Flipped

I've been a vegetarian ever since I moved out after college. My parents did not approve, but once I was cooking and living on my own, there was precious little they could do to keep me from not-buying meat products. I've never enjoyed eating meat--it was really just that simple--and once I was free not to do so, not eating meat seemed as natural as breathing. That being said, I did and still do include fish in my diet--mostly for the sake of other people who are cooking for me (those of you who are appalled at Dutch cooking should just imagine it being done with tofu).

It was a mild craving at first, one that could be sated with a bit of peanut butter or an egg or a quesadilla (technically half a quesadilla). Indeed, a look back at the weeks have shown a steady progression in my food-of-the-moment, starting with peanut butter and evolving into last week's escapade involving lots of cheese. (This, in and of itself, is rather remarkable, since I'm not ordinarily a fan of cheese.) But starting this weekend, not even cheese, with its high protein and fat content, could satisfy that little voice in my head (or stomach). No, that little voice was after blood.

I'd been ignoring the voice for the better part of a week: habit was stronger, and my habits were peanut butter sandwiches and not buying doner kebabs with shoarma (or whatever it is you can order at those places). But when you wake up from a nap with the insatiable urge to find a cow and kill it and rip the flesh from its lowing skeleton...yeah, that's a little harder to ignore.

After a day of being grumpy and cranky as all hell, I finally caved. No, I didn't kill a cow. I bought a chicken salad. And I ate it. And I was happy. And surprisingly--I was full. For someone who's usually managed to be in control of her appetites, it's a bit disconcerting for my appetites to be in control of me.

Southpaw hee-haw

I'm going to take a moment to squee about my latest acquisition: a left-handed fountain pen.

I wrote about my travails with the writing materials in this country before. Well, it just so happens that in September, I was in the V&D, picking up a few little office things, when I came upon their fountain pen display. Now, it must be said: as a fountain pen supplier, the V&D is hardly ideal. For true lovers of nib and ink, nothing less than a dedicated pen shop will do. For someone who's only ever dreamed of having that delicate, spidery handwriting that seems to come naturally to those who use fountain pens, though, it's a good place to start.

So with my birthday present (€20 in cash--I've never received cash in a card before, and spent a few weeks savoring the sensation), I bought a left-handed fountain pen. I also bought a few refill cartridges, and used one to test the normal fountain pen (behind) that we'd had lying around. And I have to say--writing with a fountain pen is a treat. I never understood why writers refer to the "flow" of ideas, but after discovering that it is possible to write something without mashing the point in the paper, it was amazing how smoothly and quickly I could write. Modern fountain pens, see, don't end in a real point (at least, the cheap ones at the V&D don't). The nib tip is rounded, in most cases, in the back, well-hidden from view. And this enables the pen to write smoothly, and a slight change in the placement of the slit means that I can push the pen along. Surprisingly enough the same was true of the normal fountain pen as well, once I found the correct angle. Writing with a fountain pen is, I would imagine, akin to driving a Ferrari: your own physical skills (handling the car, holding the pen) must be up to the task, but once it is, it's pure love.

As a bonus: the ink dries REALLY quickly--it didn't smear at all for the test page in my journal, which has ballpoint and gel-ink smears all over the place. I think this was the first time in my life when the ink dried in time, all the time.

I think I'm in love.

The Language of Science

My daily exposure to geek-speak is pretty high: if geek-speak were the Black Death, I'd be near one of the major epicenters. I.e., Milan, rather than Venice--pretty extensive damage, but survival is possible, and on a good day, likely. Monday and Tuesday of this week, though, the Radboud University of Nijmegen held a symposium, which I was more or less required to attend--I didn't even know about it until the last moment, when my boss asked me, "So, are you excited for the meeting on Monday?" Fortunately there's only one right way to answer that. I spent two whole days listening to talks given by the giants of the field, covering topics such as neonatal diabetes, mechanosensory receptors, the latest in crystal structure developments, etc. In short, I entered Venice, and the bodies were piled high.

The truly frightening thing, now that I think about it, is that for the most part, I wasn't dreadfully lost, despite my ignorance in the field. In the sea of graphs and fluorescent images, I somehow managed to find an intellectual footing for all of the talks. There were some truly fantastic speakers amongst the bunch, not the least of whom was the Nobel-Prize-winner Erwin Neher.

