Day 2
Windmills, and Bridges that Float
(don't forget to take lots of pictures)
got to ride shotgun. This was an unspeakably huge improvement
over my trip's previous leg. We were all bundled into Mom's minivan, on a
dank, dreary day (my favorite kind, and for the first time in 24 hours, cool
enough for my liking).
The plan was to drive from the airport to Mom's house in Den Helder, which would be quite a trip by itself, but we were going to compound this by taking a scenic route, in part as a challenge to me, to see if I can be polite enough to stay awake for the whole tour. After all, my body was telling me that it was just about time to go to bed, while my hosts were all tanked up on soft drinks and speculaas.
Shudder!
Sorry about that.
If you've never been to Holland, you may not know that to go from any point "A" to any point "B" in Holland is to take the scenic route, by definition. Two factors determine this: first, that it's actually quite scenic in Holland, and second, that the speed limits only tentatively reach into their teens (and we're talking KPH here). So, the trip from Amsterdam to Den Helder, which would be about 15 or 20 minutes in the type "A" personality US, takes about an hour and a half if you take the most direct possible route (and because this is Holland, I am grossly abusing the word "direct" here). Taking the "scenic route" (by Dutch definitions of "scenic") makes for an entire day of driving around some totally cute scenery.
The kids, no doubt having seen
all this before, ad nauseum, seemed nevertheless quite delighted to be seeing it
again. Mom told me that it was because I was there, and that they were in
fact happy to see me,
I found this to be quite an odd assertion.
As I said at the start of all of this, I've spent a lot of time talking to this family online, using "Yahoo Instant Messenger." As I've also said, because this family is Dutch, they all speak English better than I do.
Or at least type English. I mean, back home, I'd get onto Yahoo, and these windows would pop up from my pals Ellie, Rona and Gerwin (not to mention Mom), and they'd all talk my head off. Type my head off. Which is just fine, 'cause anyone who knows me know that I'm not exactly shy in that department, either.
So, during four days before I left, my screen was covered by these treatises on how much they were looking forward to my visit, looking forward to meeting me in person, and looking forward to being able to speak to me face-to-face. And once I got there, and met them in person and got a chance to speak to them face-to-face, here's what they said:
" ... ... ... ..."
You get the idea.
Yeah, sure, Mom was talking quite a bit, and when I first got there, Gerwin did make that comment about eating speculaas...
SHUDDER
Sorry about that again.
But now that I think about it a little more, that... comment of Gerwin's... well, maybe he was just trying to shut me up. I don't know. All I do know is that there I was, sitting in the front seat of the van, with three deathly quiet people sitting behind me, staring holes through my head, all wearing those shallow "I'm trying to be polite even though I now realize that you really suck" smiles.
Mom tried to explain to me that they were shy about talking to me because they were worried about their English. Let me tell you about their English: if Shakespeare was alive today and writing in 20th century idioms, he'd read a lot like these kids.
Yeah, right. Worried about their English. This is what they said to me for approximately the rest of my visit:
" ... ... ... ..."
Which left me with the distinct impression that they totally hated me. This impression didn't leave me until the day I got back and sat down at my computer and was greeted by at least three instant message windows containing multi-volume tomes on how much they enjoyed meeting me and how much they've missed me already since I left.
Remember, I did say that the Dutch have a sense of humor.
We saw a lot of totally cute looking Dutch
stuff. We saw the house where Mom grew up, we saw a whole bunch of windmills (but no one in cute
costumes with wooden shoes), some
dunes and a whole load of real estate that was, as close as I could tell,
below sea level.
This is when I started worrying about floods. I don't think I stopped worrying about floods until I was at about 36,000 feet on my flight home. Naturally, the Dutch, who are used to living on recently dried seabeds, thought this was silly, and mom spent a lot of time trying to reassure me that floods just didn't happen (that often), that if they did happen, they weren't (too) serious, and that very few people died, and that after all, they were pretty hardy people and quite used to having wet feet.
I have to say that from my two trips to Holland, the overriding theme was that the Dutch are quite proud of the fact that their back yards could double as oyster beds. Everyone that I've spoken to (with the possible exception of mom's kids) has gone on at great length about how this piece of land or that was, through hard work and diligence, reclaimed from the sea. And I'd ask "Wow. When was that done?" They'd sigh, check their watches and shrug.
Great sense of humor there.
So, throughout the trip, I kept asking if we were about to be flooded, and mom kept reassuring me that would never happen. "Isn't that right, Ellie?"
" ... ... ... ..."
So, to reassure me, Mom took me by this big huge levee that runs approximately the entire length of the country and across major pieces of ocean. "We are protected by dikes. Do you have dikes in your country?" Well, yeah, but usually they have their hands full protecting themselves.
