Day 4
Sick Day
(More puzzles, more dikes, more strange dogs)
really
felt like crap. So did Ellie, although we never really compared notes on
who most closely imitated the feeling of crap. This was largely because
she had the good sense to stay in her room. I, on the other hand, dragged
myself out of bed and went downstairs to share my mood with everyone.
Ok, so maybe I was up until some incredibly late hour, working on those stupid nonograms, but I was really in no mood to take responsibility for that just then. My head hurt, my body ached, and I think I was feeling the after effects of the Peking Duck.
See, I love Peking Duck. I eat it whenever I can. Trouble is that it's so rich that it almost always makes me sick. I would never let something like this prevent me from eating something I like. It's just that I was paying for it, and the effect was probably intensified because I had tried some of that sweet & sour duck stuff. Urp.
I was so far off my feed that I couldn't even make it through my morning slice of vlaai. This greatly concerned mom and the kids. Or, so I surmised. At this point in my vacation, the kids had finally started feeling comfortable enough to actually speak in my presence. The only problem was that they were speaking Dutch.
I'm still not sure if their motivation for speaking Dutch was because they were finally starting to feel comfortable around me, or because they felt that if they spoke Dutch, I wouldn't be able to tell that they were begging their mom. Begging her to introduce me to silverware when we ate our sandwiches, reintroduce me to my shoes, and if she was feeling really generous, to introduce me to a ditch on the side of the road.
Well, that's not entirely true. I was following a surprising amount of what was being said. It turns out that Dutch is sort of halfway between German (which I studied in high school), and English (which I nearly failed in high school). So, right there, I was picking out a surprising number of words. Add to that the fact that Dutch, as well as just about any other contemporary language (other than French) has been infested with so many English language words (mostly Americanisms) in the last few years that it's starting to sound like a humorous dialect of English.
The thing about Dutch is that to an English speaker, it's sort of like a simplified German with some really entertaining vowels. They just put them all over inside them words in that cute Dutch fashion. German seems very rigid about its vowels; English seems to smear them all together into a single dipthong, and Dutch just makes them national sport.
Then, there's the Dutch "j." I think it's designed to torture foreigners. They throw them into words - stick them at the precise point in the word when a non-Dutch speaking person would be least prepared to pronounce it. Take "Rijsttafel," for instance. What in perdition is that "j" doing in that word, and now that it's there, what the heck am I supposed to do with it?
By the time I got back to the US, I had a serious cramp in my jaw. Curiously, the last time my jaw got cramped this badly was when I tried to learn ASL (American Sign Language), but that's a whole different story.
But even beyond that, the pronunciation of Dutch completely escapes me. They'll start with some safe looking word with comfortable looking Germanic roots, and then do something that... well, it just doesn't follow for me. I can't think of any examples, because there was such a huge disparity between the pronunciation and spelling that I wasn't able to correlate the two until hours after I'd completely forgotten the entire conversation. But, I can remember Gerwin's name. It's spelled "Gerwin," in case you hadn't noticed. The way Mom pronounced it sounded almost exactly like "Harry," except that it didn't sound anything like "Harry" at all. It was somewhere in between, which I realize covers a heck of a lot of ground, but I think she also kept changing the pronunciation just to trip me up.
Eventually, I got so embarrassed about my total inability to pronounce Gerwin's name, that I resorted to "The tall one with the funny hair" as the best possible substitute. But that's getting even farther off track than I intended.
Anyway, this is how I came to be able to pick bits and pieces out of all that top-secret Dutch stuff they were talking to each other. Stuff (not the dog) like "When is she going to leave again?" and "I can't believe that she's about to throw up in her vlaai!" and "If I have to pose in front of another windmill, I'm going to run away from home."
I spent the morning pretending not to understand, and trying to look like I wanted to die. Well, I was sincere about the second part.
In the meantime, Mom got this really great idea. She figured that since I'd been spending all my free time (that is, the time not already taken up by taking millions of pictures of tourist traps or standing on chairs saying "Eeek!" at her rats) working on those stupid nonogram things, that she'd go get some for me. And of course, since it was a holiday, the stores were open.
I still don't get that.
She and Rona took off for the store, while Gerwin went and worked on his hair, and I tried to lay down on the sofa to sleep off my sick feeling, while all sorts of dogs attacked me. Eventually, Ellie came downstairs to watch this.
Sometime in here, I had the pleasure of watching some Dutch TV, which is largely American TV with Dutch subtitles. They get the finest that the US has to offer, meaning Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, and other shows like The Fresh Prince of Belair, and that Urkel show. I'm starting to understand where the Europeans get their image of Americans.
I do have to say that you just haven't lived until you've tried sitting through an episode or two of Fresh Prince with Dutch subtitles.
Not that there weren't Dutch TV shows. There was one that the kids tried to watch that was a sort of reality based TV show, meaning that it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any reality that any of us might know. This show was even more insipid than "Survivor," which apparently never caught on in Holland because it was too highbrow or something.
I've really got to say that if the Dutch have any faults at all, it's that their television is absolutely execrable. Unfortunately, their way of maximizing execrability involves importing as much American TV as possible, but when they need that extra kick, they come up with shows like the one I was watching.
It was like listening to jokes being told in Yiddish without having any grasp of the Yiddish language. They tried to translate for me, but for some reason, the inanity of the program didn't properly translate to English (which, when you think about it, is really quite surprising), but from what I could make out, it involved a group of women being "shipwrecked" on some island resort where they're forced to wear bikinis and run around on the beach a lot so they can get a date with a stranger or something.
