Netherlands Day 7

Ghent

We took a very early train to Ghent and first things first, locked up our stuff in the train station lockers. This will become our M.O.

Ack, I’m already getting tired just writing about this day. Let me tell you, we were both exhausted from the get-go and probably planned too much in too short a time. There was very little conversation. I think we were both saving our energy for moving our feet and blinking.

Ghent is another little Belgium city with cobblestone streets and pretty cathedrals. From the train station, we took a tram into the center of town. Ghent boasts not one, not two, but THREE large and beautiful churches. We saw two of them but only one was memorable because the ceiling was entirely laid with brick. Red brick. It seems a little wrong to me. Like, isn’t the brick is too heavy and small and won’t it just fall out of its mortar and onto the head of an innocent Catholic? Also, isn’t red brick too ordinary for an ornate, Gothic church?

While I pondered these thoughts and chewed European strawberry Mentos, we climbed to the top of a bell tower. By “climbed, “I mean “took the elevator.” There was no way either of us were going to expend energy or muscles on an experience we did yesterday. This bell tower was altogether quite similar to the one in Brugge, only shorter and less full of tourists. Also, it started raining hard while we were up there, so the view was very gray and foreboding. Perfect for our next stop at a medieval castle.

Oh, but first we stopped and got pastries, because what is traveling without eating chocolate-stuffed pastries for breakfast/lunch/dinner/snack?

Gravensteen Castle was pretty much in the middle of town, right in between some pretty old guildes’ gables and a lace store. It was made of stone, as castles are, featured a moat and some turrets, and apparently was used as a torturing chamber for many generations. I kid you not, in every single room there was an explanation for a different kind of cruel punishment. Here they did water torture, here they did stretching, here they did public burnings, here they did private burnings, here they did secret burnings, and here are the toilets. (Not as thrilling as our castle hostel, to be quite honest.)

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Antwerp

For some reason, I have this notion that Antwerp is a big, Europeanish city with famous things and a rich history, somewhat on the same level as Athens or London or Moscow. For reals, it is the center of the diamond industry, has a huge black hat Chasidic community, was home to Peter Paul Rubens, and boasts the second largest port in Europe. (Rotterdam in the Nederlands is the first.) HOWEVER, no one sets their wall clock to "Antwerp" time. But I just can't shake the feeling that I am in Paris. (I have never been to Paris.)

We walked around the center of Antwerp, past a lot of diamond stores, past two more Black Hats, past the Vlaamse Fritas stand Jabba Dabba Doo that no longer exists. (Sad Day.) We lunch (Parisians "lunch" as a verb) at a fantastic health food restaurant. I get a delicious, creamy pumpkin soup and my mom gets a "delicious" leek soup.

We don't actually do much in Antwerp, because it is Monday and that is the day all of the museums are closed. All of the famous art and architecture museums I was so looking forward to seeing. Instead we see another Rubens-filled cathedral, the central market square which is lined with medieval and Gothic guild houses, and lots of tourists.

The train station is lovely, a beautiful Art Deco / Classical colorful facade. Also, our train conductor has a very serious mullet, that is pretty fucking awesome. On our way to Rotterdam, we woefully outnumber the seats on the train. I sit on the floor and gaze at the American guy sitting on his suitcase right next to me. For pretty much the whole time.

ohmigod, I am exhausted.

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Stayok Rotterdam

Rotterdam is kind of an ugly city. It was all bombed during WWII, on account of their huge port, so there aren't any Renaissancey or Gothicy buildings. The streets are paved with asphalt and there are many boxy, unadorned high-rises. It's like Los Angeles.

But Los Angeles doesn't have a Stayok hostel, which is a fab place to be if you are in Rotterdam for the evening. This Stayok is related to our castle Stayok, although there is no moat and no coat of arms. We manage.

FIRST, we claim beds and lie staring at the ceiling for several minutes, catching our respective breaths and enjoying the uniquely comfortable Stayok mattresses. NEXT, we take bets on whether or not our roommates are Asian. (They are.) THEN, we separate and my mom drinks tea in the "kitchen" while I stuff my face with Belgium chocolate in the TV lounge. TV!!! I believe I intended on reading my book about the Dutch girl on a pirate ship but was sucked into Wimbledon on the boob tube. I have never been interested in tennis, but I AM interested in Serena William's fashion decisions, and thus watched several games (or matches? or sets?) between her and some skinny blondish chick. And then the men's game got rained out. Boo hoo. At some point, my mom came in and we planned our next day. LAST, we fell asleep to the gentle pitter-pat of the Dutch rain on the window.