My Dutch courses take place on Tuesday night, so immediately after the very last talk on the second day, I hightailed it out of the symposium to the other side of the campus, where my inburgeringscursus takes place. Where I was confronted with my class--and the class clown, who spends the evenings asking the strangest questions and pretending not to understand the most basic concepts (at least, I hope he's pretending). Maybe I was especially peevish, since I normally walk something like 8 miles a day (so says the [Company that sponsored the symposium] pedometer that I picked up), and I'd just spent two days stuck in a chair. Or maybe my sense of humor was taking a vacation to Hawaii.

Aside: those of you who thought high school was over when you turn 18? Haven't been to an inburgeringscursus. High school is never over.

It wasn't until I got home later that night when I finally fathomed the reason for my irritation: I'd been stuck in "Science", when ordinarily, by the time I make it to my class in the evening, I'm so tired that I'm in "English". I've only been stuck in "Dutch" a few times, but it does happen, sometimes. Apparently, for me, Science is a language. It certainly requires a LOT of abstract thinking to make any sense of anything you read in a scientific journal these days, just as it requires a lot of...well, it's not concrete thinking, exactly. For me, putting things into Dutch (and indeed, even Spanish) has less to do with fixating on the grammar than it does with structuring the sentence correctly.

Science and Dutch--they're really just a state of mind.

Poof!

Poof: March is almost over, and so is my month of not taking myself or anything else too seriously. I'm pretty happy with what I've managed to get done--renewing my baking skills, some financial planning-ahead, flexing the writing muscles, rediscovering how to draw. Time certainly flew by, and now it's time once again to buckle down and get sh*t done.

Poof: 'Tis the season, sadly, for posters of missing cats. I love cats (obviously) and while I completely sympathize with someone who's lost theirs, I also tend to think that they got what's coming. For Chrissakes, you let a small, furry, oft-dark-colored animal run around next to a busy street; it gets into other people's gardens--people who have no compunction about using pesticides and herbicides and God-only-knows what to get beautiful plants; where people regularly walk their dogs without a leash...seriously, it'd be more of a miracle if they didn't disappear.

Poof: An hour of my day has vanished. Usually I'm pretty aware of the start of Daylight Savings, but this year it caught me by surprise. Fortunately my boyfriend had the wherewithal to adjust our alarm clock, but it's been a little discombobulating all day.

Poof: Changes to the area around Millingerward mean that there were no signs of the released beavers this time around. Was I just not looking hard enough? Or have they gone, migrating to less industrialized places along the Waal? Hard to say; I'm planning to do another epic ride (+20 km) in a couple weeks to find out for sure, and maybe shoot some snails in the bargain. I am definitely looking forward to the start of baby season, when the konikpaarden start foaling. It's amazing to watch a baby basically fall out of its mother and then get up 15 minutes later--from a safe distance, of course. The wild horses of the Ooijpolder aren't really all that wild--you can walk through a herd and they can get quite close while snuffling for foliage (unlike most horses, they eat leaves as well as grass)--but going near a momma and her baby is just asking for trouble.

Poof: While I've always liked tea, these past few weeks I've become convinced that nothing magicks away problems like a nice hot mug of good, loose-leaf tea. We have two tins of it from a gift basket that I'd constructed by never managed to give, and recently I've started making some every day. I may not believe in God, but heaven is a cup of good tea.

Culture Shock redux

I'd hazard a guess that most people get over their culture shock within, well, a time period shorter than four years. You either do, or you don't, and if you don't, then you don't stay here for very long. But every now and then, something comes along that shocks you back into your "I just got off the plane" state.

We're in the market for a fietskar, the better to haul Noodle to the vet with. The Kitty Tower of Terror was patently unsafe and precarious--not to mention that it meant walking to the vet's, and while it's not a too-bad walk, it gets a lot worse when you're hauling three yowling kitties along for the ride. Especially when a bus comes careening down the road.

It's not just cats, though. We're stuck, for instance, paying for kitty litter six liters (one box) at a time, in a large part because the sacks of litter are simply too precarious to move by bike. We'd also like to start up again with the plants in the apartment--mostly garden herbs, because they're not only delicious and smell good, but also because the cats can eat them with impunity. And that takes potting soil, and lots of it.

There were two aspects of the hunt for a fietskar that made me feel like a newbie. The first is that they are surprisingly difficult to find. I visited three bike shops in town before I was able to extract directions to a little store called "Hans Janssens" which carried them. The second is, when I got there and saw the prices, HO-LY F*CK but the buggers are expensive. I'm used to seeing four-digit bike prices, but €300 for a box with wheels? Makes me think I might just make my own. Or, at the very least, demand installation.

