Saturday, March 24, 2007
12:03 a.m.
AMSTERDAM
    I set out on a trip to Amsterdam, mostly because I wanted to go see my fiance as she was finishing up some work there. The trip was my first trip overseas, and was an exciting prospect, knowing that I would be able to investigate another culture for a while. And while I was hoping to hear encouraging words from others, I didn't.
    "It's not enough time." I was told. "You need to spend at least ten days, or it doesn't count." Count against what? It's just a hollow way somebody is trying to tell you that you just don't measure up, that you're just not "keeping up with the Joneses." It was empty heads like this that brought station wagons and large custom vans to the population in the 60s, 70s and 80s. It brought about a collective national insanity that you had to have the first Cabbage Patch kids on the block, or the first "Tickle Me Elmo." It's crap. Everybody knows it and they just can't stop themselves.
    I hate when I find myself buying into it, and at times I can actually see the lie before it comes out of somebody's mouth. The reality is that it doesn't matter what you spend, and it doesn't matter where you go. What matters is that whatever you do, and whatever you spend your time and money on. What matters is that you make the most of it all, and find happiness in what you do.
    This trip was a test for me. Can I make the most out of four days off, knowing that I would only have two days to enjoy myself in a foreign city. I had one huge advantage, and that was having Nicole with me to help me through some of the things that should be simple but aren't; catching the train, ordering food and drinks, and finding landmarks.
    Before the trip, and on the plane, I picked up a little phrasebook to help me with Dutch. It, quite frankly, wasn't worth its weight in dog crap. Let me give you an example.
    An important phrase for any beer drinker might be, "Ik wil graag (I will have)... alstublieft (please)... een bier van hat vat (a draught beer)." But for some reason, I think this phrase now translates to: I would prefer you to shave my cat. Needless to say, you get a very strange look, and after you walk over to the beer tap, point at it, and say please (alstublieft), the bartender looks at you and says, "Tap Beer?"
    I dipped into some German, in part because there are a few similarities (don't say that over there, and I think I tried to buy a monk for $200. I'm not sure what I asked, maybe I'll never know. But I didn't think I'd go hungry in a couple days.
    There are a lot of people who speak English over there, and if you're like me, and you can gather enough words and figure out the missing words from the context, you should be able to understand about half of what people are saying. Since about half the words translate the same in German, I was able to understand about half of what people were saying in Dutch, too. But some immersion, like working with some people for a couple of months, would help me to understand a lot of the language. It's a very pretty language when the people speak over there. Their tones are seldom very sharp, and the whole country would best be described as "kind." I will enjoy going back there.

    When you finally get the chance to walk around Netherland's Cities, the first thing that truely takes your breath away are the incredible numbers of bicycles.
    According to en.wikipedia.org, Amsterdam is one of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. There are bike paths in the cities and in the country, and it is estimated (they do not license them) that there are about 3/4 of a million bicycles in Amsterdam alone.
    It takes your breath away to hear that 80,000 bicycles are stolen each year, or that 25,000 of them are dumped, thrown, or accidentally dropped into the canal each year. But if about 11 percent are stolen, and 3.5 percent go in the drink every year, you still have greater than an 85 percent chance that people will leave your bike alone. That's pretty good odds.
    In addition to the bikes, in Amsterdam alone, the public transportation is really amazing. There are canal boats, ferries, trains, several metro lines, a light rail, 16 tram lines, an express tram line, 5-dozen bus lines, night bus lines, hotel shuttles, and taxis almost everywhere. Given the opportunity, because so much is so close, people are usually seen walking.

    Where cities in the U.S. have adopted to use an incredibly abundant but somewhat wasteful and grotesque-looking concrete, cities in the Netherlands have mostly kept with traditional brickwork, cobblestone, cement block, and recycled rock and brick everywhere a person can walk, bike or drive. Deep inside some cities, seeing grass or dirt becomes a strange site, but the way the cities are set up, they appear to drain well, keeping water from collecting too much in any one spot.
    Some of the original cobblestones were more than likely pulled from the river, or from farmers' fields, and essentially "cobbled" or shaved off so that they were uniform and somewhat square. These days machines can do the same work in a much shorter amount of time, but actually putting the cobblestones, bricks or other pavers down must still be done the old fashioned way. No machine can do it, and that's a good thing. Because if they could, patterns would be lost, the subtle changes from one pattern in front of a shop, to the bike path three feet away, would not be so effective. By not doing this by hand, there could also be issues with drainage, something the current designs seem to take into thought wherever bricks are placed.

