Home, Sweet Camper-Van

News Blackout

I have lots of stories, friends, but no time to blog. I hope to write more about all we are experiencing, but for now will let you know we are alive and well and seeing the world. We made it out of Amsterdam on July 10 and are slowly learning how to travel as campers. Since then, we have

• been to a festival of street theater on stilts in the medieval city of Deventer, Holland
• Spent two nights with my distant cousin Karl Lovink and his wife Thecla
• watched the Dutch narrowly lose the world cup finals with 9000 excited, then dejected Dutchmen and women
• figured out how to unclog and empty the stinking wastewater tank in our van, which was full upon delivery . . . also had the air-conditioning repaired (thank heavens)
• camped near the spa town of Bad Ems and gargled with the water from the hot springs
• flown along the "fantasticable" from on Alpine mountaintop to another, 100 km an hour and hundreds of meters high
• Spent an evening at the Montreux Jazz Festival
• hiked in the Alps
• stayed with our good friends Jenny and Peter in Morgins, Switzerland
• lost Dennis's backpack in a tiny medieval town in the Aost region of Italy (it was basically empty)
• Missed our Dutch friends!
  
• seen the opera Aida in the Arena at Verona 
• camped in the ruins of a castle above Verona
• taken the Vaporetto in Venice and explored the Doge's Palace
• Seen the sixth century mosaics in Ravenna
• left my wallet on a chair in a Ravenna church and had it returned by -- who else? -- Dutch tourists
• swum in the Adriatic Sea
• Gotten sunburned
• Eaten gallons of gelato
• More . . . . but I have to get off the wireless now . . .

Countdown to gone

Long silence = packing.

And packing, and packing. What to take, what to pitch? What to give away? How to bring home all our acquisitions without paying a fortune in excess baggage? How to get it all to the airport, for goodness' sake? We bought an entire dinner service in the south of France. So optimistic of us!

Clara is bringing her Dutch bike home. That in itself will be an interesting logistical exercise. After much deliberation, I am leaving mine in Holland. I think I'll get one with three speeds in the States. I'm glad to know my trusty steed will be in good hands, though -- my good friend Charlie, an experienced expat, is taking it with her to Sevilla, her next port of call.

I'm not even going to write about the sadness. Not now, at least. 

Anyway, we are not going back to Ohio yet -- just leaving Amsterdam. We will spend four more weeks touring Europe in a camper-van. Switzerland, Italy, Northern Spain, and a bit of France. I hope to post from some of these ports of call -- if I can find a wifi zone!

The children's hands-on sex, I mean science, museum

If you want real evidence that the Dutch have a different attitude about sex than us prudish Americans, don't go to the red light district. That's for tourists. Go to NEMO, the children's hands-on science museum. There is a "Teen Facts" exhibit there that made me blush, and I do not consider myself a Puritan (I'm the mom who told her kids the facts of life the first time they asked. I apologize if they told your kids; I forgot to tell them to keep it to themselves). When I found myself standing beside a hulking teenage boy, both of us looking at 20 pairs of wooden artists' mannequins posed to demonstrate different sex positions, I hightailed it out of there. AWKWARD, as my daughter would say.

My 10-year-old son and his friends Isaac and Eliot did not go inside that exhibit; it was labeled for ages 12 to 18 (!). But they were interested in the exhibit where you could practice French kissing by sticking your hand inside a giant puppet of a tongue. "Be creative! Make it beautiful!" read the instructions.

They also watched this hilarious and rather brilliant three-minute film about puberty, which was looping continuously on a wall where you really could not miss it. Check it out here:

The boys found it fascinating and watched it twice. Zander pronounced it "disturbing" -- but he didn't really look disturbed.

There were a lot of things in the Teen Facts area that would have some American parents yanking their kids out by the hair. I admit, I was a bit shocked. But I also found it refreshing. Another blogger who wrote about this exhibit asked whether the frank attitude of the Dutch toward sex ed had a better outcome than the
American approach cited the following statistics, which support the case for openness quite elegantly:

	United States	Netherlands
Births per 1000, women ages 15-19	52.1	6.2
Abortions per 1000, women ages 15-19	30.2	3.9

Source: 2001 Unicef Report

By the way, this intrepid blogger took pictures of everything.

