Young and Euro

My twentieth birthday is in a little more than a month. I am unreasonably excited, because, let's face it, twenty is one of those less-exciting birthdays between eighteen and twenty-one. Plus, all of my co-workers and friends this summer are in their mid-twenties (at least) so twenty doesn't seem like such an accomplishment anymore.

One of the side effects of being so young is that I get all sorts of advice about life-experiences I've never had. It's enlightening. Also, it seems like my every decision can be attributed to my status as a youngster. Observe:

"Wait, you didn't go home with him?"
"No."
"Oh, that's right! You're only 19!"

or,

"You're up early. How late were you out last night?"
"Til about four."
"Oh, that's right! Your body can handle that because you're only 19!"

or even,

"Frites for lunch?"
"Yeah man."
"Yeah, your metabolism can take that because you're only 19!"

I'm officially the baby of all the interns at my job, but usually everyone forgets I'm so little. Usually I forget I'm so little. I'm in Europe and I have a big-girl job and I wear pencil-skirts and nude heels. I must be a grown-up.

I might have to readjust to being a kid when I get back to America in a month, to wearing jeans and flip-flops day-to-day, to being able to enter a building without undergoing an intense security regimen, to getting grades and not just an email from my boss saying I did a great job on my latest legal brief. I also might have to adjust to not kissing everyone on the cheeks when I see them. Don't be concerned if I do this to you stateside, friends. I'm not being frisky. I'm just Euro. I have French friends and it just caught on. Kiss. Kiss. Kiss. Three times. Except for my friend Christian, who always says "Non, non, une quatrième!" when I stop after just three.

I use the expression "I'm Euro"  because a friend of mine told me, "When you get back to America, if people make fun of your clothes or hair, just be like, what? I'm Euro now." I plan on using that excuse when I just throw on whatever was on the floor and don't brush my hair. So most days.

In other news, I broke my bed the other day. In my own defense, it's a crappy IKEA bed, and I wasn't doing anything but sitting on it (too much cheese, clearly). I just sat down on the center, and there was an ungodly noise as four slats fell down to the floor and my mattress folded up like a taco around me. I  managed to jam the slats back in, but it's been a pretty nerve-wracking couple of days ever since. Every time I go to lie down I hold my breath, and about half of the time it breaks all over again. Plus, of course, everyone gives you funny looks when you say you broke your bed.

Real men ride mopeds

Hallo! Or should I say ciao?

I spent a three day weekend in Sicily two weeks ago, eating copious amounts of gelato and pizza, and I’m still fighting off the urge to say grazie and prego. Italian is so animated and over the top, and so much fun. 

However, even in Sicily, I couldn’t escape my affinity for all things Dutch. I stayed at a hostel with a communal kitchen, and that is where I met Ronald.

Ronald is Dutch, and he is so typically Dutch that I could never mistake him for any other nationality. We bonded over breakfast in the kitchen (he always lit little candles, saying he likes candlelight at breakfast) every morning, talking about the NBA (he used to watch in the 1990’s, when I was neither living in America nor interested in basketball, so it was pretty tough going holding a conversation about that). He made me tea and opened my little pear juice bottles every morning for me.

He popped his head into my room at 1 a.m. to ask me and my roommate is we wanted to go out for a drink. I was already in my pajamas. Seriously, the guy was in his mid-thirties. I hope that when I’m in my mid-thirties I’m still cool enough to go out at one in the morning.

Anyways, total gent. Sharing an apartment with a stranger is a little weird, but he was a very, very nice guy. And funny, though maybe not intentionally.

When I asked him what he was doing in Sicily, he told me – not kidding – that he was “going out into the wild”. I laughed nervously and told him we were sitting smack dab in the middle of city center in Trapani. That’s when he announced his plan to buy some gear, hop a boat to Sardinia and disappear into the wilderness to eat berries and kill wild boar for a week.

This plan was, apparently, a long time coming. As a teenager, he bought a gun and planned to come to America, to Yosemite, to hunt animals and live off the land. I tried to explain to him that Yosemite is basically overrun with tourists, but he didn’t believe me.

