Endings

Transitions are always hard.  Jeff and I are in our very last days here, trying to wrap up and close down the life we have built together in The Hague.  Meanwhile the weather has suddenly turned sunny and warm, beautiful fall days that make one feel prematurely nostalgic, like you are still living in what is already the past.

As a goodbye present for someone dear to me, I picked up a collection of poems by my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins - a Victorian whose language was ahead of his times and whose love of nature was deeply spiritual.  Looking over the book, I am reminded that I don't read enough poetry.  This one, which has always been one of my favorites, feels particularly timely:

Hurrahing in Harvest

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks rise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour

Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

And, eyes, hearts, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous love's greetings of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

Majestic--as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!--

These things, these things were here and but the beholder 

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder,

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

What America Does Better

OK, so the Dutch might have figured out (in order of importance) bicycling, canals, work-life balance, public transportation, international law, windows, thrift and towel warmers. I love the Dutch, and the rest of Europe is pretty awesome, too - but after a full year here, I miss mightily those things that, frankly, the U.S. just does better:

• Handicap Access: London tube system, I'm looking at you. But it's a near-universal problem. God bless the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• Asian (and Mexican) food: Not a good sign when tacos cost north of 15 euros. And never trust an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet in a region best known for its raw herring and mayonnaise.
• Target and Trader Joes: Our four-year-old guest last November, who otherwise loved Holland and Paris, was confounded by the idea of life without Target. As am I.
• Popular entertainment: No one here disputes the U.S. superiority in this particular category. But the love of American pop culture renders the constant criticism of American politics somewhat ironic. (Yes, now that you've used your beloved iPhone to tell everyone on Facebook how America should be doing more for the world, please enjoy your evening of McDonalds and Mad Men.)
• Drip coffee: For whatever reason, it's just not appreciated here. 
• Tolerance: I've mentioned Geert Wilders before, but one need only note the reactions of politicos around Europe in the aftermath of the Oslo shooting to understand how unprepared Europe still is for a truly heterogeneous society. At least in the U.S., we pride ourselves on being a melting pot, even if we're still trying to figure it out.
• Cocktails: Yes, the beer and wine are great, but sometimes you just want a kickass Sidecar.
• Netflix and Amazon: Actually, given Netflix's recent downfall, I'm re-considering our move back to the States. Drat you, Reed Hastings!

This game can also be played with "What America Gave the World."  As friend Megan wrote in a postcard last summer: "Just remember: we invented the Internet, French fries and cars. Fuck yeah." To this we could add jazz, cowboys, the personal computer, the Declaration of Independence, hip hop, Tex-Mex, the Marshall Plan, the lightbulb, and Michael Jackson. As Jeff likes to say, "You're Welcome."

Utrecht Journal: Learning to Travel Solo

This is a story about making myself proud.  

I was convinced, after pathetic days spent alone in London and Amsterdam pre-law school, that I do not travel well by myself.  This has cramped my traveling style in the years since, and also made me feel bad about myself.  But after the partial success of my Morocco challenges, I decided it was time to try again.  My self-imposed challenge: a day-trip to Utrecht, solo.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

8:58 a.m., Utrecht Central Station: Half-hour train ride passed too quickly in whirl of anxiety, both general and specific.  Stumbling onto train platform amidst flow of passengers, uncertain what to do first - go straight to the museum? Find a cafe for second breakfast?  On escalator up to the station hall, notice the lights above create a cool effect in the escalator shaft. Hesitate as escalator comes to an end.  Step back onto down-escalator while digging camera from backpack.  Spend 10 minutes riding escalator back and forth, taking pointless pictures of the light.

Note the yellow train, which I heart.

9:22 a.m., Utrecht Central Station (still): Pointless escalator picture-taking is oddly liberating.  Understand that I should head straight to the city center to find an atmospheric cafe full of university students.  Thinking what I really want is a "misto" at the Starbucks in the unremarkable train station.  Realize the power of choice is entirely in my hands.  

Gardner's Guide to Groningen

I realize that many of our most memorable experiences traveling around the Netherlands and Europe have not made it into my posts because they are, individually, not that interesting. Take, for instance, the one night and subsequent morning we spent in the northern Dutch town of Groningen during our Friesland adventures: nothing singular happened that merits writing home about, yet we liked the town very much and have great memories of exploring its compact center.  To illustrate our more typical travels, then, I've compiled a map of our several little discoveries that, taken together, made our brief time in Groningen so memorable: 


View Guide to Groningen in a larger map

To the North, Part II

Other than seeing the Wadden Sea, the primary mission of my self-directed northern adventure was to visit the rest of the Netherlands' World Heritage sites.  All five (including the Wadden Sea) are variations on the same theme: how the Dutch fought the Sea.  The five sites were, collectively, rather anti-climatic.  (Spoiler alert: the Dutch won.)

