What Happens In Amsterdam...

Ah, Amsterdam! Because nothing says “family vacation” like a dildo shop next door to the hotel.

This weekend, my mom and I left the safety and rain of Nijmegen for the cultural treasures and rain of Amsterdam. I hate to admit it, but after ten months in the Netherlands, this was really my first time in Amsterdam proper.

A number of things surprised me about Amsterdam, but the most shocking was the number of people I saw wearing sweatpants.

You know: Amsterdam. City of canals and art and gays and ultra-progressive social policies like legalized prostitution and marijuana. And bleeding-edge fashion. Such as sweatpants. Regular, gray, straight-legged, American-style sweatpants.

We were also surprised by the sheer volume of artifacts just relating to the history of the city of Amsterdam. I acknowledge that the city is more than 400 years old, but seriously. There were a LOT of artifacts in a LOT of museums, all illustrating just three basic ideas:

• Guilds of men bearing crossbows policed the city and enjoyed having group portraits painted. Possibly more than they enjoyed actually firing their crossbows in defense of the city.
  
• Dutch trading companies made a tremendous amount of money building worldwide empires.
  
• The sanctioned flavor of Christianity changed every 50 years, but in the proud tradition of Dutch social tolerance, as long as you didn’t make a big fuss, you could pretty much worship however you wanted.
  

We visited many of Amsterdam’s signature museums, but we also hit some of its tiny specialty museums, of which there are also a shocking number.

Like the houseboat museum, which is a charming, houseboat-sized showcase of... (I know the suspense here is killing you) a houseboat.

We skipped the Bags & Purses Museum, as well as the Torture Museum. It’s debatable which of those would have actually been more torturous to visit.

Did I mention that it rained day and night?

I have to admit that my biggest concern about taking my mother to Amsterdam was not the pot or the Red Light District (though we partook of neither, in case you’re wondering).

It was the bicycles. She’s generally pretty alert, but if you haven’t spent the last ten months training yourself not to step into the path of speeding bicycles, the intermingling of bikes and pedestrian on the busy streets can be a little dicey.

Fortunately, the only true threat to my mother’s health and well being came when she dumped a sachet full of salt into her morning coffee. Needless to say, this was not a gentle introduction to the otherwise delightful Dutch buffet breakfast.

Me: Were those packets next to the coffee?

Her: No, but they were right next to the packets of brown sugar!

Me: Um...I think those were mustard seeds.

My mother, who has a long and storied culinary history of swapping salt in for sugar, tried to invoke the Vegas clause with respect to the salt incident.

But because what she actually proclaimed was, “What stays in Amsterdam, happens in Amsterdam.” said clause was null and void.

Sorry, Mom.

After Amsterdam, we ignored wretched weather forecasts (one of which actually used the term “wretched”) and took a train across the Flemish countryside to Bruges, a small Belgian city near the coast.

Lots of people had recommended Bruges as THE day trip to take from Nijmegen, but I was a little skeptical. How great could some obscure little Belgian city be?

As it turns out: really great!

In short, Bruges is a lovely, beautifully preserved medeival city with a strong but not overly commercialized tourist infrastructure. Plus: canals, museums, churches, restaurants, chocolate shops, cafes, and miles and miles of twisty little streets with gorgeous old (really old) houses. And a fully operational nunnery.

It’s a lot more interesting than it sounds.

I realize that this doesn’t really help my argument, but some people even call it “The Venice of Belgium.”

There’s not much going on in Bruges other than tourism associated with the places I mentioned above. Fortunately, we only experienced a few Disneyland moments.

Like one of the churches’ infinite-loop PA-system announcement inviting you in 7 languages to lay hands on its holy relic and thanking you in advance for your donation.

Or the bell towers, which really lay on the charm by chiming every 15 minutes. This is great, except that the first carillon tune we heard was “Stars & Stripes Forever.”

Nothing says “Medeival Capital of Europe” like John Philip Sousa!

Or the street musicians, who added lots of old world atmophere except when playing an accordian rendition of “My Way.”