Ronald (or Ronaldo, as I called him) was supposed to be gone off into the wild for two weeks, and time is up. I haven’t heard any news reports of Dutch hikers being killed by wild animals or starving to death, so I’m assuming all went well.  

Also, Italians really dig blondes. Especially on Sicily, where most are quite dark, blonde travelers get treated like princesses. I thought it was just a figment of my imagination that everyone was being incredibly nice to me, but a friend who studied in Bologna tells me that it’s a common phenomenon. There was a lot of “si bella!” as I walked by. I don’t speak Italian, but I know what that means.

For example, on the Egadi Islands (google image that, it’s beautiful), I was sitting on some rocks in the water, and this precious little Italian Casanova explained to me that he is learning English in school, and that his English “was no so good, but in fourth level will be better”. He also said that he was sorry to bother me; but that I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen (being the only blonde for miles around really strokes your ego.) He might have been ten or eleven, and he was nervous out of his mind to talk to me.

So, in conclusion, I thought everyone was great on Sicily, although it’s apparently run by the Sicilian Mafia. They run around on mopeds in packs which really makes them seem a little ludicrous to someone who associates the mob with, well, The Godfather. Guys will drive on their mopeds past girls and speed up and pop wheelies and making cute little roaring engine sounds (as a girl who's been in many a pick-up truck, I am not impressed). But hey. They're mafia. I guess that badassery balances out the sissyness I associate with riding a moped. 

 

Loud and proud

I miss singing. A lot. I have this crazy Dutch lady living in the apartment beneath me and she calls our landlord to complain about the noise we’re making… at three in the afternoon when we’re all at work. We had to put carpet all throughout our apartment because our high heels in the morning before we go to work bother her.

I’ve never gone so long without singing. I sing every day. I have since I was a little girl. Even when I’ve been in hours of rehearsal and I think my vocal chords hate me and they’re going to shrivel up and die just to spite me, I catch myself singing along the radio in the car or humming Vaughn Williams as I do my homework.

I can’t sing in my apartment, so I tried to find an alternate location. I tried the beach. But it’s so windy and cold that it hurts my throat and I can barely hear myself over the surf.

Then, I looked to the Dutch. They sing in the most peculiarly public places. Shopping? Random Dutch lady browsing the racks and singing along the EuroPop on the radio. Grocers? There too. On their bicycles as they bike to work/school/a bar/everywhere? Oh, yes. All the time. It’s like they make their own little car radio on their bikes. They even sing duets with random other cyclists in the bike lane. My neighbor is in her garden, outside my back window, singing, or shouting, incredibly loud, to a song that was popular in the 90’s. Little kids on the street. The ex-military security squad at my job. The waitresses at cafes. I don’t know why I never noticed this growing up, but I know it’s not just a figment of my imagination. The Dutch are constantly singing.

The great thing about this is that they have no shame. They don’t do that whole thing I do wherein when someone catches me singing I trail off and slink away as quickly as possible, avoiding eye contact and pretending it never happened. They look you in the eye as they belt it out, loud and proud and off tune (I’m not exaggerating when I say that in the past three weeks I haven’t heard a Dutch person sing in tune). None of them have been good singers. None of them really know the words. They were all really, really loud. But they are totally open about singing, wherever they are. And if you look at them like they’re crazy, they stare right back as if to say you, my friend, are the crazy one.

I really wish I was more like the Dutch and less my shrinking self, some days.

Things I have learned in the past two weeks

Some of this is awkward. Some is not.

1. How to ride a bicycle in the pouring rain, during rush hour, in a pencil skirt and heels.  (How, you ask? Carefully.)

2. Similarly, you have to be careful biking downtown any time between 6:00 pm and midnight. Because drunk bicyclists, even if you are said drunk bicyclist, are very, very dangerous.

3. Serbians sometimes order straight vodka with their dinner. None of that pansy wine-with-dinner stuff you see Western Europeans doing.