Threads

If you were actively looking for me on the Veolia line today, you were probably disappointed. I can explain, though:

As the Mini-Boss at my workplace, I deal with a lot of sales people. They're a pretty friendly lot, and always happy to help out with some problem or other. Of course, the catch is they want you to buy your stuff from them, so it's all an interesting charade--you want to get the best price, and they want to sell you stuff, so everybody's excruciatingly nice to each other. A few months ago I met a guy who worked for Another Biotech Place, who'd helped me get in contact with the people who could help me troubleshoot one of our experiments (in science, it really is all about who you know).

So I was on my way out when I ran into the ABP guy--we had a small chat as I was waiting for the elevator, me and my HEMA bag full of shoes, and I revealed that I was on my way to Nijmegen. He offered me a ride, as Nijmegen was on his way, and I arrived at my apartment a full hour earlier. This is in part because he was speeding like a maniac down every stretch of open road he got, but largely because there's no 10-minute pause in places like middle-of-nowhere Boxmeer. We had an interesting conversation: he offered to help me buy a €100-car (no joke, no missing 0). I thought he was kidding, but he was so serious that he only desisted when I told him I didn't have a license.

At the end of the drive, I started to feel as if I'd made another friend. Part of this may have been that he's a very good sales person and being friendly is just who he is. But it's hard to have a conversation for ninety minutes if there isn't some kind of connection. It's strange, if you think about it, how little it takes to actually know someone. I'd been a virtual friend with a another guy in Boston for a few years before we finally got to meet up--and when we did, it felt more or less exactly like reading his posts. I keep up with most of my friends digitally, but even if I don't hear from them for a long time it's easy to pick up where we left off.

What is it that makes total strangers of long-wedded couples, and perfect soulmates of the just-introduced? What makes some relations shrivel when a week goes by without contact, while others can stand years of neglect? Humans may have just lost to computers when it comes to connecting the facts, but I very much doubt that computers can make the sorts of connections that just don't make sense.

How to move when you don't have a car

These past 5 or six weeks, if you take the Veolia line between Roermond and Nijmegen, you might have seen a short Asian woman carrying a purple Case Logic netbook case and one huge brown sack, filled to the brim. Or suitcase. Or (this week) an enormous HEMA bag, filled with shoes.

That's me, moving.

Carrying my life back to Nijmegen one piece at a time really hammers home how much of our lives get invested in stuff, even if we try not to. I've been really careful last year, too, with respect to buying things in Maastricht--always, at the back of my mind, is, "How are you going to get that to Nijmegen?" But somehow, I've still ended up with more things than I could ever hope to cart back, even if space weren't an issue.

One of the things I've learned is that kringloopwinkels, or secondhand shops, appear to be required to take away your furniture. They won't pay you (and I suspect that they'll charge you), but at least it gets removed. I've made arrangements with a nearby shop to do this, and the experience, while pleasant enough, just drove home the point that learning Dutch is a really good idea, even if you live in Limburg. My new word of the day is "ophalen", which means "to collect", but the shopkeeper was using it to denote the appointment at which the collection would be done. Up until that point, I was feeling pretty fly, too :-/

It takes a lot of thinking and planning to do a move like this--one package per week. You have to consider what you can live without for the next few weeks, what you will leave behind, what you will just get rid of. Surprisingly, while I have absolutely no attachment to my reading chair, I find myself extremely reluctant to contemplate leaving my tea mug behind. The sentiments of the human heart are strange, indeed.

My Big Splash

About two weeks ago I made up my mind to quit dithering around already and start doing what I want to be doing for a living (hence the intermittent angst). This has led me to two interesting observations about myself: 1) I either hyperfocus or have ADHD the likes of which make an eight-year-old seem calm and sedate, and 2) working around the clock really sucks, but only because the clock is too small. If I could make the day longer by another four hours...oh, who am I kidding? I'd want another four.

I haven't been able to say in ages.

Strangely enough, it's the entrepreneurial side of hack-work (as I like to think of all the writing that I do in the interest of generating money) that I find fascinating, chasing leads, writing proposals, tweaking the formula to figure out just exactly what works. And yes, I also think of this blog as work--keeping in good form--constantly generating content--and it kicks my ass on a regular basis.