Comments, anyone?

[update: Interested in further information about what schools and government do in the Netherlands to produce the outcomes cited above? Check out this article: Adolescent Sexual Health in Europe and the U.S.—Why the Difference? ]

The ridiculous and the sublime . . . and loving it all

The Dutch aesthetic is tough to pigeonhole, embracing as it does both the vulgarity of the red light district with its "Sex Museum" and array of shops selling grotesque sexual appliances and the delicate perfection of a quiet Vermeer--or the architectural integrity of Amsterdam itself.

Last night the kids and I went to a city-wide party in Leiden that exemplified the first aspect of Dutch culture -- not vulgarity so much as a love of loud partying (evident also in Dutch football culture) a love of costumes and display, frank sexuality and just all-around crazy fun. Peurbakkentocht is, as far as I can learn, a Leiden-only festival that commemorates something about fishermen and worms (help me out here, somebody!) What it is really like is Mardi Gras -- with the parade taking place on the canals.

Our guide to this particular event was my second cousin Carla and her husband Willem, who have been our companions and generous hosts on several explorations of things Dutch: a visit to the famous flower gardens at the Keukenhof, a fabulous two-day sailing trip across the Ijsselmeer to Workum in Friesland on their yacht, a tour of Leiden's canals and nearby lakes on their canal sloop, and now a Peurbakkentocht party at their home which overlooks the Oude Rijn canal. Here are Carla and Willem watching the parade from the window (we went below because just like in a July 4th parade back home, the people in the boats were throwing things to spectators and we wanted to catch something).

Carla is in the middle, Willem on the right.

Anyway, what a great parade! The air was filled with music and the scent of barecue, people were floating around on rubber rafts to get a closer look at the decorated boats, children were swimming in the canal (really) and the costumes and themes were extravagant and slightly demented.

Floating princess (that seems to be a club emerging from her skirt)

And pouring champagne for one of her helpers

 

Goth boat

Harem boat with lovely men in drag performing belly dances

 Pregnant and painted

Trappist monks (towing a floating keg of beer)

Dutch hats!

 My personal favorite, a sinking tour bus (can you see the half-submerged driver in the front?)

And the piece de resistance, for which only a video will do (don't forget to turn up your audio):

                 


Can you hear what the people are singing while gathered around that phallic sculpture? Yes, you are correct: "Penisland."

Okay, on to the sublime. I discovered about a month ago that after dropping the kids off from school if instead of stopping in the Beatrixpark for a jog-walk, as had been my habit, I continued south on my bicycle, after only about 10 minutes I was cycling a gorgeous and peaceful route along the Amstel river. On that road is an art gallery in an old mansion and next to the gallery is a sculpture garden that I am adding to my favorite places in the world. It is an island of total peace, a cool, shady, meandering park filled with birdsong and studded with a beautiful array of contemporary sculptures. I love to walk there, contemplate the art, take in the peaceful mood and let my mind drift. At various points you can walk to the edge of the park and peer out of the wooded area at the farmland beyond, featuring sheep and horses. A bench is situated under a weeping beech tree and it's a perfect meditation site. The sculptures range from lovely to odd, with a couple that I dream about purchasing, if I could cobble together a few thousand Euros. But outside of this outdoor gallery, who knows if I would love the sculptures as much. The Dutch are fantastic at combining art with nature -- in fact, art and nature have combined to create this country rescued from the water -- and this spot is a perfect example.

I didn't take any pictures, but here's a video I found online. The music fails to capture the mood I experience in this place, but you can see what it looks like.

Beginning to say goodbye

Last night the four of us were coming home from a dinner party, riding our bikes along our favorite canal in the half-light that is Amsterdam at 10:30 p.m. in June. The hour was late because we had stayed to see the end of the Spain-Portugal soccer game. We stopped on a bridge to look at the reflection of the little lights beneath the bridges in the canal, and the four of us were simultaneously enveloped in sadness. How hard it will be to leave this beautiful city behind us!