4. There is a bird outside my window that makes a peculiar noise at 4:45 a.m. every day, as the sun is rising. I want to end its life.

5. Dutch boys of all ages want to, uh practice their English with me. And when I say all ages, I mean anywhere from 12 to 50. If you're looking at it glass-half-full ...wider playing field.

6. Apparently when I talk I sound "like George W"... I didn't even realize that I drawl.

7. The Dutch search and rescue team coast guard team is apparently composed of male models who wear their wetsuits peeled down so far that if they were in America, there would be a lawsuit.

8. Baking late at night without measuring cups never turns out well. Especially when your landlord comes by the next morning to show a prospective tenant one of the bedrooms.

9. There's a deadly strain of e.coli on vegetables in Europe. Good thing I have consumed nothing but bread and cheese since I've been here.

10. Wandering alone a lot is good for the soul. So is going to the train station, picking a platform, and going on an adventure.

11. Security guards are human beings too. And apparently if you make friends with them, they won't say anything when there's two bottles of liquor in your briefcase as you put it through the scanner.

12. The Dutch special police forces are like American SWAT, only taller and brawnier, and they were in my office today. Not really complaining.

13. People who deal with death all day develop very twisted senses of humor. I understand them perfectly.

14. I am capable of, with the help of a tiny tiny Chinese girl and a French man, consuming a platter of meat literally the size of a boogie board.

15. I am almost short here. It's magnificent. 

16. In Amsterdam, there are big brothels where men literally stand outside of booths in line and go in one by one as if they're on an assembly lines. There are different sections, like aisles in a grocery store, for different kinds of girls. Or, if you prefer, not girls. It's like a sexcapodge. (No, this is not something I know from entering into any such establishment.)

17. Thai Massage doesn't really mean a massage.

18. It's possible to miss the ones you love so much that your stomach hurts.

19. Nevertheless, human beings can belong to a place. I kind of belong to this place. 

20. You really don't need to own a cell phone. Going two days straight without having a real conversation can be magical.

21. How to send emails in cyrillic Serbian.

22. There is nothing more marvelous than waking up to rain blowing in your open window. That wasn't sarcasm :)

23. When you take a lot of pictures but there's no one in them, people start to worry for your sanity/emotional health/social skills.

My neighbor, the horny Turkish Man

 This weekend was freezing in the Netherlands. But today (of course, Monday, the day I go back to work) was just beautiful - 75 degrees and sunny with a light breeze. I got home from work and sat out on my balcony with a stack of books I've been meaning to get to (that book about the disintegration of Yugoslavia I'm supposed to be reading for work... yeah, not in the stack) a bag of speculoos cookies (basically the the best thing ever) and a cold drink, enjoying the view of the sun setting on the church down my street. 

I live on a street in a very nice part of town, so I always feel pretty safe here. My street is about half native Dutch and half foreigners, mostly Turkish. The Turkish population is pretty cool. They hang pretty cloths over their windows and play music at dusk and their children all run around the street with their toys. A Turkish family also run the restaurant down the street, and even though it smells really good, I have never seen a white person go in there. Two or three older Turkish men always linger outside the door, literally blocking the door, so I feel like I would be invading their club if I went there.

Anyways, I live on the fourth floor of an apartment building, and I have a balcony that faces the street, and, because Dutch streets are very narrow, my neighbors apartments and balconies. Two youngish Turkish guys were standing on the balcony across from me holding their little terrier dog over the rail (no idea why you would do this... that would be awful to pick up if you dropped it). They weren't speaking Dutch, so I had literally no clue what they were saying, but they seemed to be looking over at my balcony a lot.

Finally, they stopped putting the sweet puppy's life in danger, and the one holding it went inside. I kept reading, but now my neighbors attention was focused soley on me. I finally looked up and made eye contact.

He smiled at first and I felt encouraged, excited to be making friends with my neighbors. I smiled back.

Then, he put his hand down by his belt and made the universal symbol for "jerking off".

