someone else’s property, we froze uncertainly. The man was mumbling something quietly in Dutch, and I strained to make out a familiar word, to no avail.

That was when he stopped, produced a stone about the size of a soup bowl, walked over to us and placed it officiously inside of the clog. With that he looked at us, bobbed his head, and tottered off into the bustling crowd, leaving Kristin and me to look at each other in bafflement.

We took our picture in the clog as quickly as possible, and hopped out a little nervously. “What was that about?” asked Conny, who had taken the picture. “I have no idea,” I said, “but it was really weird.” “It freaked me out a little, honestly,” agreed Kristin.

What was the meaning of the mysterious rock? Was it a weight? A bomb? An offering to the clog god?

We may never know.

Pretending we're not scared.

4. Let’s Talk About Sex

Amsterdam is famous for its liberal views and high tolerance of all things sexual. Gay marriage has been legal here for quite some time, the prostitutes in the Red Light District have a workers union, and there is not one, but two museums dedicated entirely to sex. But did you know that the sex education policies in the Netherlands are also among the most liberal in the world? The national guidelines for sex education are much more comprehensive than what is generally taught in the U.S., and most people here scoff at the idea of “abstinence only” education.

I’m not bothered by this attitude - I even support it (did you know the Netherlands also has the lowest teen pregnancy rate in Europe?). But what I like to think of as my own liberal attitude still didn’t prepare me for what I found at the NEMO Museum.

NEMO is a children’s museum across the harbor from where I have my classes. In most respects it’s a lot like any Science Center I’ve ever been to – several floors of fun games and interactive exhibits designed to teach kids about the world. As you advance up the levels, however, you eventually reach the “Teen Facts” floor. There you can find, among other things:

- A short animated video of the changes teenage bodies go through during puberty
- A game of Memory where the cards are microscopic or heat-signature depictions of things like sperm, neurotransmitters, or STD germs
- A display of wooden artist’s model dolls arranged in different Kama sutra positions, and -
- A glass box containing giant fabric tongues that you can stick your arms in to practice “making out”

You think I’m kidding.

I’m not kidding.

5. The Fresh Prince of… H&M?

After we had run out of pretty scenic things to see during Tarra’s visit to Amsterdam, we spent some time walking around Kalverstraat – a very big, very commercial pedestrian street. We shopped for awhile in H&M, the cheap, trendy clothing stores that are ubiquitous in Europe, and not uncommon in the hipper cities of the United States.

Tarra and I were perusing the racks of scarves and bags and stylish dresses when the edgy EuroPop that was playing in the store suddenly gave way to the most unexpected – and quite possibly most ridiculous – piece of music ever: the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song.

We both did a bit of a double take, and then cracked up for awhile in the middle of the store. There’s nothing like the musical stylings of Will Smith to make you want to buy that leather-fur-and-sequins purse you’ve been eyeing for awhile. Right?

Oh, Europe...


I hope these anecdotes have been as entertaining for you as the actual encounters were for me. Here’s hoping the rest of my semester will be just as wonderfully strange!

Den Haag

Upon my return from Edinburgh, I was faced with an unusual week. Had I been at any other European university, it would have been the week of my fall break. Had I been at any other Dutch school besides a university, it would have been the week of my fall break. Unfortunately, I’m at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and they don’t have an official, scheduled fall vacation. What happens instead is that professors may or may not cancel class that week, depending on whether or not they have younger children to be home with. Other professors take advantage of the fact that their colleagues need to be with their families and cancel their classes as well.

And then there are my teachers, who decided that we would not only still have class that week, but we would use our class time to do more time-consuming things than usual – like go on field trips or have guest lecturers. All of my teachers decided to do this, except for my kindly old Dutch Language professor, Freek.* I think the idea was that if you decided to cut class that week (to have your own de facto fall break), you wouldn’t be missing anything that you couldn’t go do on your own, but still… it was a little frustrating.

*Yes, that is his real name. You actually say it more like “Frey-k,” but in my head, he will always be Professor Freak.

On the other hand, I got the opportunity to visit some cities in the Netherlands outside of Amsterdam. I spent one day in Utrecht, and one day in Haarlem, visiting the Aboriginal Art Museum/Utrecht Centraal Museum, and the Teylers Museum/Great Church of St. Bavo’s, respectively. Unfortunately, since these were fast-paced field trips, I didn’t bother to bring a camera. I thus have no pictures to show you – you’ll just have to trust that I was there.

Because Professor Freek had canceled my Monday-Thursday Dutch class, I had an extra free day at the end of the week. I decided to continue my string of city-hopping by taking a trip to Den Haag. Den Haag is better known to English-speakers as The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government and the city where the royal family currently resides. It’s about a 45-minute train ride west of Amsterdam, but it’s well worth the journey (and the €12 return ticket).

Like in most European cities of note, there are lots of pretty buildings and impressive statues. More importantly, however, there are two excellent art museums – The Mauritshuis Museum and the Escher Museum.

I went to see the Mauritshuis because it was supposed to have a painting by Rachel Ruysch, a 17th century painter of flower still-lifes on whom I’m supposed to do a paper for my Colour & Culture class. Despite the fact that Ruysch was incredibly prolific and lived in or around Amsterdam for most of her life, her paintings are surprisingly hard to come by. The people at the Rijksmuseum didn’t even know who I was talking about when I inquired there, but the Mauritshuis website claimed to have at least one of her paintings on view.

Unfortunately, when I got there, I learned that the floor with the Ruysch painting was temporarily closed. Just my luck. Fortunately, there are more exciting things to see at the Mauritshuis than a painting of flowers. Like what, you ask?

Oh, I don't know... this?

After reveling in the Vermeer for awhile (and buying a postcard of the closed Ruysch in the gift shop), I had lunch at a cool little café with my traveling companions, Kathleen and Marie. We were served heaping sandwiches accompanied by necessary forks and knives, ate them, then set off through the misty Den Haag weather to destination number two: The Escher Museum.

M.C. Escher. Also possibly an evil wizard, or Rasputin.

I love M.C. Escher, and I loved the museum. In addition to having tons of Escher prints and drawings on display, there was an installation of whimsical chandeliers in each of the rooms of the building, which used to be a palace. So really, the museum was like 3 museums in one: part Escher, part historical landmark, and part display space for the artist who had created the chandeliers. Visitors were allowed to photograph everything – sans flash, of course – and although I usually don’t take pictures of art on principle (I’d much rather take the time to look at art instead of snapping a picture that will never be as good as a professional replication anyway), I was so delighted that I couldn’t help but try to document some of my favorites.

After two museums, we were pretty wiped out, so we headed back home to Amsterdam. I hardly saw half of what The Hague has to offer, but it was enough to make for an absolutely excellent day.