Netherlands Day 6

Brugge

Before we got to Belgium, we ate a delicious Best Western breakfast of chocolate sprinkles on bread. Of course, it was raining. And the train station did not have lockers. So we walked with all of our shit to the center of Middleburg, where there is an enormous brick Abbey, or Abdij. It is quite empty and silent, save for the pitter patter of rain and our footsteps. No one here goes to church on Sunday morning?

And...back on the train. No passport stamp, which is tragic. A minor train mix-up in Antwerp, but no big deal. Three black hat sightings. And then hauling our junk to Hotel Lybeer (which is really a hostel), located on a narrow, cobblestone street. As they all are, we soon learn. Brugge is a medieval city with a lot of old buildings and cobblestone squares. Kind of like all of the Netherlands, but even older. And it is FILLED with tourists. The kind of tourists who carry Fodor's Guides, which are very different from those of us who use Lonely Planet or Let's Go. Fodor's people stay in nice hostels and wear ironed slacks and carry purses. They eat at sit-down restaurants. Lonely Planet tourists stay in hostels, wear jeans and running shoes, and eat paninis from street cart vendors. We carry backpacks.

We carry our backpacks through a church that houses Michaelangelo's Madonna and Child statue, the only one outside of Italy. In it is playing the most beautiful choir music ever, it is called Veni Sancte Spiritus and composed by J. Berthier and M. Franck, listed under the title "Taize." I must find it somewhere are buy it. Then we carry our backpacks to a locker so we can enjoy yet another medieval art museum. And we climb up a bell tower. It is 315 or 336 steps high, depending on who you believe. I might choose to believe the building itself, because 336 steps sounds more impressive, despite the fact that I counted as I climbed. There are carillon bells inside and a fantastic view of the city.

We reward ourselves with some genuine Vlaamse Fritas, or Flemish Fries, which are made from Binji potatoes and cooked and then fried. The Dutch (and Flemish) eat them in little paper cones with mini pokey forks and mayonnaise. We request tomato ketchup. Then we take a canal cruise around the city. It is not so impressive, except for the building we pass that could possibly be the international clog house of pancakes and some swans on the grass.

After unsuccessfully using the hotel's computer (did you know there is a non-QWERTY European keyboard? Me neither.), we find an internet-snooker-bar and did some internetting. Across the street was a fantastic sandwich / smoothie / crepes / waffle place. WE were very lucky to find such an amazing place like that, and the fact that it was still open at ten pm was double lucky. I got a goat cheese panini and carrot-apple juice. DELISH.

Back in the hostel, we meet Shane the Canadian who has just celebrated Canada Day at Vemy Ridge memorial in France. He enlightens us about how the rest of his country hates Torontonians because they not-so-secretly think/wish they were part of the USA. He is a voice talent and represents some Canadian company that I have never heard of. This last bit he doesn't tell us, but I hear it anyways, because the girl sleeping in my top bunk doesn't notice that both I and my mother are sleeping in bed and maybe she should keep her voice down. By "down," I mean not speaking as if she were on the other side of the room, when in fact, she is just three feet from Shane. He finally tells her that we are asleep and planning on waking up early and that they can talk shop in the morning. God bless Shane, although it really shouldn't have taken him twenty minutes to speak up. It was past midnight, after all. As soon as the lifhts are turned off, I fall asleep.

Oh! I almost forget the best part! My top sheet has a hole in it! Big enough for me to fit my hand through! This cracks me up to no end. My mother's also has this defect. It's like an Orthodox sex sheet, only with much more starch.

Netherlands Day 5

Today we gave ourselves a good butt workout. We biked a total of . . . (let me add this up) . . . FORTY SIX POINT TWO KILOMETERS!!! Which is TWENTY EIGHT POINT SEVEN MILES. That's 28.7 miles. On shitty bicycles, no less. When you see me I think you have to compliment me on my shapely derriere, made all the more firm by this trip.

After leaving our stuff in the castle barn (it has everything), we went to look for our rental bikes. They were not there, so we got the sweet hostel guy to come and help us. Only one of them turned up, the one with handlebreaks that I insisted on using, so my mom got a show-off red and black teenage boy's bike. The seat had two seams in it and it had rained the night before, so she rode with a wet spot on her butt the whole time.