It was the perfect spot to indulge our anticipated grief. Reguliersgracht is the canal we always trace when we ride our bicycles into the center of Amsterdam from our home in De Pijp. It is Dennis's route to and from work. It is narrow and mostly free of traffic, and it runs past seven little bridges in quick succession. It also goes over quite a few. Here is a daytime photo of the spot where we were standing last night. Two canals come together here, creating a world of water under the street:

And look, I just found a photo online of the same spot at night, taken by a better photographer than I. This is just how it looked last night:

For us, Reguliersgracht brings together many of the things we love best about Amsterdam. It's small and pretty and quaint, with lovely crooked houses, bountiful rosebushes and few sounds but the jingle of bicycle bells and the animated voices of its coffeeshop patrons. It is a joyful ride with the gentle ups and downs of the bridges (Clara likes to take a jaunt to the side at each bridge we pass, riding up the slope in order to get a longer coast down as she turns back onto Reguliersgracht), it is a route we all know well, including the children, who have a better idea of how to get to the center of Amsterdam, both by bike and by tram, than they do how to get to  downtown Columbus from our home in Ohio. This brings a special kind of freedom. Riding along Reguliersgracht is one of the shared memories we will all take with us from this family adventure, and it is very sweet.

Rainy Day in Haarlem

Sometimes my desire to say something of substance in these blog posts gets in the way of my saying anything at all . . . or at least putting up some photos. Since our time is growing short here (sob) I'm going to catch up with some bits and pieces of travelogue over the next few days.We spent a day in Haarlem last week, mainly to visit the Frans Hals museum, but also to wander its pretty streets -- which were as charming as we remembered them to be, even in the rain.

In the midst of World Cup fever, there was a youth soccer tournament going on in the city's Grote Markt - right on the cobblestones.

Haarlem is like an older, gentler, less touristy (and less diverse) version of Amsterdam. We had fun exploring its twisty, tiny streets and speculating about the history of its buildings, many of which still sport the sculptural key to their original use -- before street addresses, buildings would simply have a depiction of the owner's profession over the door. Hence the slaughterhouse:

. . . . . the hospital (I don't know if you can see the stretcher -- I think we had our camera on the wrong setting that day)

(by the way, you can see that Zander is rocking a scarf in the European fashion. Will he bring this style home to Bexley? Only time will tell.)

And a pork sausage house? "Crowned East and West Indies Sausage Barrel."

What this last building was, I'm still wondering.

By the way, Haarlem is really beautiful and atmospheric, with the added bonuse of some of the greatest shopping around. And the Hals Museum was terrific. But my favorite of the Hals paintings I have seen -- and I love him more than Rembrandt -- is here in Amsterdam, at the Rijksmuseum: "Married Couple in a Garden." Don't they look happy to be married?

All quiet on Rustenburgerstraat . . . .

Not.

Note to readers contemplating a sabbatical overseas: ask about nearby construction in the offing when you are renting an apartment sight-unseen! The location and interior of our De Pijp apartment is great -- we're really happy with it -- but the view out the front door in the morning very often looks and sounds like this:





The noise is especially hard on those of us who like to work at home. It's a boon, though, for those cafes that offer wireless and don't mind a customer sitting and nursing a cappuccino for hours on end. I am a connoisseur . . .

A few cool things we've seen in Holland that I have not previously mentioned

Boats on city streets

Lots of windmills (not a great photo but I love the juxtaposition of the new wind turbine and the old windmill.) This photo only shows one wind turbine but the countryside has many wind farms.

Psychedelic and political graffiti (vrijheid van kunst means "freedom of art.") Kudos to anybody who can tell me what the guy in the yellow headband is holding in his hand.

A unique way of collecting recyclables. There are receptacles like the one on the left all over the city. Throw in a bottle, and it sounds like you've thrown it into the Grand Canyon, because it is actually going into a huge metal underground box. Once a week, a truck like this one comes around and uses a giant crane arm to lift the box, seen here behind the stooping man (you can see the receptacle on the top of the box). The box is emptied into the truck.

Wooden shoes.

Wild foxes (this one seen in the dunes near Zandvoort and no, we don't have a telephoto lens).