The weather wasn’t wretched, after all, except for a driving rain that started the minute we stepped off the train.

After that, the clouds parted and coughed up some nice light for the 700 photos we took.

No trip to Belgium (or the Netherlands, for that matter) is complete without an order of friets.

Though I took pity on my mother and didn’t make her eat them with a big, delicious glop of mayonaise on top.

The Elusive Pontje

I'm embarassed to say that it's taken me ten months to learn the first commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not underestimate the impeding power of water.  

John recently escaped the pressing gloom of fall in Nijmegen with a strategically planned work trip to Argentina.  By work trip, I mean two weeks of spending all day out on the sunny pampas and all evening eating Argentinean steak and drinking Malbec.  

I'm thinking that I should change the focus of my job search to pursue something with lots of "work trips." 

Luckily for me, the planets and the vagaries of the airline industry aligned in such a way that my mother was able to come and visit during the same two weeks.  

After arriving early on Saturday morning, she's been gamely battling jet lag, joining me on my circuit of favorite Dutch thrift stores, and surrendering to the roulette wheel of my cooking skills.  

Fortunately for me, I have a mother who is perfectly happy knitting while I mutter to myself and try to write cover letters and blog entries.  So: so far, so good! 

Today brought an unexpected day of sunshine, so we set off on foot toward the nature reserve just south of where we live.  We walked and walked and walked and walked and walked.  And then we walked some more.  

We logged most of our kilometers after deciding to strike out for Persingen, whose claim to fame is that with 89 residents, it's the smallest town in the Netherlands.   

Let me pause here to point out that until you've seen the smallest town in the Netherlands, you really haven't lived. 

By "deciding to strike out for Persingen", what I mean is that I said something like, "why don't we head over to Persingen?" in a tone of voice that suggested that a) I knew how to get there, and b) walking there would be a reasonable undertaking for the afternoon. 

In one sense, it's easy to navigate in the Netherlands because everything is so flat and you can see exactly where you want to go.  For example, the tiny red church in the middle of Persingen: 

In another sense, it's impossible to navigate because you can see where you want to go, but there are all of these goddamned — ahem, I mean lovely! — moats and canals and rivers and streams between you and your destination:

(And even when there aren't sanctioned bodies of water, chances are good that you will get stuck in swampy, marshy fields if you try to strike out on your own.)

First, we spent a fair amount of time walking away from Persingen in order to cross two large, water-filled ditches in order to head back toward Persingen.  

We then found what seemed to be a direct path across the polder to Persingen, only to be stopped by the second commandment of navigating in the Netherlands: Thou shalt not pretend that thou doesn't understand what verboden toegang means.    

In the interest of not angering Dutch farmers (or their livestock), we set off in the other direction to try to find another, less forbidden path.  

Now we were walking away from Persingen again, with no immediate options for a more direct route.  But then we started to see hand-lettered signs directing us to a "Pontje".  I had absolutely no idea what a pontje was, but it sounded a lot more fun and promising than verboden toegang, so we went with it.  

We hiked along a winding, muddy path next along a marshy pond (could that be the pontje?), past a guy picking berries (could that be the pontje?) and then over a small wooden bridge (could that be the pontje?).  But the path kept going and going until lo and behold, shining in the afternoon sunlight, stood The Pontje: a small ferry to get us across the Meertje and on our way back toward Persingen.  

By ferry, I mean a metal boat shaped like a cage, with a hand-operated crank that one can use to coax the hulking contraption along its cable.  

Verboden toegang notwithstanding, I really do love the Dutch.  

The only catch was this: after our triumphant (and necessarily brief) tour of Persingen, we headed west along the Meertje and back toward Nijmegen, trying to outrun some ominous fog bearing down on us from the east.  

But now we were on the wrong side of the Meertje with no pontje in sight.  So we walked and walked and walked until we returned to civilization. 

And by civilization, I mean the closest bridge. 

Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Pop quiz! 