First Tongues

After almost a year of Dutch classes, I can: hold a telephone conversation in Dutch (not very well, but the other person usually understands what I want to say), read the KNMI website, and socialize with my Dutch teacher. Last week there was a sort of borrel for international staff members at my work place (not a real borrel, because it ended way too late and had seating—not a lot, but there were chairs there), and one of the little “mixing games” they had was where they gave you a lanyard with a picture, and you had to find the other 4 people with the same picture. Turned out my Dutch teacher and I were two of a kind.

So we had a brief conversation—we both knew other people there, so it really was just small talk as we parted ways to join our friends—but what surprised me was how surprised I was that she spoke English when she greeted her other students. I mean, I know she speaks English—most Dutch people do—but up until that night 99% of my interactions with her have been in Dutch. She conducted her class almost entirely in Dutch, and when we answered and socialized with each other in the class, it was also in Dutch. As a matter of fact, when I bump into another fellow student, I also speak to him in Dutch (mostly). So to hear her speak English was something like a paradigm shift—it rewrote my world in a very small way. I'd never really considered how much our first impressions of a person can stick with you; I'd never realized before how much the first language can determine the sort of impression that gets made.

I had a little taste of the weirdness last weekend, when we joined our friends for a small celebratory dinner. By now, my main difficulty in speaking Dutch is figuring out the vocabulary to express super-complicated ideas (followed closely by “is ______ a regular or irregular verb?”), but they were good sports about my botched pronunciations and didn't interrupt. I imagine it was a little weirder for them, that I could join in, than it was for me.

I'm now writing a tour of Maastricht for Rama and most of the pages that I'm gleaning my information from are in Dutch. And it's quite an interesting sensation, not to care whether a page is written in Dutch or English.

"There's Bread and Cheese Upon the Shelf"

During the winter, I need to avoid eating certain foods due to the interaction with another drug that I take to ward off the winter blues. As you might have guessed, one of these foods is cheese. And perversely enough, the Dutch aren't called "cheese eaters" for nothing: there is a lot of cheese. The inescapability of cheese was driven home earlier this week: I'm a vegetarian as well, which the catering staff usually accommodates with...cheese sandwiches.

Living with a dietary restriction (vegetarian) is difficult enough. I make exceptions for fish dishes at restaurants, because Dutch restaurants in general suck puppies at making decent vegetarian food (minus poffertjes, but even their savory pannenkoeken typically involve something meaty). Many restaurants don't even have a non-meat option, or else they consider their fish dish to be it. But even when I go to friends' houses, it's always a bit of a struggle for them to figure out just what do I eat. "You don't eat...any meat?" The relief when I tell them I will eat fish is palpable.

Overall, my experience as a vegetarian here has been a neutral-to-negative one: it's hard to find good vegetarian food unless I'm the one who makes it, and my boyfriend is most emphatically a more carnivorous personality, so if I cook something it needs to accommodate his tastebuds as well. The lone exception is ratatouille, which we both love, fortunately, but unfortunately it's not in season any more.

Durig the winter, though, the addition of cheese to the list of things I must not eat (chocolate is on that list, too, but I've decided that a tiny bit of chocolate every now and then is okay--cheese is the biggie) makes things incredibly difficult. I sometimes find myself with half a cheese sandwich, not realizing I'd started. I'd venture that it's harder to escape cheese than it is to be a vegetarian.

Ironically, the Dutch have one of the louder animal rights' groups in Europe. They gather outside the animal facility where I work, for regularly-scheduled protests, and they hand out pamphlets in the city decrying research on cute little puppies and kittens (though apparently doing bad stuff to rats and mice are perfectly okay). There's even a political party for animal rights--at least, that's the name of the party, so I assume they are fighting for Shadow's right to pee in a box. The Dutch animal welfare laws regarding animal research are some of the strictest in the world. In other words, politically, you wouldn't think that I'd have such a hard time of being a vegetarian here.

Escaping cheese...I'll keep dreaming. Maybe the Matrix will yield one day.

Good Eats

Like most women, I fret about my appearance. It's a good thing I work at a job where showing up in jeans and a t-shirt is normal and showing up in a button-down shirt counts as getting "dressed up". Otherwise I'd never leave the house.