Advertising circulars that people attach to your bike with a rubber band. The bicycle equivalent of a flyer under your windshield wiper. This can get annoying but I get a kick out of it anyway.

Electric Ladyland -- the Museum of Fluorescence. Only in a city like Amsterdam would you find an attraction like this.

Digging for Dutch Roots

Okay, this one is going to get a little more personal. And maybe a tad long. If you’re looking for a travelogue, you may skip this post. But if you’ve ever wondered about missing pieces in your family background, you may find something of interest here. The past few months have thrust me deep into my family history -- and given me a unique window on a still little-discussed aspect of Dutch history.

As I mentioned in my very first post, I’m half Dutch – my mother was born in Indonesia, of Dutch parents. When I learned Dennis had won a Fulbright to come to Holland, I thought for a while about developing some sort of project for myself that would involve learning about my family background. An article, perhaps? Some sort of a memoir? But I rejected the idea. Frankly, I had insufficient motivation for what seemed like a difficult project.  Besides, I wanted to spend the time working on a novel.

But I was interested in meeting relatives, and thanks in part to an uncle who has been amazingly helpful in connecting me to family members – he even came over from Ottawa and threw a dinner in Scheveningen to introduce me and Dennis and the kids to family members (thank you, Anton!) – I have met a LOT of relatives. I mean a LOT. People I never heard of, and didn't know existed. Some who are distantly related to me, some not so distantly. I have met, for instance, two first cousins of my mother that even SHE has never met. And I attended a family reunion in Holten with a couple of dozen people who share my mother's maiden name. You can see in the photo that they flew the American flag in our honor (as well as the Canadian and Belgian flags, recognizing other Lovinks in attendance).

At a certain point, I began to wonder why my mother -- and indeed, her parents, my grandparents -- were so cut off from their Dutch family. In an earlier post, back in April, I mentioned Carla, whose sister Ingrid lived with my family for a year back in the 70s when my mother started med school and needed help with the kids. Ingrid and Carla are from my grandmother's side of the family. When my grandparents settled in Canada -- my grandfather was the Dutch ambassador to Canada at that time, and stayed on when he retired -- my grandmother held onto a few people. My grandfather apparently did not hold onto any.

My uncle has attributed this to "snobbishness." Antonius Hermanus Johannes Lovink, or Grootvader –that’s what we always called him -- was an important man. In the course of his career he served as the Dutch Ambassador to Russia, China, Australia and Canada, and in 1949 he served as the Queen's High Commissioner or Governor General in Indonesia, in charge of overseeing the transition from Dutch colony to independent nation. Is it possible he felt he had outgrown his roots? But he was not exactly from humble origins; his own father was minister of agriculture, industry and trade in the Dutch East Indies. The family that I have met here are, moreover, all people one would be proud to claim as relatives: talented, accomplished, educated, interesting. And very nice.

So what else? Over time,  I have been vaguely aware of an ongoing dialogue in the family concerning my grandfather's reputation. There was a critical biography of him published in the 90s that I cannot read as it is in Dutch. I've "Google translated" the summary that appears on the Internet and even with the bad translation I can understand that he is seen as a man who failed to change with the times, that he retained a paternalistic attitude and that he wanted too much to hold onto the Indonesian colony.

I remember how proud he was of what he accomplished in Indonesia in 1949 -- much blood had been shed there in the years following the war, but now that the Dutch had agreed to transfer power to the Indonesians, the transition was accomplished peacefully under his oversight. And I think he felt this contribution was under-appreciated.

There's more, and it has to do with his intelligence work prior to Pearl Harbor and the Japanese invasion of Indonesia, but I don't really have the skills (or maybe even the desire) to sort it all out. Over lunch this week a dear friend of my uncle's (a different uncle) handed me a document that showed me where I could find evidence on the internet that my grandfather tried to warn the Americans of a coming invasion by the Japanese but was disregarded. It's interesting, but not a line of inquiry that seems helpful to pursue at this point.