Our trip to Berlin this past weekend was a glorious opportunity to: 

A) Visit the 2nd-largest food store in the world after 9 months in the food-retail wasteland called the Netherlands.

B) Dredge up wisps (in Autumn’s case) and clumps (in John’s case) of German speaking skills, then conquer the city in a largely incomprehensible pidgin of German, Dutch, and English.

C) Revel in the wonder and glory of German engineering, which in many cases goes beyond engineering and over that pretty line into insanity.  

Exibit 1: the chocolate-covered cookies served on the train that have a non-chocolate-covered section at the end so the chocolate does not melt onto one’s fingers while eating it.  

Exhibit 2: the train's emergency exit window with an unmistakable red dot showing exactly where you're supposed to hit the window with the emergency hammer.  Clearly, hitting the window with a hammer in some unspecified place would be inadequate. 

D) Eat sushi for the first time since — hmm, how can I write this in a way that will not sound worse than it actually is? — our trip to Poland. 

Ah, Berlin!  Only 6 hours from Nijmegen by train, and packed with all of the great things that I love in a city: cheap, delicious food; robust public transit; interesting buildings; fringey neighborhoods; and tons of music and art. 

Even the German language, of which I have less-than-fond memories from our time studying abroad in Vienna, felt easier than I expected it to be.  My knowledge of it being fortified, of course, with Dutch vocabulary words that are spelled differently but contain the same general idea.  

This doesn’t mean that I actually spoke any German other than please, thank you and tea with milk.  Which, as it turns out, are three critical phrases that get one further in the world than one might imagine!

But I could at least understand most of the signs and even some of the announcements.  

(Having said all of that, I really enjoyed my enormous sense of relief when we came back to the Netherlands and I could stop pointing and miming.)

Not to take anything away from Berlin, but I think part of my glow is that I just like cities in general.  

I've never really thought of myself as a city person, but life just seems that much more interesting when you can be walking along a street lined with tiny, weird art galleries and tattoo parlors and look up at an old, decrepit church, only to see Gary Coleman’s smiling visage staring down at you.

On Friday, we spent the late afternoon on a pilgrimage to a tiny, weird art gallery called Zozoville, which is owned by two artists whose work we really like. 

On Saturday, we made a pilgrimage to KaDeWe, a department store that contains the aforementioned 2nd-largest food store. 

The only sense of scale I can give here requires previous residence in the state of Wisconsin, so apologies in advance to my non-Wisconsonian brethren and sistren:

Imagine attaching Madison’s East Side Woodmans to Madison’s West Side Woodmans in a calamitous grocery store Big Bang, then sucking all of the combined contents into a black hole and replacing them with high-priced, fancy-shmance, utterly delicious, largely European specialty food items.  

KaDeWe also has an American food section, to the tune of: 

• Crisco
  
• Oh Henry! bars (I have to ask: do those even exist in the U.S. anymore, or are they being imported from some Hershey’s Cold War-era stockpile in eastern Lithuania?)
  
• Karo Corn Syrup
  
• Jiffy Pop
  
• Diet Doctor Pepper
  
• Cheese in a squeeze bottle
  
• Marshmallow Fluff
  
• Jif Peanut Butter
  
• Duncan-Hines brownie mix, and 
  
• Mike & Ike 
  

I felt a little bitter about the Karo.  Just last week, I had been looking for corn syrup in order to make caramel sauce for a chocolate souffle.  

(Note that something about the recent change in weather from lovely summer to cold, rainy fall has put me in the mood to make nesty, warm things like chocolate desserts baked in ramekins).  

After not finding any at my local Albert Heijn, I then sought counsel from the Internets and made my own corn syrup by boiling water, sugar and cream of tartar in a manner that, at least when performed by me, was at best dangerous and at worst a quick and easy way to ruin John’s favorite professional-grade sauce pan.  Eek!

But, we managed to escape from KaDeWe without any Marshmallow Fluff, and we recovered from our smorgasbord of food shopping with a Berlin-style currywurst: a hot dog-like substance (Exhibit 3: it was cut into coins by a specially-engineered hot dog cutter) covered with curry powder and a healthy portion of barbeque sauce. 