Oddly, though, since moving here, I've become a helluva lot less neurotic about my appearance. I attribute this to two things: a) Vogue costs too damn much to be anything more than a yearly eye-candy treat (the September issue, of course), and b) the Dutch are a lot less neurotic about being skinny. Some people might say, "Of course they're not as neurotic, because they're all skinny!" but, in fact, they're not. They are probably more healthy than their American counterparts, but they're not all waifs, either.

Which is not to say that women's mags don't abound with diet tips and pictures of pretty ladies. They do. But the pretty women aren't airbrushed pixie sticks, the way they are in the US. I mean, gods above, they have wrinkles, and the Dutch sense of style is many things, but above all not French. Even models on the show "Benelux Top Model" (Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg--cool abbreviation) have more to recommend them than their skinniness. Not much, admittedly, but they're not the wax-faced puppets you see in the States, either.

The book Wasted, besides giving a horrifying account of anorexia and bulimia, also posits a few interesting reasons why food and women are such antithetical ideas in the US, the most damning of them being that women need to be in such total control over themselves that they can't be human--i.e., can't eat. I wouldn't go quite so far, but it is interesting to note that the phenomenom of diets and "you are what you eat" is distinctly American, in the sense that dietary fads in the past two centuries have had an unusually strong presence in the United States. For instance, breakfast cereals--the ultimate anti-masturbatory food, according to Dr. Kellog. The writer Tocqueville attributed the need to improve oneself through food as the only outlet for improvement in an otherwise functionally egalitarian society. Maybe he was onto something--keep in mind he wrote this in the 1800s, and this is certainly the case today. Food in the US is intrinsically linked to moral standards, rather than being merely something to enjoy. If I were feeling more intellectual I might try to make the case that the Dutch, as a whole, are less neurotic in general than Americans, as a whole, but Geert Wilders getting elected last month kind of throws that thesis for a loop.

So you'll just have to take my word for it, that Dutch society as a whole is a lot less neurotic than the American people, as a whole. Part of it is that the Dutch have learned that when you cram 16 million people into a country the size of Maine, the only way to avoid all-out war is to talk reasonably with each other--you can't just pack your bags and ship out to the other side of the country. This has important ramifications for one's sanity. I think, if I were still living in the US, I'd still be obssessively counting calories and thinking about fiber. I've let most of that go. Part of it is that it's so difficult to count calories, Most of it is that I've stopped caring, because nobody else seems to.

BTW: No, that is not our baby. Much as though some people *ahem Mom ahem* would love to know that I am incubating another little humanoid, I'm afraid that that will have to wait.

Pancakes

I'm cheating a bit with the photo, which was taken a couple years ago on the Ooijpolder. It's an oldie but a goodie, snapped through my old Fujifilm in the bitterest cold of the middle of December, on my way to freezing my ass off while counting geese.

BTW: if anybody wants to do a bird tour of the Ooijpolder, do let me know. I'm not an expert on "little brown birds that go 'twit'", as my boyfriend puts it, but in the winter the pintails, widgeons, teals, and gadwalls all descend upon the uitwater and it's an incredible sight.

Anyway: the point is that the photo isn't truly reflective of where I was this weekend, which was Friesland. More specifically, somewhere outside Groningen, where the signs are bilingual. We were visitng Jasper and Corrine, an ecologist (who is an expert on little brown birds that go "twit") and a literary event organizer, which is my way of saying "I have no idea what her title actually is but what she does is REALLY COOL". We had fun, stayed up half the night discussing the value of human life--Jasper exemplifies the infamous "Dutch Directness", you'd never have a conversation this heated or this philosophical after dinner at the Cleavers-- in a mixture of English and terrible Dutch, from my part. The next morning Jasper and I drove out to the Puddles, two little lakes and ponds, in hopes of seeing something special. Like a smew. I have seen this bird before, only once....

Anyway-anyway: The point of all that was to say that after living in Nijmegen and Maastricht for a year or three, I'd kind of forgotten how flat the rest of the country is. Which is not to suggest that the hills in the south of Nijmegen are actually all that hilly, but it's only in the complete absence of topography that you realize just how well-endowed the east and the south are. Even though I poke fun at the Dutch people who are so excited about climbing St. Pietersberg (300m, the highest point in the ENTIRE COUNTRY is literally in my backyard), I have to confess that I do understand: the monotony of the rest of the country could bore you to death, if it weren't so pretty.

