A day in our life at Almelo

 

The canal by the park. 

How does one spend time in a foreign country?  Well, I suppose it depends on the time allotted one.  This isn't a typical vacation.  We have way too much time and not nearly enough flexibility to play tourist all the time.  Seth works five days out of the week, so Boogaloo and I are on our own most of the day.  I'm not the most adventurous of persons, and the Boo isn't the most patient of walkers, so we don't go far from home or hotel at any given time. 



Boogaloo by the canal that runs through downtown Almelo.  The
ducks have the run of the whole town and go wherever they want.

Our average day looks like this:

8 or 9 am breakfast 

A church in downton Almelo.  It's a real church,
not a tourist destination.  I could tell because
the parking lot was still private. 

It takes a while to the Boo motivated down to the breakfast hall, but Seth has to be at work by 9, so we do our best to get down there as soon as comfortably possible.  European hotels serve (surprise!) continental breakfasts but on a much grander scale than most American hotels.  There are at least seven kinds of breads to choose from, and only one of them is sweet. (This seems to be a trend with European food.)  Meat is presented in bacon, sausage, pancetta, sliced ham, and pastrami forms, plus there are eggs, fruit, real and canned yogurt, and all the usual drinks plus buttermilk.  I didn't know that people actually drank buttermilk. 

9 am Preparation

We head back to the hotel room.  Seth has left for work.  Boogaloo plays with her Escher lizards while I read my Bible, pack the backpack, and stow away any personal belongings.



10 am Clear out so as not to inconvenience housekeeping 

Boogaloo chases the ducks in the gardens outside the Huis van
Almelo. 

The maid comes by at about 10 in this hotel.  Intending to be out of her way,  we bop down to the elevator and betake ourselves out the door right about 9:56.  Each day we set ourselves a task.  Monday's task was to find the grocery store.  Wednesday's task was to find out if the Huis van Almelo  is open for public tours.  It isn't, but it sits in the middle of a very nice public park with deer, ducks, and a pair of black swans (yes, I'm not kidding).  Friday's task is to investigate a candy store, a toy store, and a chocolatier.  You get the picture.





The butterfly bush. 

 

After completing our "job," we always end up at a little park by the canal behind our hotel.  This park is unique in that it has a slide and a sandpit, which keeps the Boo happy and makes it a necessary stop each day.  This park also has a beautiful butterfly bush which is full of, you guessed it, butterflies.  Sometimes they'll flutter just low enough that Boo thinks she can catch them.  She chases them halfway across the park. 

Lunch with Seth in the plaza. 

12 pm  Home for lunch

The maid is finished well before noon, so we head back to the hotel.  By this time, the Boo needs a potty break, and as there are no public toilets in Dutch parks, we find this a good time to go home.  Lunch is peanut butter and nutella sandwiches with whatever fruit we have lying around.  Sometimes it's leftovers from the night before.  Today at lunch, the Boo and I ate cold Greek pork and French fries with our fingers out on the patio.  It was an oddly freeing experience. 

Sometimes Seth comes home for lunch rather than buy it from the cafeteria.  Then we go out and enjoy the plaza scene. 
12:3o to 2:30 pm

I put in a movie for the Boo and get some work done.  Sometimes I blog.  Sometimes I pay bills.  Sometimes I grab a nap. We only have two hours of Internet each day, so we have to be sparing, but the Boo stills gets a half an hour of educational website, and I get my fifteen minutes of facebook. 

2:30 pm

A black swan is supposed to be a rare thing.  Huis van Almelo has
a matched pair in its gardens. 

Sometimes Seth is home by 2:30, and then we go and investigate the results of our morning's explorations.  If he isn't home, I leave a note that tells him where we're going, and we take off on an afternoon walk that most likely ends up at the park with the slide again. 

5 pm  Dinnertime

If you're ever in Almelo (it's not a big tourist town, so that's not
very likely), Seth had a perfect steak at this restaurant.

Seth is definitely home by now, and we go out in search of dinner.  The Dutch custom for dinner is to wander out to a cafe area, sit down at a table, and spread the meal over the whole evening.  The cafes are many and varied, serving food from all over the world.  We've had British food, Italian food, and Chinese food since we came.  We meant to stop at a Dutch pancake house one evening, but we couldn't find it, so we settled for a Greek restaurant instead. 