    Once we took a nap, Nicole and I hopped a train down to Delft, a city known for its Delft Blue Pottery, the Delft University of Technology, and for its location between Den Haag (The Hague) and Rotterdam. We enjoyed a climb up the tower of the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), which overlooks city hall a market area, we took a pottery tour, checked out a leaning church, a windmill, and a couple nice little pubs. I took my chance to try out some of the local beers, Nicole needed to drink water. I say when you have beer, you don't need water, but I digress. Considering the father of the microscope, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, came from Delft, I would like to see some beer under a microscope. I'm just curious...

    One of the things I take from Delft is that I will have a much deeper appreciation for Delft Blue Pottery and the artists who put it together. The factory tour was great, the displays in the museum were some of the finest I've seen, and yet underlying the whole place is the sheer age of the pottery style, borrowed from the Chinese in the 1600s, and now to the dismay of potters and pottery enthusiasts, being copied again by the Chinese and the other blackmarket "knock-off" trade. Turnabout is fair play, as far as I'm concerned. But with a keen eye, even the everyday person can tell the difference. And this stuff is scattered all over the globe. It's very popular among antique traders and collectors. So I don't think we will ever have any trouble finding something they made that we just can't live without.
    And speaking of finding something she just couldn't live without, Nicole found no less than 70 Tulip bulbs she just couldn't live without. It made for an interesting morning, looking over tents full of flower bulbs, wooden shoes, and some things that you would never find on a shelf in the United States. It all looks so crazy, and at the same time makes us Americans look like such uptight squares, and it somehow sets you straight and right again to see that there's a place in the world where people just don't get uptight about a lot of things that don't matter, and they spend a large amount of their time growing flowers. And you begin to wonder if the rest of the world just grew a few more flowers, that there wouldn't just be a little bit less wrong with the world.

    So it is that Nicole and I find ourselves knee deep in flowers, looking over bulbs set aside for Americans and Canadians. More than likely the bulbs are soil-free or have been treated in some way, and the rules or laws are holdovers from the post-911 and post-mad cow world of hype we still find ourselves in. We clearly don't see that in the Netherlands, they aren't suffering from a mad-cow problem. But we can't trust them and have to crack down on their harmless tulip bulbs.
    One of the things you see at the Bloomenmarkt (Flower Market) that really makes you crap your pants are the many various Marijuana seeds for sale, out in the open, for anyone to buy. Such a thing would certainly bring out a pair of chrome-plated wrist constraints if you were found with such a thing in the United States, so to see something like this in the open air, sandwiched between this year's tulip bulbs and a rack of wooden shoes is not just an eye opening experience, it makes you think twice about continuing to live in such a stuck-up country.
    It reminds me of a joke, however: What did God say on the 8th day? "Oh, no. I left pot everywhere. Now I have to create Republicans. I knew I shouldn't have gotten high on the sixth day."
    I like the joke because it helps to remind me why the world has the Platypus, Venus Fly-Traps, and men who truely believe they are "Truckin' for Jesus." If you don't believe me about the last one, let me know and I'll pick up a hat for you. They've become as popular as a "Che" t-shirt.

    On our bike trip that day, Nicole and I happened across the Anne Frank Huis. We were carrying a little bit of cargo from the Bloomenmarkt (no hemp seeds, sorry guys), and Nicole stopped me to show me the site. They have put a modern facade on the building, in order to preserve the original building inside, and probably also because of the large amounts of people streaming in and out of the building each day. It's hard to get any perspective about her condition without going inside, but it is no less amazing to see the city, and how she could be so trapped, and live in such a confined space for so long a time. We Americans have it so well, living in areas equalling the size of one, five, ten, twenty and even more football fields. We get angry when people invade our space, and when you look back at such a building and try to imagine a couple of families finding enough room to hide in such a small space, you start to wonder how they did it. And you wonder how much more of the world is hidden in tiny little crevices, hoping to be found by future generations.
    To imagine Amsterdam in such a time would be to imagine a huge city, completely overrun by bad guys. It's hard for anyone who grew up with a history of the wild, open west, to imagine having nowhere to run. There is nowhere else to go, and the sea stops you. Only large amounts of money could save you from your fate, and even then you can only hope you don't end up in a place worse than where you are.
    Where other cities and countries have worked to forget about the Nazis and the Holocaust, I find it comforting that Amsterdam has embraced their young, almost forgotten daughter. A lot of research, preservation, and public relations have gone into making the Anne Frank Huis a centerpiece to the city, the tours, and the draw of people who have read the diary all over the world, and in almost every possible language. Most writers would love to have their work even translated to one other language. So in this way, Anne is the writer. Nobody doesn't know who she is.
    After more biking, wandering up and down the streets, beside canals, homes, businesses, and parks, we came across a basketball court in the Jordaan Quarter (neighborhood). And I wanted to take some pictures to bring back to my brother, as maybe something he could show his 2nd grade class, or just enjoy himself.