Healthy in the large sense of healthy, not in the healthy sense of healthy. 

Currywurst was not the only irresistible thing we found that afternoon.  

We also spotted a store called Kang Fu Supermarkt, which turned out to be an insane amalgamation of Chinese-themed clothing and accessories, Chinese calligraphy supplies, notebooks bearing titles like, "Happy Eggs; Feel My Cups", Berlin souvenir pins, mystery CDs, and two full aisles of hard-to-find imported food.  Like noodles for Bun Bo Hue and real brown sugar.  

And off-brand Pinda Kaas, which was too scary to buy but not too scary to flirt with for a few moments in the dark basement of the store.  

Turbo Polyp Job Search Bonus

I went shopping downtown today, only to find that Plein 1944, one of the big town squares, has been taken over by Kermis.  

Like most Dutch special events, I don't really understand what Kermis is or why we're celebrating it, but the bottom line is: small carnival.  Rides, games, cotton candy, bad music.  You know the drill. 

I found myself both attracted and repelled, especially because the rides were running but the whole square was creepily deserted in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon.  

And then I caught a glimpse of the back of the "Shark Reef" ride:  

Oh, yeah. Turbo polyp baby! 

I'm not exaggerating when I say that this makes my month.

What also makes my month is my recent discovery of a "lifestyle coach" job posting.  To wit: 

Do you have a positive and motivating influence on others and are you a native american? or have a background in food/lifestyle. As lifestylecoach (32-40 hours a week)you will provide international e-mail coaching by use of advanced technology and based on scientific findings.You will be coaching 6000 participants per year and help them find the fun in being active and overcome barriers. In this first line contact with participants, the coaching application helps you to pro-actively direct your attention to participants who can benefit from your support. A good sense of humor, flexible attitude and ability to work accurately and concentrated in a dynamic environment will help you to enjoy your work. Jobrequirements: excellent english analytical reading-people skills/empathy-Knowledge of health related behaviors and food-Able to pratically convert knowledge into motivation/actionable advice&support-Experience in coaching people. US residency is a big plus! 

The first time I read this posting, I nearly fell out of my chair.  The second time, I realized that what they're looking for is a native American, not a Native American.  In which case I believe I'm qualified! 

My second favorite job posting (so far) is the one that describes their ideal candidate as "a real sales tiger."  

I sort of want to apply just so I can write the phrase "a real sales tiger" in my cover letter. 

Raaaowr. 

   

Apen Kijken

We're back from our tropical adventure in Indonesia — with about 700 underwater photos and 400 more freckles in tow. 

I have to confess that I even enjoyed the parts of the trip that were supposed to be painful, like the 12-hour flight from Amsterdam to Singapore.  Buckled in front of a 6x6-inch personal entertainment screen, I was ecstatic (and I really do mean ecstatic) to find more than 50 English-language movies and TV shows upon which to binge.  

It's not like we're living in Bhutan.  But we haven't yet tackled the project of getting a membership at our local Videoland, and we don't yet have a digital TV antenna, so our couch-based entertainment options have been a little limited.  (Insert deep sigh of longing for Netflix here...) 

As a side note, even though it explicitly mocks people who use their travel experiences as fodder for blog entries, I can't help but recommend a terrific Japanese movie set in Hawai'i that we saw on the plane: Honokaa Boy.  It's definitely one of the best movies I've seen in the last year.  

Relative to our other far-flung vacations, the rest of the itinerary for this one was pretty straightforward:  a 3-hour flight from Singapore to Manado, which is on the island of Sulawesi (during which I was completely unconscious due to the aforementioned TV bingeing in place of sleeping), then a car ride to the port of Bitung, then a 10-minute boat trip across Lembeh Strait to the dive resort. 