This Greek restaurant was once a textile mill.  You wouldn't
know it from the food. 

7 pm  Home again

We've over reached Boo's patience again, so we head home.  All the stores here close as early as 4 and no later than 6, so there's no touristy stuff to do after dinner.  Almelo isn't much of a tourist town anyway.  Tonight, we understand, there's a professional soccer match pitting the local team against a team from Turkey, but from all I've heard about European futbol, I think we're just as well off staying home.  Seth plays a little computer.  I put the Boo to bed.  Once she's asleep, we slip out to the patio with a glass of wine and watch the color disappear from the clouds and the lights come in the alleyways.  Then we head back inside and fall asleep ourselves. 

Little things I've noticed

A typical street in Almelo, NL.

We are now in Almelo, our second city in as many days.  Seth has a week  here observing how the parts of his machine are built, and we are staying in a nice hotel that is built around an old theatre, appropriately called the Theatre Hotel.  It's not as convenient as our apartment in Eindhoven because it's not an apartment, and it doesn't even provide a refrigerator with the room, just a mini-bar.  Still, it has a pleasant view from the balcony, and like our room in Eindhoven, it has a huge bathroom.  Dutch hotels seem to do themselves well in bathrooms. 

Our hotel, which is built around a working theatre.  The theatre is only active in the winter.

Jet Lag

Jet lag is a beast.  Jet lag is a six-legged dragon in a hula skirt and a fluorescent Elvis jacket dancing the Cha Cha around my hotel room all night defying me to sleep and then slithering along behind me slavering and snapping at my heals all day.  For three nights, I've been watching the clock and wishing that I could just turn my brain off and then dragging myself halfway through the morning until I crash for two hours of sleep.   My sleep medication got doused with soap on the trip over, so that's no good.  One tiny blessing is that Boo is running on the same schedule that I am, so she gets tired when I get tired.  One the other hand, she's four, so she doesn't stay tired as long.  Oh, to be four again or even twenty.  I don't remember any jetlag when I went to Oxford in college.  It's amazing the difference a decade can make. 

Other odd little inconveniences

There are other odd little things that serve to remind me that we're not in Kansas anymore.  Public restrooms in the Netherlands cost 50 cents per visit, so most of the time, when the Boo needs a potty, we end up walking back to the hotel.  On the other hand, there are public urinal stands on the street corners, at least in Eindhoven.  Apparently public urination constitutes a problem in the Netherlands, and that's how they decided to fix it.

One thing I've noticed about the Dutch language is that they like to be blunt.  In the States, we'd call it a waste disposal bag.   In the Netherlands, they just call it "bag for dog poop."

Another interesting quirk is that all the hotel beds are twin beds.  The room might have a queen-sized bed, but it's really two twin beds shoved together.  This isn't twin mattresses on a  queen-sized frame;  this is two twin beds with twin frames, twin-sized sheets, and twin-sized duvets jammed but not fastened together.  We're not sure if this is an economy drive, an ergonomic measure for the people who have to move the mattresses, or just a sneaky Dutch form of birth control.  I find it ironic that I crossed the Atlantic to sleep next to my husband, and now when I roll over to be close to him, I slide into the crack between the beds.

They also don't believe in distinct demarcation.  In the U.S., we have a yellow line going down the middle of the road to let us know that traffic on the other side of that line goes in the opposite direction.  Not so in the Netherlands.  All the lines are white.  A one-way street looks like a two-way street looks like a freeway entrance.  The only way to know the difference is to know which street you're on and which way it goes.  That's a good theory for the natives, but in practice with out-of-towners like us, it amounts to being forced into awkward turn arounds because we didn't realize that a certain otherwise unmarked street was one way only.

There are toys in the market streets.  Granted, this was outside a toy store, but it wasn't the only place we saw this.  It's as if the merchants of Almelo decided to be nice to parents.  Almelo is a very family-friendly city.

Also on the residential streets and market streets, the streets, the bike lanes, and the sidewalks are distinguished only by barriers, like a concrete mound here or a post there.  Otherwise, the brick intermingles freely with the pavement, it's all of one color and pretty much of common use.  The theory seems to be that if you can get to it, then you can ride on it.  The barriers keep out the cars.  The curbs keep off the bikes.  But nothing is marked with paint, and people mingle freely with cyclists while drivers edge their way cautiously through the crowds. 

