The Rapture

We're on the verge of going off the grid, and before that happens, I wanted to post a few of our photos from Cape Town.

While John has attended roughly 77 talks on various and sundry physics topics — Cosmic Deceleration Parameter q(Z) Dependence Upon Gravitons, anyone? — I've been touring around Cape Town, hotel-bunny style.

I've spent a fair amount of time at the Waterfront, with which I've developed something of a love-hate relationship.

It's a beautiful area along the water, and the abundance of restaurants and English-language bookstores make us feel like we're experiencing the rapture.

But the whole place definitely has a Fisherman's Wharfy, tourist ghetto feeling to it. It's a lot more interesting to walk the mile or so into downtown, which also has a tourist infrastructure but doesn't feel so much like Cape Town Disneyland.

One redeeming feature of the Waterfront is that it's still a working harbor, so there are all kinds of boats and piers and shipping containers to feed my secret love of all things industrial:

Fur seals are another big highlight for pinniped fans like us:

Cute marine mammals aside, it's hard to say what about Cape Town makes us the happiest: the food, or the weather.

Even on the days when the weather forecast says "cloudy with light rain", there might be an hour of clouds and a form of cloud-based moisture that might be rain if you really used your imagination, followed by an entire day of brilliant sun.

This is in sharp contrast to the Netherlands, where a "10 percent chance of rain" just means that it's going to rain all day.

And the food! In addition to gorging ourselves on sushi, we've also had delicious South African, Ethiopian and Cape Malay cuisine. Just look at how happy and well fed we look!

This morning, I picked up a rental car and drove it by myself, on the left side of the road, back to the hotel. My post-driving trembling notwithstanding, I'm really excited to have a car.

Using our combined powers of observation to survive the totally counterintuitive driving, we're leaving Cape Town tomorrow. First we'll head down the Cape Peninsula to Simon's Town, where we hope to see penguins and baboons in the wild.

Then we'll drive east to De Hoop Nature Reserve for more quality time with the creatures of the sea!

Thanks, Kijkwijzer!

You would think that going to a movie theater would be a fairly universal experience: you pay a relatively inflated price to sit in a relatively comfortable seat to watch a movie on the big screen and hope that the other people in the theater aren't too talky and annoying.

I knew to expect some differences here, like intermissions and assigned seating and bringing coffee or beer into the theater in a lovely mug or glass. (The last two, by the way, also happen to be hallmarks of certain overpriced theaters in the U.S. You know who you are.)

But it seems like every time I go see a movie in Nijmegen, I discover some outrageous (if minor) thing that I just didn't see coming.

This time, it was "Kijkwijzer", the Dutch equivalent of Motion Picture Association ratings system in the U.S.

A system after my own heart, it uses a series of cute little black & white icons to point out what you can expect in the movie of your choice.

"AL" stands for something (alles? allemaal?) that means "everyone", and the numbers refer to the ages for which the movie is appropriate.

As someone stuck in the 1970's school of parenting, I find the 6, 9 and 12 distinctions a little overbearing, but I'm generally on board with the part about labels for movies that indicate age appropriateness.

(In reality, I'm stuck in the "Gee, that seems like a great job for someone else to do" school of parenting, but if I were to parent, it would be as a member of the 1970's school. Just look at how well I turned out!)

The rest of the icons, from left to right, stand for violence, sex, scary, drug/alcohol abuse, discrimination, and coarse language.

Violence? Sure, I get that. Sex? I get that, too. What I don't and can't get is the icon showing what it would look like if you sat at the end of a bed with two people having sex on it.

(I'll pause here while you scroll back up, look closely at the icon, and then fall out of your chair.)

Almost every Dutch person I've met seems to have the impression that all Americans are prudes. I usually protest this vigorously, but this icon seriously blows my mind.

If there were an icon depicting sex in the U.S. — and I think it's safe to say that there probably wouldn't be — it would probably take the form of an euphemistic kiss or embrace, like a logo you might see on a box of condoms, not the bottoms of feet of people engaged in the act itself.

The next one on the list is "scary", which I also struggle with a little bit. The cute spider works well enough for, say, Night of the Living Dead, or Poltergeist.

What it doesn't work for is Precious, the movie I went to see. Sorry, Kijkwijzer, but Precious was tragic and complicated and scary in the worst-side-of-humanity sense of scary, not scary in the big-hairy-spider sense of scary.

The next one is drug / alcohol abuse, smartly depicted with a syringe. Nice work, Kijkwijzer. No problems there.

Which brings us to discrimination, with an icon that appears to be a group of white overlords standing in a group, threatening a person of color.

Not to put too fine a point on things, but this? From the people who brought you Black Pete? Seriously?

I am all for pointing out (or kijkwijzing) discrimination in its many nefarious forms. But I can't for the life of me figure out why this is on the list of things to alert viewers about in a movie. Any way you spin it, it just doesn't make sense:

"No, baby, I don't want you to go see that movie with your friends. It has discrimination in it."

"Do you want to go see a romantic comedy tonight?" "Mmmm...no. I'm more in the mood for something that depicts, I don't know, maybe some discrimination?"

"You know, I think it's high time that we took little Maaike to see a movie with some discrimination in it."

"Hey, have you heard about that movie Precious? I'm thinking about taking John on a date to see it." "Oh, you'd better be careful. I've heard that it has discrimination in it."

What puzzles me even more is how Kijkwijzer determines whether or not a movie deserves a discrimination rating. It's hard to describe in just a few words, but Precious is the story of an obese, illiterate, black teenager whose mother beats her and whose father rapes and impregnates her.

So I can understand that it has a violence rating and a coarse language rating, and while I'm not fully on board with the scary spider rating, I can let that one go. (I'm not sure why it didn't also get the sex sticker, since the rape scenes gave a pretty clear picture of what was going on.)

But I've really thought about this a lot, and I can't figure out what exactly about this movie triggered the discrimination rating. My first (admittedly cynical) thought was, is it just because this is the Netherlands and the movie has black people in it?

There are other possibilities, of course: is it because the mother makes disparaging remarks about gays? Is it because the family calls the baby with Down Syndrome (somewhat affectionately) "Mongo?" Is it because of the daily harassment Precious takes for being obese?

But those all seem like very minor side notes to the central struggle with abuse and to a lesser extent, illiteracy.

Sure, it doesn't take a huge leap to realize that there are forms of longstanding, systemic discrimination influencing Precious' world in general and her experiences with the welfare and education systems in particular.

But something tells me that the fine people at Kijkwijzer aren't contemplating the socioeconomic history of inner cities in the United States when they slap that little discrimination sticker on a movie like this.

So I continued to be puzzled by why the discrimination rating exists in the first place, and why this particular movie gets one.

And last but not least, we have coarse language. Not to be confused with a warning for projectile vomiting from men without arms.

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.