We left our castle and rode to Domburg to check the bus schedule, then backtracked and went eastward through the woods near Oostkapelle, over the fake island off Vrouwenpolder, up over the locks of the Delta Project. The locks are massive blocks of concrete and steel that look scary and very manmade. Then we visited a cool museum about the Dutch land reclamation project, aka dikes and dams. It was very cool. A lot of land here used to be under water, or used to be beach, or used to be ocean, or used to be unuseable at high tide, but the Delta Project spent millions of dollars and took over twenty years to dam rivers, build up riverbanks, create moveable dikes, assemble locks, and otherwise change the face of their coastline.

We ate french fries at the museum that we had to pay for. We were both convinced that our entry ticket guarenteed us a free snack at the restaurant. It didn't.

On our way home, we pass through Veere, an old fishing village which is now a yuppy yacht harbor, as well as the home of our castle hostel guy. There are a lot of buildings from the 1500s and an old well. We pass through Gapinge, Serooskerke, and Oostkapelle on our way home. We see many windmills (I'll give a count later), lambs (of the shorn and unshorn varieties), cows (all smelly), ponies (ditto), ducks, and clogs on windows. We are besieged by tiny little bugs that stick to our glasses and shirts as we ride into the wind. My mom says they stick around farmland because they like fertilizer. We shake out our shirts several times but the poop bugs follow us all the way back to the castle.

At the castle, we are FAMISHED, and the sweet hostel guy makes us cheese sandwiches. These are so not as good as the kind I ate every day for dinner in Thailand, mostly because they are just plain bread and Gouda cheese, and we all know how I feel about Gouda, but for the moment, they will do. SHG also brings us two tall glasses of apple juice from a local appletree. Or a local farm. Or grocery store or something, but he makes a big deal about how the apples are local. The apple juice is delicious.

We walk two kilometers to the Domberg bus stop, and on the way, my mother reminds me again that she is very fertile. She has done this before on more than one occasion: Leaning close to me, so that we are eye to eye, she will say, "You know, I am very fertile," as if to frighten me into using twelve different kinds of contraception simultaneously every time I have sex.

At the bus stop we play Boggle, and boy am I good. I win three games in a row. Our bus comes, and the journey is uneventful other than we see a lot of windmills. At this point, we have totally lost count, so I'm just going to add up the number of windmill pictures on my map of the region and assume we saw all of them. Which is possible. They all look alike, anyways. Ok, my mom is arguing that they don't all look alike, she says that some are brick and some are wood and some are big and some are little, so ok, there are four different models and we've seen all four several times.

THE HOTEL IN MIDDLEBURG is just as amazing as the castle, even though it is a measly Best Western. Our room is HUGE, with a king sized bed and a bright red comforter. It's like the honeymoon suite. There is also:

• a TV
• an armchair and a table
• a desk
• a bathtub
• towels
• a blow dryer
• a shaving kit
• a dental set
• face towels I can steal
• snacks in the bar

Which we order, a banana, an orange, and a bottle of tomato juice while we plan our two-day excursion to Belgium. It is here, in the hotel lobby, that we discover all the museums in Antwerp will be closed the day we plan to visit. So I take a bubble bath to soothe my spirits, shave my legs with the provided shaving kit, and order a giant glass bottle of water that would make Benja proud.

Netherlands Day 4

leaving Amsterdam

The girls in the hostel for some reason decided to all wake up at six am and rustle around their sheets and blankets and nylon duffel bags and zippers and unlock and open and close their lockers. Also they all thought it would be a good idea to walk back and forth across the room.

Which meant that I had to get up too, even though they weren't serving breakfast until eight. While I was changing into the tank tops and jeans I've worn for the past three days, I watched one of the early risers comb her eyebrows with a brow brush. Or whatever that thing is called. Then she put on eyebrow pencil.

When you are travelling around with a heavy backpack and sleeping in dormatory hostels, isn't an eyebrow brush the sort of thing you leave at home? I mean, I had to think SERIOUSLY about whether or not to bring a hairbrush. (I didn't, in the end.)

We ex-nayed breakfast at the hostel, walked to the train station, left our luggage in some lockers (I love that about Europe, that you can leave you stuff in all sorts of places), and bought a chocolate croissant. On to Alkmaar and the cheese market!