Boogaloo watches Daddy make his "Dame Blanche."
The deserts over here are decadent, but they're really not that
sweet. 

Another example happened to us last night.  We were going down to the hotel restaurant to order a pizza because we knew Boo would eat it.  At some point on the cobbled patio, we passed from the hotel restaurant to an adjoining restaurant without noticing it.  The chairs were of a similar kind.  The table umbrellas matched.  The only distinction was the color of the card holders on the tables, which we didn't see until after we had ordered drinks.  So we had Spanish tapas instead of pizza, and Boo spent most of her time playing on the play structure. Even the classy restaurants out here have fisher-price type play structures to entertain the younger patrons.  This restaurant had a play structure and a bouncy house.  She didn't come to the table until it was time for desert. 

Other distinctions

A typical family conveyance.  The kids are so at ease on their
parent's bikes that they don't even need seats.  They'll sit on the
rack if nothing else is available.  But most parents are more
consciencious than that. 

The wine is cheap, but the water is expensive.  Everyone rides bikes, but only the police wear helmets.  I saw a woman with two kids on her bike, one in a kid seat on the back and one in a kid seat on the front.  Necessity is truly the mother of invention.  People wear blue jeans as dress pants with dress shoes and jackets, and you can tell that's how they've always seen them.  They are slowly becoming work pants, which is opposite their history in the U.S.  Fashion seems to be very important out here.  Almost everyone I see seems to be in the peak of city chic by U.S. standards.  Of course, our fashion writers might just be entranced with European fashion. 

Speaking of clothes, I had promised myself that I wasn't going to view this trip as an extended shopping trip.  Yes, it would be fun to bring home jackets and dresses and say, "Oh, I got this in Amsterdam," but gosh, stuff is expensive out here.  However, it became apparent on our first day out here that Boogaloo and I would need to make at least one significant wardrobe purchase: rain boots.  Seriously, we went for a walk on Sunday, and my shoes still aren't dry.  We thought we were encountering a little drizzle, but we were encountering a sustained cloud burst that made even the native Nederlanders take cover.  And these people don't stop for rain; they just open up their umbrellas over their bicyles and keep on riding.  It quickly became plain that if we are going to go anywhere or do anything when the weather is less than ideal, we were going to need appropriate footwear.  Of course, they don't have plain old galoshes out here (I've seen kids wearing them, but they're noticeably absent in stores), so Boo has her first pair of real leather boots, and I hope they last her a good, long time.  

First Impressions of the Netherlands

I've always found that the word Europe evoked a very specific image in my mind, an image halfway between Renaissance Rotterdam and World War II.  For all the pictures I've seen of modern twenty-somethings strolling through shopping malls in skinny jeans and sunglasses, I've seen just as many pictures of the men in white clothes with red scarves who carry the cheese wagons.  And though I've seen many pictures of the Dutch countryside, most of them most of them were close ups, most of them were close pictures of an item of specific interest (windmills, anyone?)  I knew that my assumptions were based on limited information.  Still, shaking them off and embibing the reality that is Eindhoven, NL (and various other places) was kind of unsettling. 

A tired girl.  That's what comes from doing roughly two days on four hours of sleep. From the looks that we were getting at the pub, I begin to suspect that Dutch children don't cry in public.   

What was my first impression of the real Netherlands?  It's wet.  I joked to a friend that I've never seen a sunny picture of the Dutch countryside.  Well, I think there's a reason for that.  It's so humid here that it makes Portland feel dry.  As soon as we got off the plane, I felt like my clothes were sticking to me, not in a hot Southern states sort of way but in a cool, clingy sort of way for which I really have no American comparison. 




The view from our front door.  Eindhoven, NL.

It's also flat.  And before you say that everything looks flat to a PNWer, this place makes Iowa look mountainous.  The ground between dikes is so flat, it looks like they graded their cow pastures with a flat rule.  The combination of tall buildings (we're on the sixth floor) and flat territory means that the views really do seem to go for miles, and out in the country, the only thing that breaks the horizon is the orderly rows of trees that line roads and farmsteads at random intervals.  It's like the country in Mississippi and Louisiana around New Orleans, except the green is fresher and the Dutch don't seems to have a kudzu or wysteria equivalent. 