I'm sure you can see what I mean about Dutch TV. The only thing in the world that can make a viewer really miss Richard Hatch.
By the time Mom came back with bags overflowing with nonogram books, I was starting to feel human. Actually, I was starting to feel like a big salt- lick for the dogs, but given the choice between than and pretending to feel ok, I decided to pretend to feel ok.
After the nonogram distribution, we sat down to those wonderful european hard rolls and luncheon meats, and had the usual things-that-aren't-sandwich sandwiches. I still miss those rolls.
The thing was that after we finished lunch, Mom still felt obliged to fill the rest of my day with vacationy touristy things. Maybe not my first choice, but it seemed somehow preferable to sitting around looking uncomfortably at four people who were secretly wishing I'd just go home.
So, we hopped back into the van, this time without Ellie, and we headed off for the great Dutch Wilderness. Sort of. I mean, as close to wilderness they could come up with on such short notice.
This mostly meant heading off to the east, which would have normally presented something of a problem if the Dutch hadn't decided a while back to wall off the ocean. So, we found ourselves taking a detour through the countryside, seeing more cute Dutch buildings, cute windmills and cute floating bridges, until we finally ended up on this cute dike that seemed like it was about 30 miles long. It connects the east part of Holland with the west part of Holland and fences in this big hunk of ocean or inlet that used to be called the Zuiderzee, but is now just some kind of lake.
On the way there, Mom pointed at a hill and said "Look at that hill over there." This might not sound terribly exciting to you, but I've got to tell you that the words "Look at that hill" don't often enter the Dutch vocabulary. Up to this point, I'd seen sand dunes and dikes, tall buildings and windmills, but no hills. Hell, even most of the bridges were below sea level.
But, there I was, looking at an actual hill, in Noord Holland no less. High ground to scamper up when the Big One comes. Seemed like a nice secure little thing to have. Not that I had anything meaningful to say about it at the time. I think I grunted or something.
I think the Dutch enjoy making American tourists squirm. I mean, I'd been nervous about the below sea level thing, I'd been nervous about the rats, and I'd been nervous about how people can't really be that polite all the time. Still, I hadn't made any nervous noises yet that day, so I think Mom felt the need to wind me up again, just to make sure I was still unsettled.
"That used to be Wieringen Island."
Great. I was looking up at what used to be an island, and I was pretty sure that there hadn't been any great geological upheaval to explain it. Once again, we were tooling around at oyster depth, and Mom just couldn't resist the urge to remind me. It figures that one of the highest points in Holland used to be an island that used to be in the middle of the ocean.
I busied myself with trying to figure out where the water line on the side of the hill used to be.
This eventually led us to the Afsluitdijk. This was sort of like our TVA project, except instead of damming rivers to make hydropower, the Dutch dam oceans to make more sea bed to build houses on. This was one long frigging dike with a four lane highway on top of it. It figures that one of the highest speed limit pieces of road in Holland is in the middle of the ocean.
Like I said: great sense of humor.
We didn't go all the way across it. We stopped at some tourist tower roughly 1/3 of the way up the road. It was an observation tower from which you can see a lot of water to the north, a lot of water to the south and one ex-island to the west. It figures that another one of the highest points in Holland also happens to be in the middle of the ocean.
Really great sense of humor.
But, I climbed up to the top of the tower to take some really swell pictures of a really long dike. I descended the stairs to buy some real touristy crap in the tourist shop. Mostly, I walked around, made appreciative sounding noises, saying things like "Yep, this is one really big dike."
All of which was completely drowned out by the 100 MPH wind that seems to accompany every dike in Holland, but that's beside the point.
We got back into the van and drove a few more miles up the dike before finding a place to turn around. No, we didn't drive the full length of the dike; there's only so much excitement that one carload of Dutch people can take in one short day.
We drove back to Noord Holland, with Mom making sure I got a lot of pictures of the sluice gates at the west end of the dike. Yep, they were sluice gates.
This was followed by a leisurely drive around more ferries, more floating bridges, and more cute buildings. I gotta say that I don't think I'm ever going to suffer the emptiness that comes of not having enough pictures of floating bridges, ever again.
We eventually ended up at a wilderness area that consisted of a bunch of sand dunes with a lake or reservoir on top. Yes, that's right, the lake was on top of the dunes, no doubt to keep the water at the same level as the ocean. But, it just figures that another one of the highest points in Holland is a lake.
Is anyone else starting to notice a pattern here?
We went back to Mom's house, where she cooked us some Zuurkool, which may not have a real scary name, but can be kind of scary in content: mashed potatoes with sauerkraut, applesauce and sausage. Really. Of course, having potatoes in it meant I yummed it right up.
There wasn't really much to do for the rest of the evening. Mom and I went over all the pictures I'd taken, with Mom telling me all the odd places to put the "j"s in their names. At some point, Mom's ex- came over to see the crazy American who doesn't wear shoes and who touches her sandwiches.
I demonstrated standing on top of the chair and screaming "eek!" at the rats for him. He seemed to think that was very American of me.
Which was pretty much the end of the fun part of my vacation. There was getting that last night's sleep before leaving, the packing, and the excruciatingly painful trip back to the US, but as far as the fun parts went (or at least the parts that I'm supposed to say were fun), this was it.
But not too late for that one last piece of vlaai.
Actually, I never finished this trip report, but about all we have after this was spending a day getting home, and who the heck wants to read me griping about planes some more?
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