Alkmaar

The train to Alkmaar is pleasant and quick, just like every other train ride in this country. We pass many green fields with sheep and cows, and I try to take pictures of them through the window. Farmland is cut across by small channels of water, mini-canals, it seems. The land is so flat, and so empty; the sky looks so big up above. And always, there are clouds, big puffy clouds and flatter smooth clouds, moving fast across the blue-gray. We count windmills as we pass them.

When we get to Alkmaar, it is drizzling. We walk out of the station and pass the huge grote kerk, the "big church" that is central to every village and town in this region. This particular church is covered in a greenish moss and is surrounded by a tree-lined courtyard. We pass a cheese shop with my last name and I proudly stand under its signage to take a picture.

Alkmaar is famous for its cheese auction, held every Friday morning April through October. The cheese auction is called for ten o'clock, and we are several minutes early. Already, the central plaza is roped off with metal barricades to keep the people away from the cheese. In the center of the plaza are long piles of cheese. At least I assume they are cheese; each pile is covered with a white tarp, and signs sticking out from them read, "Gouda," and a price. We taste some sample cheeses from one of the carts lining the square. I'm not so into Gouda, I have to say, it's too soft and bland for me. But the cheese lady (one of many) also has goat cheese, which I love, so we buy a whole slice of that and gobble it up.

It starts pouring rain, so we quickly hide under the shelter of an overhang at the edge of the plaza. I'm not sure we're allowed where we are standing, but there are several other people with us, and besides, they still haven't started yet. Inside the building beside us is a huge scale, the kind that hangs from the ceiling, is made from iron and could probably hold a standing cow on each balance. After some minutes, a cheese official shooes us out and we have to join the hordes who are standing behind the barricades, some with their own umbrellas, some under restaurant umbrellas.

This is what happens at a cheese auction:

1. A lady talks into a microphone for a long, long time. Most of it is Dutch. Her accent is so thick that even when she speaks English it is hard to understand. So I have no idea what she talks about. Perhaps she comments on our overall enthusiasm level, which is a bit lacking other than the row of cheering children near the front.
2. Men in white lab coats walk around with clipboards. At each pile of cheese, they stop, lift the tarp, take a wheel from the pile, and cut it up. They taste one piece and give some to the crowd. Then they write down stuff.
3. Young women in traditional Dutch dress walk around the plaza next to the barricades doing not much other than looking like traditional Dutch cheese maidens. I think that's what they're going for. They have white Amish bonnets, red neck scarves, blue apronish dresses, red socks, and wooden clogs.
4. Cheese Guilde Men cart wheels of cheese, eight at a time, on a special wooden harness stretcher. They carry them to the big scale in the front, and then they carry them back to a wheelbarrow, which is then wheeled to a cheese truck out of view. the Cheese Guilde Men wear all white except for their hats, which are like little straw play bonnets, only painted yellow, red, green, and blue, and tied with a coordinated ribbon. The Head CGM wears an orange hat to show he is in charge. (If he showed up in America dressed like that he would for sure be beat up.)
5. CGM continue to cart the cheese to the scale and to the truck.
6. This goes on for more than an hour.
7. Most people leave the square as it has become quite boring.

So that's a cheese auction, now you know. We left after forty minutes to go to the local Beer Museum, called the Biermuseum in Dutch, which was cute, but not terribly exciting. I watched a number of humorous Heinekin ads and learned how to brew beer, which I kind of sort of knew about from my bartending school days. (Calling it bartending school is a bit generous, I know.) When we left the museum, the CGM were still carting cheese.

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Amsterdam --> Middleburg --> Domberg --> castle

At the train station, I got the most delicious lunch, which was pasta with fresh basil pesto and sun-dried tomatoes and a round of goat cheese that was sweeter than anything I've tasted and must have had a piece of heaven inside. Waaaay better than Trader Joe's or the Silver Goat chevre, and I eat that stuff like it's candy. (But mostly because it tastes so damn good with TJ's balsamic vingrette.)

WE ALMOST DIDN'T MAKE IT!!!!!

The train from Amsterdam to Middleburg is a little over two hours, and there were several stops in between, most of which we were only somewhat aware of since the conductor spoke only in Dutch. At one stop, he talked for an awfully long time, and then a few minutes later, the lights in the cabin went off. Remember how we don't speak Dutch and understood not a word. Maybe he was giving us stats on that day's gas mileage. I got a nagging feeling that something was wrong, and voiced this to my mom, who was blissfully unaware, deep in her book. At that moment there was short, shart lurch in the direction opposite from where we were travelling. As if our car was moving backwards. We jumped out of the train and saw that they HAD DETATCHED OUR CAR FROM THE FRONT OF THE TRAIN AND WERE ABOUT TO LEAVE US AND THE STATION BEHIND. Boy did we run with our bags to the front car, where a conductor was waving his hands like, dude, hurry up, get with the program.

