Sex & the Schlumpy

Last week, I won the "who can take minutes for a meeting that will be in fast and complicated English?" sweepstakes at work and went on a two-day junket to Amsterdam.

This was fun for a number of reasons, almost none of them having to do with the meeting or the minute taking.

For one thing, it was sunny in Amsterdam for the first time in my experience, which made my evening stroll around the canals about 7 times nicer than any other canal strolling I've done.

For another thing, I was reminded of how much more diverse Amsterdam is than other, smaller cities in the Netherlands. It was pretty awesome, for example, to walk past a guy with giant dreadlocks speaking Dutch with a Jamaican accent.

This may sound a little strange, but it was also fun to fit in at least a little more than the plain old regular tourists, of whom there were many.

Having said that: as I suspected, people in Amsterdam are a lot more likely to switch into English upon hearing my very American r's and generally imperfect Dutch.

This is in strong contrast to Nijmegen, where we're quite close to the German border and shopkeepers will occasionally assume that I'm German when I trot out my Dutch.

I feel a sort of amused pride about this, mostly because I like to think if my American accent were totally hideous, it would be clear to them that I hadn't just hopped over the border on a shopping junket.

(As a side note: it's an endless source of amusement to me that Germans visit this part of the Netherlands in order to go shopping, while the Dutch cross the border into Germany to go shopping.

From my admittedly American perspective, both countries have outrageous prices and crappy selection, so why on earth would anyone bother driving 45 kilometers for either?)

Speaking of German, the bank where I work has a German branch, and so about once a week, an email written in German will come across my desk.

Almost 15 years ago, I took an extremely painful German class for a laughably short period of time before studying abroad in Vienna for a laughably short period of time.

This is a long way to say that I do not speak German. At all.

However, one seriously added bonus of learning Dutch is that I can now understand most German emails — if and only if I look at the words kind of cross-eyed and don't think about them too deeply.

For example, a final decision in Dutch is an uiteindelijk besluit, while in German, it's an Endbeschluss. For me, that's close enough to get the idea.

But going back to my Amsterdam outing: I was delighted to find a small, hip and otherwise lovely Japanese restaurant in the neighborhood of my hotel.

Everything about it was great: the owners were friendly, it was tiny but there were still plenty of tables, and no one complained about me not having a reservation. (Okay, the sushi was just mediocre, yet still better than I expected!)

But I noticed right away that the other women in the restaurant, of whom there were many, were ALL wearing very high heels and very short, sexy dresses.

I should preface this by saying that we're planning a trip to Paris in July, and I've started to feel paranoid about needing to at least make an effort, fashion-wise. Like maybe I should buy a dress or two and wear something other than Birkenstocks.

John's reaction to this latest installment of Autumn-has-lost-her-mind theater was: um, it's not like anyone's going to think we're Parisian.

Okay, fair enough, point taken. But at the very least, I would like to avoid embarrassing the friend we're visiting when we're there.

But in Amsterdam, I was really surprised by the hard-core outfits on a Tuesday night. My first thought, of course, was wait, am I inadvertently having dinner in the red light district?

After a moment of panic, I decided that no, people really were just dressed to the nines (or as another friend likes to say with regard to overdressed elderly Russians, "to the 11's").

This, perhaps it goes without saying, was in extremely sharp contrast to my usual schlumpy self in jeans and my favorite Dr. Pepper t-shirt.

I always thought that Amsterdam was known for being a just-be-yourself, anything-goes kind of city, but maybe it was more cosmopolitan than I thought.

Outside of the restaurant, the fashion insanity continued: I started seeing men in tuxedos along with the ladies in the dresses, and I thought, okay, is this some kind of weird Dutch prom for adults?

Then I turned a corner and came upon a giant crowd of people standing around a pink carpet just outside of a movie theater.

There were lights, there were cameras, and fortunately for my fashion self-esteem, it quickly became clear that all of the women in a 10-block radius were taking part in a Tuesday-night premiere of Sex and the City 2.

I was briefly surrounded on all sides by Carrie Bradshaw look-a-likes, which was frightening enough as it was.

To complete the nightmare from which I couldn't wake up, they were all chattering away in Dutch.

Luckily for me, I was wearing my favorite pair of all-purpose hiking sandals and could run quickly and quietly in the other direction.

Speaking of fashion, one of the highlights of this week (and honestly? possibly the highlight of the year) was discovering the Eurovision Song Contest.

For Europeans, this is seriously old news, but for us, it's like discovering what it's like to eat hot chili flakes on pizza at age 32.

Your joy from the deliciousness is mitigated only by bitterness at having missed out on, say, 25 years of enjoying it.

Just as a hypothetical example.

The Song Contest is relatively self-explanatory: once a year in the spring, 39 countries in Europe (and slightly beyond) put their national pride on the line with a band and a single song.

The format is simple: two semi-finals to narrow the field to 25, and then a final competition. The judging formula is not even remotely simple, although the tolerance for complicated voting systems in Europe is much higher than it is in the U.S., so maybe I'm not the best one to comment on this.

John and I inadvertently happened upon a broadcast of the semi-finals this week, and we found that we couldn't turn away. I was transfixed, open-mouthed, well past my bedtime, by the utterly bizarre combination of costumes, choreography, and music.

The least interesting acts were ones that were — at least to my ears — clearly derivative of American rock bands.

The most interesting ones were just plain crazy.

It's hard to choose, but one of my favorites was the sexy Doublemint twins from Finland in all-white outfits playing accordion and staring at the cameras like deranged elves.



Musically speaking, I found myself quite taken with Malcolm Lincoln from Estonia, and no, it's not just because I have a thing for Estonia.



But the pièce de résistance was Aisha from Latvia, whose song "What For?" explored deep existential questions with the following lyrics:

I’ve asked my angels why
But they don’t know
What for do mothers cry and rivers flow?
Why are the skies so blue, and mountains high?
What for is your love, always passing by?

I’ve asked my uncle Joe
But he can’t speak
Why does the wind still blow and blood still leaks?
So many questions now with no reply
What for do people live until they die?

What for are we living?
What for are we crying?
What for are we dying?
Only Mr God knows why

What for are we living?
What for are we dreaming?
What for are we losing?
Only Mr God knows why
But his phone today is out of range

And so on.

But the lyrics alone don't do it justice; the singing is what the British announcer on BBC referred to as "Deep Root Canal: The Musical."



To my great disappointment, none of these candidates made it to the final competition on Saturday.

How could that have happened, you ask? I think it goes without saying: only Mr. God knows why.