What seems to me perhaps the most likely answer to my question is connected to what I am gradually learning is the confused, ambivalent relationship the Dutch have with their colonial past in Indonesia. Trade – and then colonialism – made the Netherlands the wealthy, culturally rich country that it is, but of course the idea the colonials had that they had come to the tropics to “improve” the natives was gradually discredited over the past century. That was progress. But for anyone who was associated with the colonial enterprise, either personally or by family history, changing attitudes must have meant that a proud aspect of family history was now a shameful one.

I have to wonder, therefore, did my grandfather reject Holland, or did Holland reject him? He was nothing if not a dedicated colonial. He firmly believed that the work he did in the Dutch East Indies, the country of his birth, was for the good of the Indonesian people. This idea must have made him very unpopular in contemporary, postcolonial Holland. To the end of his life he was proud to be a Dutchman, but he never went back to the Netherlands. Perhaps he closed the door on his Dutch family and his sense of belonging in the Netherlands out of a sense of hurt, not one of pride. 

 Women in Tjideng Kamp

There’s another piece of the story that fascinates me. During the war, my mother was interned along with her mother and older brother in a Japanese concentration camp, from the ages of five to eight years old (1942-1945). The camp (one of many) was called Tjideng. My grandfather, who was at the time the director of Dutch intelligence for the region, had been pulled out of Djakarta just before the Japanese invasion, spirited away in the night on a plane to Australia. My grandmother had the option to go with him and to take the children as well, but chose to remain in Djakarta in solidarity with her compatriots who were stuck there. It was not long before the Japanese rounded up all the Dutch nationals and interned them in camps. The camps were not too bad at first, but over the course of three years they became a kind of hell on earth.

My mother doesn’t talk much about her years in the camp, and of course there is much she doesn’t remember because she was so small. When my grandmother talked about it, she used to tell us picaresque stories; adventures in pluck.  How your Granny fooled the Japs into thinking she didn’t have access to a radio. How she taught her children to sing, “We’re not hungry!” so that they would come to believe they were not (a strategy that apparently worked, but also got her in trouble with the other women in the camp who came to think she had a secret food source). How she stood up to the Japs in countless little ways and was punished with frequent head-shavings.

My mother, too, shared some stories. She told us about eating cherries picked out of a sewer, fashioning shoes from tin cans to protect her feet from the hot ground, and the audacious willpower of her older brother, who contracted polio shortly before the family’s internment and was miraculously cured (that’s another story) but who had to exercise relentlessly while they were in camp in order to bring his body back from the brink.

Nobody talked about things like the scars from cigarette burns on my grandmother’s legs –marks of torture, I think because she would not share information about her husband -- that became weeping ulcers in her old age when her legs were swollen from edema. Or about whether anybody was angry that my grandfather left them behind – or that my grandmother chose to stay behind.

My grandmother often told me that I should write her story, and in fact I conducted quite a few interviews with her, both on audiotape and on videotape, but I never really wanted to write the story. I think that’s because I never really thought I was getting the whole story. And to try to learn more felt like breaking a family taboo. Although I have always been fascinated by this piece of my mother’s history, I have also always had an implicit understanding that this was something you didn’t ask questions about.

Nor did you talk about it much. I don’t share this piece of my background with many people, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s my mother’s story, not mine, and I do not wish to invade her privacy. Second, it’s a real conversation-stopper. For some reason, it feels boastful. Telling people my mother survived a Japanese prison camp feels somehow like claiming some kind of extraordinary history for which I cannot take credit. Third, it takes a lot of explaining. This episode of history is not well-known in the States, and people often respond by saying something like, “I didn’t know your mother was Jewish?” (She is not).

The term “concentration camp” is a loaded one, and no matter how bad it was (one in eight of those interned by the Japanese in Indonesia died in the camps -- from disease, hunger, or exhaustion and occasionally from execution), I would never want to seem to be comparing it with going to Dachau or Auschwitz.
But most importantly, I have somehow internalized the idea that you don’t talk about this period. And my time here in Holland is starting to offer me a bit of context for this feeling.

The friend of my uncle that I lunched with yesterday was in the camp with my family. Until he turned 11 that is, when he was sent away from the women’s camp, where children stayed with their mothers, to the men’s camp -- a work camp. He doesn’t really remember it, he says – a prime example of the safety valve of repression at work. It must have been terrifying.