At Middleburg we had to take a bus to Domberg, and then walk some hundred meters to our hostel, which was . . .

(drumbeat)

A CASTLE!!!

A CASTLE WITH A MOAT AND SOME TURRETS AND A COAT OF ARMOR IN THE LOBBY!!! (And a head of deer in the dining room.)

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resting in our castle, aren't you jealous

We pounce on dinner as though we haven't eaten for days. It is DELICIOUS: steamed brocolli with molasses sauce, green salad, rice, potato soup that may or may not be made with a meat base but I didn't ask and they didn't tell, spinach potato cheese casserole, pineapple yogurt with whip cream. Also there is a deer's head on the wall of the dining room. Obviously.

Seriously, this castle hostel is the best idea ever. All I want to do is sit and think about how I'm sleeping in a castle tonight. But instead, we go to the beach.

I know! The Netherlands has a beach?!!? Duh, it's totally on the north west coast of Europe. From our castle, we walk through a patch of woods and then over some grass-covered sand dunes and then *poof* there is the ocean! It's the North Sea, so a part of me thinks that it doesn't really count. I have to constantly remind myself that the North Sea is actually CONNECTED TO THE ATLANTIC and is therefor not a lake but SALTY WATER WITH WAVES.

It is very cloudy and totally the opposite of Santa Monica. We are two of five people out as far as I can tell. The beach is empty of trash and towels and umbrellas and sunbathers -- just sand and surf. It is, of course, overcast and a mite drizzly. Round wooden logs stick up out of the ground in sets of two lines. These are old pier pilings, and they have started to get green with moss. It is very windy, and after each wave pulls back into the ocean its foam is left behind on the sand, which is then blown away, so that the ground is filled with flying specks of white foam. Where the waves don't reach, dry sand hurls past so fast it stings my legs.

After the beach, I read Elle and Elle Decor in Dutch on the couch in the castle lounge. A little girl sitting opposite me asks her father if that is my bed. I guess the Dutch don't lie down barefoot on their furniture. I take a hot HOT shower with a push-button faucet and our castle roommate goes into the forest to look for bats. Obviously.

Netherlands Day 3

This morning we decided to eat breakfast at the Christian Youth Hostel where we were staying. Did I not mention that? We found an evangelical Xtian Youth Hostel in the middle of the Red Light District, and who can pass that up? We moved there last night before our bike ride.

The breakfast was a good idea in theory but not in reality. They were serving French toast, but they were serving it one at a time for some reason, so we had to put our names on a list and wait our turn until the Christian Workers made enough toast to feed the people before us. I just thought it was a weird system for a place that can pretty much guarantee at least fifteen breakfast diners a day. Anyways, we put our name on the list and waited at a table with a Christian Worker who had moved from Japan nine years ago and was now married to a Dutch woman. Had I known he was a Christian Worker when I sat down, I would have chosen a different table. I am not into the evangelical types. But I think my mom had a good time chatting with him about her work, about teaching religious studies, CONVENIENTLY leaving out that actually, she teaches a lot of Jewish studies too, and oh! Did we mention that we don't believe in Jesus?

After finally getting breakfast (SO not worth the wait), we took a train to the city of Haarlem, twenty minutes west of Amsterdam. This is the city that Harlem, NY is named after, but let me be the first to tell you, it is NOTHING alike. Haarlem, NL is a small, charming city with cobblestones, a town square, a giant church, and canals. It is the kind of town you expect to see pictures of in museums about old folk life. There was a lot of pretty architecture, much like in Amsterdam, but on a slightly smaller scale. Also, it was sunny (finally!), so it felt a lot more homey.

We visited St. Bavo's Cathedral, which was huge and gorgeous and had an amazing wooden ceiling. Most of those European cathedrals with the high arching ceilings are painted white or have religious iconography, but this one had wood paneling, like a curved hardwood floor. It was quite striking. The floor was also tiled with giant blocks of black stone, each one marked with the name or symbol of the fellow/felless buried beneath. Also charming! St. Bavo's greatest claim to fame is that its organ -- which is huge and shiny and quite impressive in its own right -- was once played by both Mozart and Handel! (Not at the same time.)