Because that's the other thing most tourists will never really understand: there is a whole different world outside Amsterdam and the Randstad. And it's a nice world, a beautiful one, one full of animals and fungi and trees and, if you're lucky, hills. It may not have many windmills and the only tulips you'll see are sold in cut bunches at the florists--you'll never see a wooden shoe and people will offer you beer instead of weak tea and a whole plate of cookies. The drivers are polite and people might actually pick up after their dogs. There's a Netherlands that's not really the Netherlands, as most non-Dutch think of it, and they might never know....

For What Ails Ye

I'm usually not thrilled about living in the Netherlands. I mean, I have a job which is okay, and I have things to blog about, which is fun, but it's not like I go skydiving every weekend or fight pirates or discover a new element every weekend. In terms of excitement, on a scale of 1 to 10, life here averages out at a modest 6, and it's only that high because the NS somehow manages to screw up even the most simplest schedules from time to time (and somehow only ever when you're in a rush) and royally f*cks you over.

But every now and then I am reminded of why I love this country: the fact that you literally cross a street and go from an urban to a rural environment, the tree-hugging ethos of the country as a whole, and health insurance. Especially health insurance:

I was reminded of this in a recent discussion with online friends from the US. The conversation was ostensibly about money, but largely had to do with health care expenditures. All I can say is: OH MY GOD am I glad I don't have to deal with any of that. From my experience, the health insurance policies in the Netherlands are a) affordable, b) comprehensive, c) easily understood, and d) rarely (if ever--I don't think it's even legal) rescinded. It's a far cry from health insurance in the US, which is insanely priced, cover everything except what you actually need, and immersed in medical-ese the likes of which my boyfriend, who is a doctor, hasn't got the slightest clue of.

But most of all, it's simple: I just filled in an easy-to-understand form, and received my insurance card in the mail a few weeks later. When I went to the dentist, I just presented my card, and the receptionist presented me with a bill when I was finished (I have a low premium, but a middling deductible--for dentist visits it's €120, and my bill was about half that). When I need to get my allergy medication refilled, I present my prescription and insurance card at any apotheek, and get pills--with my first insurance company I didn't have to pay at all, but with my current company I get charged all of €10 for my allergy meds (it lasts me about 6 months). I actually haven't had much experience with Dutch doctors--I usually just tell my boyfriend what I need, and he writes me a script.

Compared to some crazy-ass insane policies in the US--where health insurance for a family of 4 can run to $7000/month, and prescription drugs--well, suffice it to say that they're not cheap. Despite the popular image of the spendy-trendy American, the real reason why most Americans who declare bankruptcy are forced to do so are...you guessed it, medical bills. And then you have things like Health Savings Accounts--where you put, say, $80 in an account, so that when you visit a doctor and your co-pay is $60, then that $60 comes out of the account, and you can use the remaining $20 for your medication. ON TOP OF your health insurance. Which of course never covers dental, or vision (though here, glasses are pretty cheap--mine were €85, complete with thin, non-reflective lenses, frame, and exam). And then there's always the question about what does your insurer cover, and what doesn't it, and can you afford this test, etc...not a one of which comes up here.

This is not to suggest that all is well in the state of the Netherlands: rising health care costs are a major headache for everybody, and while doctors in the Netherlands do tend to be more prudent about over-testing and big pharma is forbidden to make TV commercials advertising the latest drugs, the cost of care is increasing dramatically. I don't quite know how the Dutch are going to solve this issue, but rest assured--the people who came up with the Dutch auction undoubtedly have some other accounting tricks up their sleeve.

Schooled!

Preuvenement this year coincided quite nicely with the start of the academic year, a yearly event denoted in Maastricht by the sudden appearance of student parties everywhere, and the population doubling, and possibly tripling in some neighborhoods. At least it seems that way: lines at the Albert Heijn are at least twice as long now, but they have the best bread, so I grit my teeth and bear it.

As such, you might expect back-to-school sales to be everywhere. Nope. There are sales here and there, but none of the back-to-school extravaganza that seems to sweep the US prior to Labor Day (another vacation that I'd forgotten). This is not to say that kids don't get new pencils and paper and notebooks, just not on the scale that they seem to "need" that stuff in the US. In fact, the only clear delineation of this time of year is the appearance of academic agendas in bookstores. These aren't any different from regular agendas for boring working people like me. They just start in September rather than January. A few of them might have places for grades, and possibly classes, but that's it.

School is a casual matter here, where the focus seems to be less about learning stuff (at least, until you're 10 or so and have to start worrying about the placement exams) and more about learning to tap into the Dutch hive mind and the art of cooperative living. Bookbags, therefore, are shockingly skimpy, as for the most part, they don't really have to carry much of anything.