After the war, he said, there was another reason to forget about the camp: nobody in Holland wanted to hear about it. No matter how bad it was, it didn’t compare to the deprivations of life under German occupation. Hunger winter. People being executed or sent to death camps for working in the Resistance movement. Or, of course, for being Jewish.

Then, after a bloody revolution against which the Dutch fought bitterly, the Dutch East Indies were no more. There is a museum here in Amsterdam called the Verzetsmuseum (Resistance Museum), and it has a room with exhibits about the war and its aftermath in Indonesia. I knew the collection was there but only discovered it at the end of a visit back in January. I didn’t have time then to study it. But I went back there last week and took my time with the collection. It was an emotional experience for me.  Not only were there some fascinating exhibits about life in the colony before the war, from the perspective of Dutch colonials, native Indonesians and Dutch East Indians (people of mixed background), but lots of artifacts and accounts of life in the camps. There was a film reel from one of the camps that showed people cooking over open fires and men who looked skeletal (my own grandmother, 5’8” tall, weighed 90 pounds when she came out of the camp.)

There was also information about the period between Hiroshima, which ended the war with the Japanese, and the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch East Indies to Indonesia in 1949. This account particularly stayed with me, from a young man who volunteered for the Dutch army, intending to help liberate the Dutch East Indies:

“We’d kick the Japanese out! Japan surrendered while I was still doing my military training. I went to the East Indies anyway, fully convinced that we were needed to restore order and peace. But after a while I began to have my doubts about our military presence there. I thought, darn, perhaps I’m fighting on the wrong side. When I returned to the Netherlands, our street had been decorated.  I always say: “We went as idealists, were received back home as heroes, but later went down in history as war criminals.”

I couldn’t help thinking about the American soldiers who went to Vietnam.

In the exhibit I also found a newsreel from 1949 about the transfer of sovereignty. How strange to see my grandfather, in his white suit, making a speech to a formal assemblage of officials in the palace where he lived, listening to a radio message from the queen, then signing official documents, bowing to the Indonesian representative, and boarding a plane. Following that, a shot of what looks like thousands upon thousands of people rejoicing in the streets as Sukarno comes to the palace.

Over the next decade, the Dutch were forced to repatriate, and hundreds of thousands of Dutch East Indians also chose to move to the Netherlands. I read in the museum guide that the Dutch government did their best to discourage this, as the Netherlands was impoverished following the war, and suffering a severe housing shortage. They were joined by many Moluccans, Indonesians who had supported the Netherlands and were viewed as traitors as their archipelago, the “Spice Islands,” was absorbed by the larger Indonesian nation.

It’s not hard to see how this turbulent time, with the overtaxing arrival in the Netherlands of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the former colony, led to very mixed feelings here in Holland.

By Googling around, I yesterday discovered a book that was published just 2 years ago, in English – by Ohio University Press, of all places – called “Silenced Voices: Uncovering a Family’s Colonial History in Indonesia,”by Inez Hollander.  In the introduction (which is available online), Hollander writes

When I started asking my mother about my grandfather’s colonial past, I met with resistance and denial . . . The fact that the whole subject seemed shrouded in silence made me all the more curious . . . I have come to see this denial on my family’s part as a form of self-censorship, which to some extent plays out in Dutch society as well. The average Dutch person will be able to tell you about the Second World War, the German occupation, the Holocaust, and the hunger winter of 1945, but when you ask him when the Dutch East Indies were liberated [from the Japanese], what exactly happened during the Dutch police actions, and when Indonesia gained independence, that person  may well draw a blank. Colonial history is no longer a standard part of the Dutch school curriculum, and yet almost everyone is familiar with the greatest Dutch novel, Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli. This book, which exposed the exploitative cultivation system of the colonial class and the corruption of the Javanese aristocracy, has left such a mark on the Dutch psyche that the consensus seems to be that most everything the Dutch did in Indonesia was evil, coercive, and politically incorrect.

I have ordered this book from Amazon.uk, and look forward eagerly to reading it. It seems I have unwittingly tapped into a strain of Dutch history that is painful, fascinating and still unresolved.