But in the right order, they do tell the arch of the defining Dutch story.  It goes something like this:

In the beginning, there was land, and there was Sea.  And then the Sea breached the land, and the land was flooded.  This was understandably frustrating to the people who thought they lived there.  (The Wadden Sea will remain permanently stuck in this stage of the story, now that it is protected as a World Heritage site.  But no one really wants to live that far north anyway.)

At first the people tried to fight the Sea by building their houses and churches on terps (mounds of earth) and constructing sea walls and sand bars.   This was not very successful. Eventually the ingenuous Dutch realized they could use windmills to pump water up and out of low-lying land.

Thus the polders were born: land drained and kept dry by orderly systems of dikes and windmills.  The very first, Beemster Polder, was drained in 1612 (!!!), and was designated a World Heritage site a mere 387 years later.  But it is a particularly difficult site to visit because - other than the pretty lines of trees and tidy grid of roads and canals - there's not really any there there.  It's like the Greenwich, CT of Amsterdam.  (This stage in the battle between the Dutch and the Sea is much better represented by Kinderdijk.)

Although great for postcards and Dutch branding, the windmills alone were not enough. Terrible floods racked the lower Delta region of the country, while the large bay of the Zuiderzee (the "Southern Sea" that in fact lay north of Amsterdam) stubbornly ate away at the interior of the country.  In the mid-1800s, the government forced the evacuation of one large island in the Zuiderzee, Schokland, having grown tired of funding the fight for such a lost cause.

Biking along the Edge of the World

Sometimes you need to go someplace just because it's there - because that black hole sitting on the edge of your mental geography goads you and it's within your power to extend the boundaries of your known universe by some small increments.  At least, that's how I felt as a fat ten-year-old trying to bike up unexplored blocks in the 'hood that were inconveniently pitched at 45-degree inclines.

That's also how I felt about the north of the Netherlands - the upper half of the country above Amsterdam which no one else seems curious about. But it's there.

It's also different.  Friesland, the northwestern province of the country, has its own language that is entirely distinct from Dutch. Indeed, Dutch was not the official language of the Netherlands until 1993.  (They might as well have skipped over Dutch entirely and gone straight to English, but that's a different essay.)  In between Amsterdam and Friesland are vast tracts of land - entire provinces - that were under water 100 years ago.  And to accentuate the far distance you can travel in an hour's drive north of Amsterdam, Frisia is replete with funny looking little ponies, so miniature that they turned a grown man (Jeff) into a cooing eight-year-old girl.

Cooooo.

It's good to remind yourself of the power you wield over your own life as a fully independent adult. I wield this power sometimes when I skip the oatmeal Jeff dutifully makes for me in the morning in lieu of a pain au chocolat at my office canteen.  Or when I start watching the movie that comes on TV at 11 pm even though it's a school night and I'm already up past my bedtime.  Similarly, I decided I really needed to see the north of the Netherlands.  So in August I rented a car and dragged Jeff along on an entirely selfish two-day northern adventure.

It did not blow me away; it was different from the rest of the Netherlands, but only as different as, say, North Carolina is from South Carolina.  But our ultimate destination did move me greatly: it felt like we were biking along the edge of the world.

Love Lock: A Story in Pictures

Once upon a time, in a land far far away (Cambridge, Massachusetts), a girl met a boy in a bar.  The fates were not aligned: He had sworn he would never date a lawyer, anyone affiliated with Harvard, or anyone under 30.  She was out celebrating her 27th birthday with her Harvard roommates before hunkering down to study for the bar, while working full-time.  

The night of their first date, Boston was shut down by a blizzard.  The night of their second date, twenty-four hours of "wintry mix" had turned the poorly drained streets around Harvard Square into ankle-deep lakes of icy slush.  For the first two months, she spent every weekend and most nights with her BarBri books.  Then she moved to DC for work.  But they persevered, through tough corporate jobs and multiple relocations. 

Last March he asked her to marry him.  This summer they decided to settle down in Portland come the fall. Before leaving Europe, they thought, wouldn't it be nice to commemorate their fortunate love?  

Enter stage left, the train bridge next to the cathedral in Cologne.

The rest of the story, in pictures, after the jump.

What's the Story, Morning Glory?

Where, oh where, has the summer gone?  Technically, it never came (at least to The Hague), but there's no time for complaining.  Our time in Europe is running short.

We move back to the States at the end of the month.  I've talked Jeff into a cross-country drive, so we should be settling into Portland by early November.

There's a lot of questions we don't know the answers to yet, but here's a few we do:

Why Portland?

My family, an excellent job opportunity, good food, and a creative techie entrepreneurial community for Jeff.  Plus it's basically like The Hague.

Won't you miss Europe?

Jeff has already entered his official mourning stage.  For my part, I prefer to assume life will bring us back this way sometime down the road.

Are you going to drive through North Dakota?

No.  We're playing it safe and taking the most southern route possible, before driving up through California.  I hear Alabama is most decidedly not like The Hague.

Any other big news?

Mmmmmm - no.

So where have you been?

Traveling, and writing about pirates.  And daydreaming about the summer that never was.