Laundry Gravity

I will be the first to admit that John and I are a little bit manic when it comes to weekends.

On any given Saturday and Sunday, we're either gorging ourselves in Barcelona, trolling New York's second-hand shops, sailing on the North Sea, absconding to Beijing — OR, we're hunkered down in Nijmegen, leaving our apartment only when absolutely necessary.

Which generally means one trip on Saturday afternoon to Albert Heijn

for groceries, with grudging auxiliary trips to the Turkish market or the Asian food store as needed.

And, because there is no voice of reason in our mildly OCD household, we often spend these weekends cooking in extremis.

This weekend, for example, we're making bagels, scones, Chinese beef noodle soup, and kimchi.

...in addition to our regular meals: cheese quesadillas and homemade guacamole, rosemary-garlic lamb with tsatziki and greek salad, and caprese sandwiches.

I'm not sure why we're not like normal people, who are able to eat frozen pizza for lunch while blending at-home activities with out-of-the-home activities in the span of a single weekend.

I think it has something to do with the gravitational field from the mountain of dirty laundry in our closet.

It also has something to do with Chinese beef noodle soup being impossible to find in Nijmegen, so if we want a slice of that particular deliciousness, we have to spend all day making it ourselves.

But mostly, I think it's just a habit we've gotten into: some weekends, we head into the great blue yonder to do something adventurous and fun, and other weekends, we stay home to restock our fridge and wash our clothes and catch up on sleep and luxuriate in doing nothing.

Which is also fun, but it's a very different kind of fun.

Speaking of the great blue yonder, our latest adventure (fermenting kimchi notwithstanding) was the final weekend of our so-called "Competent Crew" sailing course.

During our first two weekends of becoming competent, we stuck to the gentle waters of the Ijsselmeer, a man-crafted lake surrounded by excruciatingly quaint Dutch villages.

For our third and final weekend, we needed to learn how to wrestle with tides, so we headed along Amsterdam's main shipping channel in the other direction, into the North Sea.

On Friday evening, it took the better part of two hours to motor all the way to Ijmuiden, the port at the mouth of the North Sea Canal.

On the way, in the darkness, we experienced a version of Holland that stands in stark contrast to the quiet, pastoral landscape that makes up 90 percent of the country.

We navigated through Amsterdam's industrial quarter, past enormous cranes and thousands of shipping containers, around huge tunnel-digging operations with machinery that resembles something out of City of Lost Children.

The most striking image, though, was the steel foundry at Ijmuiden, captured here by our friend Jan, a German whose Dutch is so flawless, I am tempted every few hours to throw myself off the boat in a fit of envy.

I acknowledge that from an environmental perspective, the flaming chimneys and ominous smoke are not really that great.

Even so: there was something about it that I loved.

Maybe I just like moody, dystopian landscapes.

Maybe it's because I grew up (at least partly) in the rust-belt town of Fulton, New York, which was home to a Miller plant and an Alcan plant and a Birds Eye plant and a Sealright plant — and a Nestlé plant that made the whole town smell like chocolate before it was about to rain.

(As a side note, the Sealright plant was taken over some time ago by a Finnish paper company called Huhtamaki, which happens to manufacture the lids to the paper coffee cups sold at Dutch train stations. Every time I buy a cup of tea and pick up a lid that says Huhtamaki on it, I get a strange, small pang of homesickness.)

Or maybe it's just that after a while, the Netherlands' endless pattern of lovely fields and sheep and lovely fields and sheep starts to seem a little bit...endless.

Either way, it was strangely refreshing to see such a messy, imperfect, industrial side of Dutch life.