And I should say that Mom's English is indeed quite a bit more fluent than I represent here, but in the name of concocting a total fiction for the purposes of documenting a vacation, that as far as you know may have never happened, I'm going to persist in paraphrasing her in broken English just because I think it makes her sound more quaint.
The dikes were very nice and everything and they did look big and huge and strong, and almost enough to calm my fears, until we climbed back to the top and mom pointed inland at a big puddle she called "Kwelwater." I asked her what the heck that was, and she said "This is the water that sneaks under the dikes."
Oh, yeah, great. I feel WAY better now!
Mom took all this in
stride. I think they have this procedure outlined in their official
government guide for hosting panicky tourists. Standing atop the dike,
with gale force winds threatening to launch us into the ocean, she calmly
shouted at me to take a picture of some plaque explaining how they like
to use British battleship wrecks as jetties. and to take a picture of a bunch of sheep on the top of the
dike, who were somehow supposed to make the whole dike thing work in the first
place (I didn't ask for details). If I did that, she promised to take me
to see the windmills.
Well, we've all seen the whole Holland-Windmill thing, but what I never realized until my last trip there was what the windmills are for. Originally, they were to pump water uphill, which struck me as an outstanding idea. And, with the winds we'd just been experiencing, I suppose they could pump the water quite quickly indeed.
But, you know, we drove out to the nearest quaint looking windmill - you can't swing a dead cat in Holland without smacking into one - and... well, it was a windmill. To tell the truth, I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with them, other than stand there, take pictures and say deep, philosophical things like "Yup. That's a windmill."
So, I took pictures, shuffled around and said, "Yup, that's a windmill" while mom taught me some of the more colorful aspects of the Dutch language after having stepped into a mud hole. Well, I guess this windmill was noteworthy in that it was perhaps the first such windmill I'd ever seen that I didn't subsequently attempt to putt a golf ball through.
Windmills may be what gets Americans excited, but the Dutch have their own very special passions. We've already covered one: talking about how everything used to be underwater. Well, they like their things so close to the water that they have this other passion - floating bridges. Simply put, Mom wasn't going to let me go anywhere until I had at least a half a roll (or half a memory stick) full of pictures of a floating bridge. And this one was in the process of opening for a boat, which is apparently one of the greatest treats that Holland has to offer.
We found this bridge in a little village with a name that I think means something like "Hey look! There's a floating bridge here," and I was taking pictures of the bridge like a good little tourist, and Mom tried not to hit me too much when I tried turning around to take pictures of some quaint shops instead of the bridge.
And hey, after seeing the floating bridges - which seem to be just about as common as windmills, mainly because there's a canal about every 15 feet - there really isn't much else to see, is there? So, in the warm post-bridge afterglow, we agreed to call an end to the scenic route, and head for Mom's house.
Well, I'd just filled my
camera's ram so full of pictures of dikes and floating bridges, that I had to
upload the pictures to her PC just to make room for more bridge pictures
later. And of course, now that we'd decided to head straight to Mom's
house, it only took us another forty-five minutes or so, because the Dutch are
just laid back that way.
Shoot. I was getting pretty laid back (or wanted to). I was so tired, I could barely keep my eyes open. Going to sit in a nice comfortable house sounded like just a great idea, except that I knew it would turn into a battle of will, trying not to fall asleep in front of my hosts as soon as I got comfortable. As luck would have it, that wasn't a problem.
Remember how I keep saying that the Dutch are really nice people? Here's how nice they are: not only do they not kill anything, including rats, but they actually find them comfortable places to live and feed them good food. The rats, I mean.
Yes, they were there. Rats. Lots of them. Big rats with them little beady rat eyes, them bald little rat tails, them squeaky little rat voices, and those little rat scurrying sounds. All over the dang house.
Sure, they were in cages, but I wasn't inclined to trust the cages any more than I was going to trust the dikes, which is to say not at all. So, staying awake wasn't a problem, because I spent the entire remainder of the weekend standing on top of a chair shrieking. The Dutch found this immensely entertaining.
Aside from the rats, there were also three totally mutant dogs. The smallest was named something like "Beef." Every time I saw him, I got hungry. He was just strange.
The middle dog's name is "Stuff." Seemed like an apt name if the word "stuff" conjures up satanic images. I mean, Stuff was friendly enough and everything, except that the "Cujo" face he kept making at me was a little unsettling. Especially if I'd be laying down on the couch, "resting my eyes," only to be awakened by Stuff, standing on my chest doing the Cujo thing right in my face.
Mental note: Remember to send Mom the check for the cleaning bill.
The third dog, Citha, was mutant only in that she's such a normal dog that she seems sort of mutant next to Beef and Stuff.