    The three people shooting hoops invited us to a game, and devised the teams, boys against girls. (*At this point, had I been thinking or wanted to be funny, I could have explained that at this point in the team picking in America we would play 'shirts and skins.' The next line would be how the guys will be shirts, and so on... No, wait, they don't know! I could have said pants- and pants-less... Yeah! That's even better! Ha!) Anyway, I digress. And I'm going to quit before Nicole reads this and gets mad at me.
    The game was fun, and was the first game I played since I shot hoops with my cousin Katie Mo in Stockett, Montana. I was at the end of my time off from the broken arm, and I was trying to shoot left-handed because it still hurt to shoot with my right arm. It still takes some getting-used-to, shooting without complete motion, but after 10- to 15-minutes, I was starting to make a few baskets. The court was so small, I only had to walk back to the other hoop. And if we let them take a shot, we usually got the rebound, and I'd get the pass back down the court for the fast break.

    We all discovered that Nicole is a force to be reconed with on the basketball court. I get the feeling her team knew her by some nickname like "Nothin' but Net Nicole," or something of the like, because I hardly saw her use the backboard, and she was often making it in. And it's hard to tell on the playground where there is no net if people actually make it in. But she did, and did quite often.
    Basketball makes me parched, so the next stop was a pub. Yay. We darted across the neighborhood and found a pub. It had to be a good one because it was difficult to find a place to park and lock up the bikes. We backtracked a little, and found a place next to a bridge to lock up the bikes, take our stuff and catch a few pictures of the city before the sun went down.

    Travelling becomes so much better when you come to realize that you have found the perfect travelling companion. At this point, we were caught in the rain, we scaled a tall tower for a good view, we ate and drank and enjoyed each other's company. And at the end of each day, I knew I wanted to spend even more time with her. I start to see why people say that no matter how much time you spend away, it is never enough. But that being said, there are times when I look forward to having a home with Nicole, and having one place in this world where we can go to feel completely at peace. We both have made large strides toward this goal, and hope to have something along those lines in the next few years. Until then, I guess we will continue to be "All over the Map."

    One of the new tools I picked up for this trip was a little video camera. Since this was our first trip overseas together, I wanted to make sure we had some of it on video. Since I've been doing video work since 1991, cameras come very easy to me. And I wanted Nicole to have something to work with, too. We both want to have pictures and videos to show at our wedding, and this was a good start. Video purists these days would say it's ridiculous to be shooting anything in standard definition, but I know the reality of the video world, and that today's $5,000 camera is tomorrow's $500 camera. We really both need to practice our on-camera prescence, and eventually we will have the means and the need for a high-def version. Until then, this little camera is everything we need: It's light, it's inexpensive should we break it or lose it, and it uses the same tape that every other camera uses at this point and will always be easy to dub to other future formats.
    I was trying to tell Nicole that I often have to say the same things, and ask the same questions on camera, not to be annoying, but because it gives you the ability to edit this stuff down later. It's also good practice, and a good way to log what we are doing every day.

    After we returned the bikes and dropped off our purchases for the day, we went out for a late-night bite to eat. In a pub, we discovered that the Hollanders also enjoy a good Yule log on TV. We knew we had to get a picture, and pick it up for Nicole's cousin Ed, the only man I know who runs Yule Log TV next to his roaring fireplace. To each their own, and to one's own, to each an Ed. (*What?) Anyway, here ya go, Ed, an Amsterdam Yule Log.

    The downside of any time I travel is that whenever I'm not driving, I sleep. I have trained myself to do this, and it's usually at the annoyance of others who wish they could do the same. I spent large amounts of the trip back to the states with my head in Nicole's lap, with my neck all twisted, trying to sleep upright, and then trying to figure out how much I'd just slept through.
    I have a feeling that I will be sleeping through large parts of our upcoming trips to and from the states, and hopefully it doesn't make her too mad. We both value our sleep, when we can get it, and getting it usually means we can get in some very full days of sightseeing, errands, visiting with friends, and the like. We were just talking recently about how tired we both were after our holiday "pre-engagement party" and how we are both likely to pay for it at our wedding (my schedule goes from 5 or 6 am until 1 am at this point). And I know how much we will be depending on the kindness of our friends and family to get us through the day. It will be crazy. It will be long. But it will be worth it.
    I'm looking forward so much to being married to Nicole, and every crazy trip we take together.