I mention this because when I was in medical school, I bought one of those L.L. Bean "unconditionally guaranteed" backpacks. It was about $40, near as I can remember. But L.L. Bean's products, as you might know, kick ass because they are about as indestructable as Superman. My first L.L. Bean packpack was just starting to show a little wear-and-tear after 5 years of use--it then passed on to my sister, who used it throughout high school and possibly still uses it in college.

I brought it with me when I moved to the Netherlands, because traveling up and down the East Coast had taught me that there are several things that are indispensable when traveling. Amongst them, a good book, and a small pillow. And here it languished for a little while before it got pressed back into service for my daily commute to and from Leiden. It is not at all unusual to see "real adults" carrying their stuff in a backpack instead of a briefcase. As a matter of fact, I'd venture to guess that more adults use backpacks than students, and this, combined with the literally light class loads, means that there is no demand for heavy-duty-missile-stopping backpacks of the kind that were prevalent in my admittedly-very-geeky high school and college.

Which can be a problem if you're the enemy of all backpacks, as my boyfriend seems to be. He merely has to look at a backpack and the seams unravel and the zippers get stuck. To say that he has the touch of death for backpacks is like saying that molten lava is a bit warm. I don't think any of his previous backpacks have survived the six-month mark. So it was with serious misgivings and not a little concern that I finally passed on my L.L. Bean pack to him.

After one year, I can surmise one of two things: either the L.L. Bean pack is truly indestructable, or Adobe's clone-stamp tool works a bit too well. It's a bit eerie, actually, to know that the backpack is not only still around, but that none of the zippers have gotten stuck, the seams are still together, and that it looks pretty much the same as it did when I bought it.

*wink*

I'm a pretty girl. No knockout, and certainly not a supermodel, but I get my fair share of catcalls and flirtatious men trying to (pathetically) hit on me from time to time. Thankfully Dutch men are better-contained than their American counterparts and do not, as a general rule, go tweeting on the streets.

However, they do wink.

But I've finally figured out that it's part of the Dutch DNA (or something like that), an inherited social behavior meme probably connived back in the 1600s when the Calvinists took over and made the potato the national vegetable: now that catcalls weren't allowed, men had to come up with a more subtle way to let women know what they really thought of them, although one must wonder how anybody within line of sight could miss such a huge, exaggerated stage wink. The Dutch don't exactly do subtle.

It took me a while to figure this out because my boyfriend swore that he never winked at women, which I believed because he's my boyfriend and because he has some pretty attractive female friends, and his eyes always close simultaneously. But earlier this week, I met up with Amanda and Dan and she corrected me--my boyfriend did, in fact, wink at her! As if that weren't proof enough, we had also recently attended a funeral, where winking was rampant, and even the crudest Low-Countryman knows one simply does not hit up chicks in black.

Verdict on the wink: mostly harmless, probably unconscious. If you want to have a little fun, mention it to a winker and watch him go crazy :-)

Gardening

The Dutch love gardens. But given that this is December and plants are hard to keep alive, they'll settle for Christmas trees instead: Christmas tree farmers are everywhere these days, selling their conifers at rock-bottom prices. Literally--we bought ours for €15, and it's at least twice as big as the one we got last year.

Gardening stores such as Intratuin are quick to take advantage of this to bulk up wilting sales in the winter months--the store near our apartment has cleared out all of the deck furniture that clogged the area between the pet section and indoor plants, filling the shelves with fragile glass balls and mountains of tinsel and holly and lights and ornaments and ribbons and angels and stars and....

Suffice it to say that "overkill" is an understatement. Even though it's just one section of the store, the sheer pandemonium of color and lights and glitter are enough to make you never want to see Christmas again. But we braved the ravaging hordes to find the ornaments that we wanted: our tree has traditionally--as of last year--been decorated according to a red-and-gold theme, so this year we continued to enlarge upon it, since our tree was bigger. In addition to the balls, we bought some branches, and a string of pearls.

It adds up. Decorating a tree to look like a store model is an expensive endeavor, and don't let anybody tell you otherwise--so many balls, so much tinsel, and all of it has to be bought...you might think it strange, then, that so many people are so fond of decorating their trees.

But I think the price of a new set of glass balls is but a small price to pay for starting our own little tradition. And at this time of year, that's something special.