Stumble-upon moments in Bruges

We are trying very hard during our (rapidly diminishing) time here in Amsterdam to hit all the required tourist stops. This is harder than it sounds, because we are actually living here -- the kids go to school each day, Dennis goes to work at the University, I beat my head against the wall trying to make progress on the new novel, and we all try to keep on top of the regular stuff of life: replacing holey socks, paying the bills (both stateside and here), calling our parents, etc. Visits from family and friends, however, put us back in tourist mode -- and that's a good thing. Thanks to a recent visit from our good friends Dan Kobil and Cathy Johnston, we've done a lot of fun things over the past couple of weeks, including two great nights of jazz, one at BadCuyp (a down-and-dirty nightclub in our neighborhood) and the other at Bimhuis, a huge glass-and-steel performing arts venue that leans out over the IJ -- you enter it by walking across a sort of suspension bridge that connects to a bike path behind the Central Station.

We also took a weekend trip to Bruges, a perfectly restored-and-preserved medieval city in Belgium. Fun as it was to hit the road with the Kobil/Johnstons, we were a little disappointed at how touristy it was -- chock-full of souvenir shops, and with the tourists seeming to outnumber actual residents by a large margin. We enjoyed our share of Belgian beer, and even took the kids to the "Frites Museum," but despite the beauty of the city--and a great art museum--it seemed a bit, well, Disneylandish. Which, in a way, is the case: much of it was rebuilt in the 19th century with tourism in mind.

I guess we've been a little spoiled by Amsterdam's amazing combination of charm and realness. So despite the enchanting canals and slow-drifting swans of Bruges, we found ourselves a little disappointed.

And then we had two "stumble-upon" moments that restored my faith in the enchanting power of travel.

The first was a meeting of the Crossbow Society of St. George. We were walking back to our apartment after dinner. It was in a leafy neighborhood and we had noticed a fenced-in private club across the way. This evening there seemed to be a party going on. We stopped to peer through the wrought-iron fence. What we saw was a gathering of men in dark suits and tuxedos, gathered in a cupola, taking turns shooting a crossbow at a target mounted on a tree. They used a mechanical contraption to load the arrow onto the bow. It was all very decorous and sedate.

They were too far for a really good look, and we don't have a telephoto lens, so sorry, no picture. Internet research reveals that there are two crossbow societies in Bruges, and this one goes back over 700 years.  King Charles II of England was president of the society during his exile in Belgium.

The second haphazardly-found moment was a Saturday morning songbird competition -- also on our street! The street was closed off, and competitors were seated in front of wooden boxes at regular intervals along the street. Each was focusing intently on the box, and in each box was a singing bird. The boxes had slats and slightly opaque covers -- to simulate the light of dawn, perhaps? Each birdowner had in his lap a long stick on which he or she was making hash marks with a piece of chalk. Counting the repetitions of a theme, perhaps? The competitors were men and women, young and old. We hushed ourselves and walked along by, reverently observing the ritual, which had no audience but ourselves. Definitely not staged for the tourists. To me, this is the kind of moment that one hopes for in travel: stumbling upon something truly unimagined, and totally authentic.

Here's a video, thanks to Dan Kobil.

http://sharing.theflip.com/session/4813995f33ecca62f41d94de6a295d2e/video/14897463

UPDATE, June 15: Clara sussed out the story on the bird-singing contests. Thanks, kiddo!:

hey mom!!! i got an answer on my question for you about the birdsong contests in bruges...
here it is!!!

"The birds are finches. The winner is the finch who sings the most "suskewiet" in one hour.
All boxes are with birds are place on a line with their owner behind. Then each owner shifts one place so they are behind another bird. They sign the stick everytime they hear a correct song of the bird before them. The stick make it easy to make the totals.

There is a good wikipedia page about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinkensport"

Right-wing Liberals and the Conservative Left

I've been sort of on sabbatical from politics here in Holland. But I couldn't help noticing that the Dutch government collapsed in February over Afghanistan policy and the people went to the polls yesterday to elect new leadership. So I've tried to learn a little about what's going on.