The view from our balcony.  Are you jealous yet?  Oh, right.  Silly question.   

The people are polyethnic, which shouldn't be a surprise.  Any country with erstwhile colonial habits is going to have a polyglot society. Still, most of the people look Dutch, which means that they look vaguely like someone I went to school with at some point or perhaps like somone's parents.  I think that there is something different about the face of the European Dutchman as opposed to the Dutch-descended American: something about the way they hold their eyes and mouths.  Seth says I'm imagining it, transposing what I know into what I see.  Still, he agrees that there is something that makes one feel different in this sea of almost familiar faces.  Perhaps it's demeanor or the set of the shoulders, but I feel like I would know an American in the crowd before I spoke to him. 



Orange ice cream at the Trafalgar Pub.  A highly approprate desert. 

On the other hand, I've already been mistaken for a Dutch person once.  A woman tried to tell me that there was no toilet paper in a bathroom stall, and I had to admit that I don't speak Dutch (though I have been learning some key phrases).  She smiled and repeated herself in English.  Everyone speaks English, and they seem to expect to use their English regularly. Some of the businesses even state their names in English and put the Dutch in subtitles. And inspite of the pervasive old Dutchness of the architecture, American influences will creep in. 



Dining at the Trafalgar Pub, Eindhoven, NL.  Notice the Spiderman in the background.  Boogaloo's juice bottle says 100% juice in English, even though the words "apple juice" are in Dutch. My Coca Cola had no preservatives, and you know, I think I liked it better that way.

Tomorrow, we're going to try to hunt down an open church (about 2% of Dutch people actively attend church;  most churches are now musesums), and then we are invited to a birthday party for Seth's great-uncle in Helmond.  We brought him Marionberry-flavored licorice as a birthday present.  I thought it was a neat blending of here and there.  Then we spend a week in Armelo while Seth works up there.  I'll try to blog as often as possible to keep the impressions genuine. 

Love from Eindhoven. 

Taking issue (on a non-issue)

Mr. G.K. Chesterton probably never imagined that his newspaper essays would be compiled for the enjoyment and edification of future generations.  His writing strikes me as that of a person immanently present in the present and preposterously humble as well.  So he probably didn't anticipate that nearly 80 years after his death, an American would dig up his essays, read them avidly as if searching for truth, and take umbridge with one simple little paragraph. 

In it he said, "England is the only place with weather.  . . . In America, they have only extremes of hot and cold." 
Excuse me?!  Excuse me?!  (I know.  I've posted on this before, but I can't get over it.  I mean, he insults Calvinism on a regular basis, but it's his comments on our weather that drive me to a fury.  Isn't human nature ridiculous?  Or maybe it's just me.)

Mr. Chesterton, you have irritated me.  I am afraid that my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out even with an apology.  There is only one way by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose.  I am going to prove you that you were wrong in what you said. 

 We were driving home from Ted and Alli's wedding in Berthoud, Colorado, (a wedding of which I have no pictures, naturally, because I never seem to be in a place to take pictures of people), and we took a detour through Rocky Mountain National Park just as a mountain thunderstorm was beginning to build. 



Chesterton boasted that the English clouds posed for famous artists whose names I don't remember. Well, the clouds of Colorado are much more egalitarian than that. They'll pose for anyone with a halfway decent digital camera.   I took these while we were driving up to the summit.  The clouds (not to mention the hills) were just begging me to take their pictures. 

 This is a panorama from one of the highest points in the park.  Isn't it breathtaking? 

And lest anyone think that these skyscapes are a fluke of Colorado, I caught these clouds performing in Wyoming . . .

(Spiral cloud dancing.  Isn't it fantastic?)

 and these on the Idaho border.



I half seriously thought about pulling a Chesterton and writing a book in response to the challenge.  Weather in America, a book primarily in pictures.  Can you imagine a book of photos and essays about the signature weather patterns of all the regions of North America?  Really good photos, not just snapshots like mine.  I say we ought to find a way to make it happen.  How do we go about it?