When I say "dive resort", what I mean is a cluster of 6 very basic cabins, 3,000 geckos, a pair of bare-bones dive boats, a communicative rooster, and — with three long dives and three square meals each day and a semi-motley crew of divers from all over the world — a schedule and atmosphere remarkably similar to summer camp. 

We also had a spidery friend lurking in our bathroom.  Who happened to be 4 inches across! 

Of the 8 other guests, roughly half were Dutch, so I was able to get a tiny bit of language practice, as well.  John was not especially overjoyed when I suggested that we situate ourselves at a Dutch-speaking dinner table (aka "Nederlandse Tafel"), and things went from bad to worse when he was called upon to explain his physics research.  

In the interest of defending John's honor, I have two disclaimers: one is that considering how little time he's spent studying and practicing it, John's Dutch is quite good.  The other is that I would (still) be hard-pressed to explain his research project to anyone in English.  

But a rough translation of his answer that night goes something like this:  "So, there are these little particles from outer space that are very little, and they have high energy, and the little particles are coming, and coming down and...uhhhhh..."  

At which point John's face telegraphed a desperate plea for help and the Dutch shouted in unison, "Say it in English!" 

Needless to say, that was the end of Nederlandse Tafel for John and Autumn! 

But our time spent underwater, where we communicated only with creature-identifying hand signals, was delightful.  I think it was my favorite diving trip ever. 

As I mentioned in my last post, the diving in Lembeh Strait is "muck diving", which means there aren't huge gardens of colorful coral in a crystal-clear sea.  Instead, much of the diving resembles a dark moonscape, with thick, murky black sand beneath thick, murky water.  

At some of the sites, there's a fair amount of trash in the water, which, while not ideal from an ecological standpoint, keeps things interesting.  Everything looks 33 percent bigger underwater, so seeing a man's leather shoe crusted with colorful algae makes it seem like you've found the footwear of a larger-than-life King Neptune.  

Now, some people like to dive because they like to hang around in lush, tropical underwater paradise.  I like to dive because it's a big treasure hunt for critters, and finding bizarre camouflaged life forms hiding in the rubble is one of the best ways I can think of to spend an hour.  Gorging myself on delicious Indonesian food is another, so you can see why this was an easy choice for us! 

A small subset of our photos doesn't do justice to the diversity of underwater life in Lembeh, but here are a few for your viewing pleasure:

Muck diving is cephalopod heaven, which is good for people like us who are in heaven anytime they find cephalopods.  On one dive alone, we saw a squid, two octopi and two cuttlefish!    

 

There are also a number of dive sites crawling with nudibranchs, which are sea slugs (usually just a couple of inches long) that come in all varieties of shapes and colors.  

 
 

Lembeh is also famous for its frogfish, which are sponge-shaped bottom dwellers that "walk" on their pectoral fins instead of swimming.  They attract prey by dangling a fleshy lobe like bait in front of their gaping maws.  Luckily, we kept our wits about us and didn't fall for the trick.  This one was so cute and grumpy looking, and he was only about 2 inches long! 

John took all of the photos (using an older model digital Olympus and an underwater housing), which is great for me because my only responsibilities were keeping track of John and looking for creatures in the muck.  

After seven straight days of diving (and eating, and sleeping, and changing in and out of dive gear, and showering in between dives, and avoiding ear infections, and identifying nudibranchs, and reviewing photos, and writing detailed dive logs...), we were pretty wiped out.  Wiped out in a good way, but still wiped out!

Our next stop was Tangkoko National Park, home of tarsiers and black-crested macaques.  It also turned out to be home of more chickens, pigs and other livestock than my mother could shake a flu vaccination syringe at.  

We were especially entertained by the drove of pigs that we found rooting around in the sand at the beach near our village.  

As some of our Dutch (quasi-) compatriots explained, there's an expression for when tourists visit a place and take photos of the surroundings and/or people without actually interacting with them or having a meaningful experience: apen kijken.  As in, apen = monkeys and kijken = looking at.  