Dutch politics are fascinating, but the nuances are tough to access for a non-Dutch speaker like myself. I read a few articles online, chat with other expats in front of the kids' school and get some of the lowdown in reports from Dennis, who actually goes to an office and works with Dutch people.

But Dutch politics are very complicated and totally different from politics back home. Unlike our two rapidly-becoming-irrelevant parties, there appear to be 11 major parties represented in the Dutch parliament, (with confusingly similar names like PVV and VVD) and at least nine other parties putting candidates out there, parties with names like "Party for Mankind and All Other Earth-Dwellers" and the "Pirate Party."

But to focus on the fringes trivializes the larger differences between Dutch and U.S. politics. The center here is considerably left of the U.S. center. The Dutch pride themselves on their reputation for openness, tolerance, and enlightened social welfare policy. So the right is kind of left. But it's more complicated than that, as I keep trying to wrap my mind around concepts like the "conservative left." The candidate spewing anti-immigrant proposals -- really, he sounds worse than Rush Limbaugh -- links his ideas to values we would consider liberal. Muslim immigrants are a threat to gay rights, says Geert Wilders, and to women's rights. Send them back. Tax their headscarves.

Wilders, who is either the hope of Holland or the boogeyman, depending where you sit, gained a lot of ground in yesterday's election, more than doubling his party's seats in the parliament. (By the way, that's him upper left. Could any U.S politician get away with that kind of a dye job?)

Nobody gains a majority in these elections; it's all a matter of seats and percentages and which party aligns itself with which after the elections. The top winners yesterday were Labour, Wilders' PVV, and the Liberals (VVD), which the newspapers refer to as the three "right-wing" parties. The Christian Democrats (left-wing), who along with Labour were in charge until February, lost ground.

Liberal, of course, means something different here than it does at home, with an emphasis on free markets.

It all makes a person wonder how we Americans ever thought two parties could cover the range of political ideas. No surprise that American party membership gets lower every year. But if you think that the vigor of all these ideological groupings and regroupings encourages political participation, think again. By 4 p.m., turnout was only at 38 percent.

If I have thoroughly confused you, and even if I haven't, here is a very good essay by Ian Buruma which spells things out much more clearly.

Brugge, Belgium: Clara Hirsch, Photographer

Bak(to the)fiets

Had to link to this blog with full-scale coverage of Amsterdam bike trends. 

http://www.ski-epic.com/amsterdam_bicycles/

My only correction: what the author calls an "industrial work basket with the child in the suicide position" -- a Bakfiets -- is actually made for children and used by thousands if not millions of Dutch moms and dads.

My first reaction to these was both admiration and dismay, but the dismay has dissipated. I am getting used to children without helmets. Have not heard of any terrible head injuries among children transported on parents' bikes. I think the bicycle culture is more important to keeping kids safe than the safety gear. These days, I actually let Clara (12) ride home from school alone on her bike. The Dutch style of parenting for independent children is slowly wearing off on me . . . .

Meanwhile, Clara has asked to bring her old, battered purple Dutch city bike back to the states with her in August. I'm looking into it.

Finally, a post from Dennis.

And well worth waiting for if you are planning a trip to Amsterdam. We have enjoyed quite a few visits from friends and family and are looking forward to a few more, so Dennis put together this travel guide, based on our experiences so far.

Being a lawyer with an organized mind, he writes in outline form. Unfortunately, this meant I could not upload The Hirsches' Guide to Amsterdam without losing all the formatting and while my love runs deep, it does not compel me to retype the whole thing. Therefore, it's a link. Enjoy!

Amsterdam is a very dirty girl

No, not that kind of dirty girl. This kind:

Can you see it? There's a canal behind all that garbage.

 

Overflowing recycling receptacle on my block. 

Also my block:

 

Don't you think the toilet looks rather clean in this context?

This strike, which is now over two weeks old, is the one thing that could make me happy the weather hasn't warmed up yet. We're still in winter coats, but at least the stink is not too bad! I think the municipal workers have made their point quite well. Apparently the city does too, as I hear they have reached an agreement with the city and will start cleaning up soon. I don't envy them that job!