Off to the Teylor's Museum of Science and Discovery and Somethingorother. This place was RAD. It was founded in the early 1800s as a source of new knowledge about "science," where Mr. Teylor and his friends could showcase their collections of fossils and gems and telescopes and coins and butterfly prints and newfangled electricity machines ("magic" machines). I saw some phosphorescent rocks and a dodo bird skeleton (which the Dutch successfully made extinct centuries ago), also an elaborate marble roller coaster that poured a cup of tea. My mom's favorite exibit was of a fossilized salamander, which the original discoverer thought was the skeleton of a sinner man who had died in Noah's flood. (The skeleton was two feet long, so maybe they were really short back then?)

Then my mother went off to a boring art museum (I hate old art) while I did internet for the first time. Interneting here in Europe is turing out to be much more difficult than it was in Thailand or Peru. Plus, did you know they use a different keyboard than we do?!?! No QWERTY, it's all messed up.

I got lunch at Burger King (french fries and salad). There is something about being in a foreign country and eating at fast food places I wouldn't TOUCH back home. It's like you miss American grease.

We had grand plans to bike to this nature reserve on the coast (Kennemerdunnen), but the bike shop we rented from (because the first one was mean and wouldn't take a credit card and I just didn't like the guy who worked there) closed early and there was a fear that we wouldn't make it there and back on time, so we decided instead to go to Bloemendaal, a parkish area next to a wealthy neighborhood. What is great about biking in the Netherlands is that not only do they have bike lanes EVERYWHERE, they also have bike stop lights!! There are car stop lights, green yellow red circles, and there are people crosswalk lights, shaped in the sign of a standing boy with loud ticker for the blind (or spacey), and then there are bicycle stop lights, green yellow red little pictures of bicycles. Four days later, these bike lights have not stopped being cute.

Around Bloemendaal, we saw some goats and sheep and fancy houses, and an apartment building labeled "Iben Ha Ezer" which an occupant told us was after Ebenezer Scrooge (we don't believe him and think it could be Hebrew), and then right next to that was a building I could have sworn was labeled "Chabad Haarlem," but after careful inspection turned out to be a Christian primary center. We also stopped at the New St. Bavo's Cathedral, which was built because the original one turned Protestant in the 1600s. Between you and me, this new St. Bavo's has a much cooler exterior. Its steeple tower is a large, roundish, cylindrical, spiraly thing made out of copper that has turned a pleasant shade of green. But we couldn't go inside because it was locked! Those Catholics!

We returned our bikes around six o'clock (mine had started making a funny sound), and I ate my Burger King salad in the town square while watching a man throw around batons of fire. The square was filling with people eating and drinking their evening coffee.

We took a train back to Amsterdam and made some phone calls at the hostel, but left just in time to miss Bible Study to walk through the Red Light District. I had a serious jonesing for a peice of TRIANGULAR, VEGETABLE pizza. After finding a suitable specimen, we packed up at the hostel and my mom took her fancy clothes suitcase to her conference hotel. I took a sleeping pill and slept through the night for the first time.

Netherlands Day 2

Day two was all about cramming the whole city into one day.

We had breakfast at the hotel of mint tea, toast with chocolate spread and real butter, and a taste of Dutch cheese. Actually, that's what I ate; Mommy had four eggs. The cheese was meh. I mention the butter because I didn't eat real butter as a regular thing until I was in college. We always had Hollywood margarine, which is so much better.

We walked to the Van Gogh museum which housed a large collection of Van Gogh and his contemporaries' pieces. It was nice, but very smalls. The equivalent of three rooms. Did you know they think he had epilepsy, which was the cause for his psychotic breaks. In the gift shop, I found the coolest children's art book, which I will have to buy from Amazon when I get back. Because I have nothing better to spend my money on than books for my class. (Of which I already have about three hundred.)

We ate lunch of brie - tomato sandwhich (which turned into brie - Twix sandwhich once I finished the meager two slices of tomato) next to a nice, grassy plein, and then visited the Rijk Museum, or something like that. It had a lot of art, and I was not impressed by most of it. What I did like was the wallpaper, which was metallic-taupe and gray, and featured giant floral motif. "That's so Dutch," I would tell myself, although I have no idea.