(As a side note, I can't help but think that there is something fundamentally politically incorrect in this saying, but we're learning that there's absolutely no preoccupation with political correctness among the Dutch.  When in Rome, I suppose, shudder with discomfort and do as the Romans do...)

But apen kijken was the order of the day in Tangkoko, where first we set out in the evening to observe tarsiers and then woke up early the next morning to go find the macaques.  

The park uses a network of local guides to bring visitors in and observe wildlife, and so we marched in at 5:30 in the morning (after an unfortunate incident of me — ever the morning person! — putting my pants on inside out) with a friendly if hung-over guide from the village where we were staying.  

We later met up with another couple and their guide, and learned that the standard practice was for the guides to dispatch someone to keep track of the monkeys and make sure that the guides can actually locate the animals.  

As we got deeper into the jungle, the guides started a call-and-response with the macaque babysitter.  It sounded to us like the sitter was off to our left, but the guides insisted on heading to the right.  The sitter called out, the guides responded, but we kept getting further and further away...until finally the guides gave up and called the sitter's cell phone.  

Macaque Hotline, how can I help you?! 

Having plunged into the undergrowth in pursuit of the sitter's calls, we proceeded to bushwhack our way toward the macaques.  Never have I felt like a lesser ape than while crashing like an elephant through the jungle in clumsy pursuit of a monkey with a brain half the size of mine!  

Eventually we did find a group of 15 to 20 macaques, which were really fun to watch as they ate and climbed trees and squabbled and groomed each other and tried to urinate on us.  We were also amused to learn that the guides had named the alpha male  "Rambo."  

A day and a half in the blistering heat and the (even more) basic accommodation near Tangkoko was enough for us, so we then headed to the city of Manado (population: 500,000) for the last three days of our vacation.  

Parental advisory!  If you are our parents, you probably don't want to know that for us to get to Manado, our taxi driver had to drive us through a forest fire in which the edges of our one-lane road were in flames.  

I have to confess that a key factor in our decision to head to Manado was the possibility of an air-conditioned hotel room, which we felt guilty about but not guilty enough to not purchase.  As it turns out, our hotel room was a lovely, cool oasis from the heat, though we learned that even a medium-to-high-end accommodation is not immune to rats scratching ardently in the ceiling! 

Manado is an interesting place: as the main transit hub for dive centers in Lembeh and nearby Bunaken, it gets a lot of visitors, but to say that our Lonely Planet guidebook had few kind words for it would be a grave understatement.  Our impression was that few tourists stay for more than one night, and even fewer venture out into the shops.  

But we had a great time exploring the malls and grocery stores, picking up hard-to-find Indonesian ingredients to smuggle back to the Netherlands, and dodging the ubiquitous aqua-blue, van-sized taxis called mikrolets and the off-brand SUVs that everyone who is not in a mikrolet seemed to be driving.   

For the record, Indonesian traffic laws appeared to be fairly...fluid.  

Most of the time, we were the only people dumb enough to be walking around in the scorching heat of the afternoon, and we were certainly the only white (or in my case, reddish pink) people we encountered while out and about.  

We also had fun exchanging greetings in English with kids we met on the street.  "HELLO MISTER!  HOW DO YOU DO?!" was a frequent salutation to both me and John.  Manado doesn't get a lot of American tourists, and everyone we talked with was heartily pro-American.  Thanks, President Obama!  

Perhaps it goes without saying that we also ate our way through Manado, starting with a utensil-free dinner at a local restaurant where there was only one dish on the menu.  Thanks to a hefty language barrier, we ended up with four red-flavored Fantas as our beverage of choice.  The whole experience was exceptionally fun and the food (other than the red Fanta, which tastes like cough syrup) was delicious.  

We also ate several great meals at the mall...though it was a very discouraging to find that mall food in Manado was significantly better than any Indonesian food we've found in the Netherlands.  

Speaking of SUVs, we saw about 400 billboards advertising a new type of Suzuki SUV called the Vaganza.  I don't know about you, but to me, that sounds like a glaring combination of two words, one of which is a part of the female anatomy and the other of which is "extravaganza."