So, I tried to sit on the sofa and look dazed. I wasn't too successful because the dogs were paying me way too much attention, and because I was by an urge to climb on top of a chair and shriek some more. Seeing my difficulty, Mom offered to take me out shopping with her, so I'd have an opportunity to see what quaint Dutch shops are like (hint: they're quaint). It turned out to be very important to do the shopping just then, because it was the Saturday of a holiday weekend, and after 6:00, the entire country was going to be closed until Tuesday, and if we didn't do the shopping before that, we wouldn't have anything to eat for the rest of the weekend.
Maybe this is how the Dutch stay so slender.
I was so out of it that for
the only time during the whole vacation, I didn't take a hundred pictures.
About the only picture I did take was of the bakery where people lined up to buy
some kind of dessert. At some neighboring counter, they were selling some
rather good smelling sausage, with the result that my stomach was drowning out
the sound of the people shouting what number was being served next.
We walked around some terribly quaint outdoor mall, and we saw perky Dutch people perking themselves down the street on cute little bicycles, We saw a old water tower that now serves as a place to drink coffee and (literally) climb the walls. By this point, what I was really seeing the most of was the insides of my eyelids.
Mom, of course, was doing the good tour guide routine of taking me on a whirlwind tour, and after she was absolutely sure that I had no idea at all where I was, she'd ask me questions like "So, do you know where you are now?" Sort of like being spun around blindfolded in a big game of "Pin the tail on the tourist."
"No, I have no idea where I am because I am completely, unambiguously and unreservedly lost!" This garnered polite "golf claps" from all the Dutch within earshot (and given the strength of my voice, that was a pretty fair radius), and looks of sympathy and commiseration from all the other American tourists.
Mom took me to the grocery store, where everything looked completely strange had very frightening names, and anything labeled "American Style" looked completely unlike any comestible I've ever seen. Then she drove me around more quaint Dutch streets with canals in the middle of them, to the side of them and intersecting them. Canals everywhere. I'm worried about floods, but it occurs to me that the country's already flooded anyway - it's like someone's house gets flooded, and they just decide they have a canal in their livingroom instead.
Back home, Mom made me one of the family's favorite dinners - Shoarma. You'll probably notice that the name isn't scary. That's because they say it's a turkish dish, although whenever I search the web for "shoarma," all the hits I get are in Dutch. It was pretty good anyway, and as I sat back after dinner, feeling all warm and fuzzy from the shoarma, and generally safe that I'd managed to ingest something the name of which didn't induce peristaltic spasms, Mom came in and said something that sounded like the following:
I have a fly. Would you like to eat it?
Needless to say, I'm not really sure how to answer such a question. I wasn't even sure what the appropriate way to react to such a question was, except that the kids were all sitting there smacking their lips saying, "Ja, Ja, fly ist gut!" except that that's my broken German and they were really speaking Dutch, so it didn't sound anything like that at all, except that it kind of did, because it was Dutch.
If I'm sounding incoherent here, it's only because I'm trying to set the overall tone for my state of mind just then.
It turns out it's not "fly," but "vlaai," which just happens to be pronounced in a way that sounds exactly like "fly," probably solely to make English speaking people nervous. Fly, generally includes some sort of "slagroom," which was another bit of unsettling Dutch food. Vlaai is some sort of custard cream pie, and slagroom is whipped cream.
I found out about slagroom online before I'd even left the US. One afternoon, Mom said that she and Ellie were having something with some slagroom, which certainly made me decorate my CRT with parts of lunch. She asked me what was wrong, and I explained that "slagroom" sounded like a room that you keep slag in, and she asked me what slag is and I told her that it had two meanings, either some kind of industrial waste, or slang for "prostitute." She said, "Well, we don't eat prostitutes here," and I suddenly realized that the moment was ideally structured for that overused cliche "Don't go there."
I didn't.
Well, not too much, anyway.
All along, I've been giving Mom these lessons in what the words she uses mean in English, and she tells me now that she's too afraid to speak English, for fear of saying something that's either nasty or at least bad enough to get her a face full of someone else's coca cola. By the end of my weekend there, she was about as talkative as Ellie and Rona.
And that was pretty much the rest of the day. I spent a lot of the afternoon and early evening laying on the couch alternately sleeping and being startled awake by rats screeching or Cujo dogs barking, and I do recall that at least once during this time, I was awakened to be greeted by a pair of other Dutch Half-Life players who'd come over to visit Gerwin. Mom made them sit on the couch for a while and talk to me. This is what they said:
" ... ... ... ..."
Which I'm coming to recognize as the universal Dutch greeting
At some point, I got up, uploaded all my pictures to Mom's computer, and she and I got real giddy labelling all the pictures I'd taken. Evidence of that can be found here.
All in all, a successful first day.
On to Day 3 and Fish, Forts and Rebellion.
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