After all of the museums, we walked back to our hotel without getting lost. By "not getting lost, I mean that we wandered around wondering where the hotel was, sort of going in the right direction, passing many streets that were not on our map, but generally assured that we would end up there in the end. And it was quite a lovely walk anyways, past all sorts of cute little houses with decorated gables and lots of people riding bikes. Riding bikes is what they do here in the Netherlands. Just like in LA, everyone drives. Like, it's sort of not unusual to receive a car on your sixteenth birthday in Los Angeles (crazy, but not unusual), here you get a bike when you turn, oh, say, five. EVERYONE bikes.

For example, just today while walking, I saw the following characters riding bicycles:

• a lady wearing high heels
• a guy pedaling with a girl sitting on the back wheel protector
• a mom biking carrying a toddler
• a mom carrying a baby AND a twenty year old girl
• a girl carrying a bouquet of flowers
• a guy carrying a case of beer

So then obviously we had to join the fray and rent bikes as well. I was very annoyed that they only came with backpedal brakes, something I haven't used since elementary school. Also the seat was too high and the handlebars were way wide and not what I am used to, so I complained a lot.

We biked through Central Amsterdam, through a large green park call the Vondelpark. The path was lined with big, leafy trees on both sides, very cool and breezy. Then we went past several small neighborhoods and saw a lot of different gables. There were the more modest brick squarish ones, then some fancy schmancy Renaissance curly-Q ones, a gable molded from concrete that reminded me of the Soviet Union, and a few flamboyant gables that would look at home in West Hollywood.

We at dinner at a Thai restaurant (they are ALL over the place), bought Mentos (multi-fruit flavor and Drop -- a Dutch liquorice flavor), and went on a really long, fruitless search for an internet cafe.

Netherlands Day 1

the plane flight

I would like to preface this post by telling you how insanely hard it has been to find internet here in Holland. For no good reason. I mean, this is a huge travel destination, right? It took thirty minutes of fruitless searching for an internet cafe in Amsterdam (around the main tourist section) before giving up and going to bed. I'm now typing in Harlaam, a tiny little town several miles west, where there are two (2!) internet places within a half mile of both the train station and the main square.

The plane ride to Europe was pretty uneventful, which I guess as far as plane rides go, is a good thing. In the security line, we passed through a "Passenger Reassembling Area" where you can put your shoes back on after the x-ray. Quite a lofty title for what amounted to three chairs pushed up against the wall. Our plane from Los Angeles to Houston was made by Rolls Royce, which made me supremely impressed, and, I'm not afraid to admit, a little proud. I've never ridden in such a fine vehicle on the road, but now I have brand name claim in the air. Although I have to say, it was seriously the SQUISHIEST flight I've ever been on. The seats were so close together, I couldn't even lean down to reach my backpack at my feet. Neither I nor my mother could cross our legs, and that is saying a lot. My mom is five - one. Obviously the plane food sucked, for example, the "salad" which really just consisted of lettuce. Just lettuce, not even a few shreds of carrots or a single cherry tomato, just a plastic bowl full of lettuce. Luckily the lettuce came with Ranch dressing, so I ate that.

I napped a little and read a little and watched the saddest movie ever without the sound: Bridge to Terebithia. I read the book in fifth grade and then again in college for a kiddie lit class, and I still can't believe people recommend it to children. Who wants to read about !!!SPOILER!!! a little girl who dies? I watched this movie without sound and I still cried all over the ending.

Also, at one point, something dropped on my foot and I recoiled as though being bit by a snake. Nothing hurt, I just thought it was a mouse. On the airplane. See how much my shitty landlord is affecting my life? Turns out it was a milk dud, dropped by the passenger in front of me.

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in Amsterdam

Day one was all about trying to stay awake.

We arrived at the airport a little before noon, but it took nearly a hour to get our luggage, do passports, and figure out how to get a train to central Amsterdam. When we arrived at our hotel, I took a two hour nap.

We decided to take a canal cruise of the city, because then we could stay seated and not really expend any energy. Which we needed to save for sleeping. While the cruise was pleasant and informative, it was also quiet and rolled gently in the water, which nearly lulled us both to sleep. But not before we saw a Botel. You know, a boat hotel. Duh.

For dinner, I first got some fries, and then we chose some food at an Indian restaurant (they are all over the place), but apparently we ordered too little so they wouldn't seat us and we had to do take-away. Fine. We took away the food to our hotel, gobbled it up, and fell fast asleep.