I have such friendly neighbors.

Awkwardness in het Nederland

Greetings from Den Haag, lieftjes!

The Hague is a very, very international city, because NATO, the UN Justice System, all of the embassies and about ten international organizations, like EUROPOL and INTERPOL, are based here. It's home to a lot of diplomats, expats and immigrants. In fact, often the Dutch will speak English to a stranger first, assuming there's a good chance they're foreign. I've seen it a lot this week: at the grocer, two people were in front of me. The first was a woman in a hijab, and the teller spoke English to her, and then switched to Dutch when she responded in Dutch. The second was a young woman, and they carried on the entire conversation in English.

When it got to me, she started off it Dutch, which is what, I've found, most people will do to me because of how I look. I look pretty Dutch, for being Polish-Norwegian-Anglo. They tend to be tall and blonde, and that's me. It's fine because I can kind of nod and smile and say basic things like "this one please" or "good morning" or "no recipt please" or "thank you".

But sometimes, the conversation gets more in depth, and then things get really awkward, because they're chattering along to me in a language I don't speak, and I have to interrupt and say, "Oh... Ik spreek geen Nederlands," which is my catchphrase now. And then they glare at me, as if I had been fooling them all along. And then they just look really disappointed because, let's face it, it must be a drag to constantly speak other languages in your home country. I'm sorry, lovely Dutch neighbors. I wish I was Dutch. This country is my favorite place.

Speaking of Dutch and awkward, the Dutch airline KLM gave me this on my way over. I love awkwardly translated slogans. This one is awesome.

Another treasure? I was on the beach in Scheveningen after work today and a herd of about five Dutch boys, about ten, passed by. They were making fun of Justin Bieber (it sound's really funny in a Dutch accent, like, juhSTIN BEEBeur) and singing "Baby". Hilarious, until they got to the end of the chorus (you know, "Baby, baby, baby...") and on the offbeat inserted a grunt/moan/howl that sounded unmistakably sexual. I knew my suspiciouns were correct they all laughed and repeated it, and one boy started pelvic thrusting his way along the Strand, to the cheers of his peers, one of whom was shouting, "Ja baby, ja baby!"

Ah, the years when no one is homophobic. 

Also, I know the Dutch apparently become sexually active earlier than any other people on earth, but come on.

Ik ben in Nederland

Things that are great about an 8-hour plane trip with KLM:
1. It ends with me being in the Netherlands
2. The stewardesses on KLM are Dutch, so they have these soothing accents and they tend to be quite tall, so you kind of size them up and think yeah, she could take a terrorist down. 
3. The food is not half bad.
4. You can catch up on your reading

Now, things that are not so great:
1. I was in literally the last row of the plane
2. I was in economy and the seats were so small I basically had to give the person next to me a lap dance just to use the bathroom.
3. My seatmate.

Let me explain about this guy. He was a huge Nigerian man who just sort of spilled over into my seat. And for 8 hours, we were basically best buddies. He slept leaning on my shoulder. He snored. His breath smelled in the morning. He drank five beers before he had to use the restroom (bladder of steel, he had). He itched his junk in his sleep. He did strange exercises to keep his circulation flowing, knocking me with his elbows in the process. 

Miserable.

Also, when we were sitting in the terminal waiting for the flight, I was  - I'll admit - looking for Most Likely To Blow Up A Plane Person. I had identified the only person who didn't look incredible happy and decided it was definitely him. He was frowning and clenching his fists and rocking back and forth a little, wearing black and a scary scowl. But then, he stood up and went to the bathroom. And he was wearing tight, sparkly gold wash jeans. Terrorists do not, I assure you, bedazzle their jeans.

But otherwise, the flight went smoothly, although I didn't sleep a wink and it's now 7:00 pm Dutch time. I haven't slept in upwards of thirty hours. I got settled into my apartment at around 10:30 and hit the streets looking for a coffee shop and exploring, but most importantly, desperately seeking coffee.

When I lived in the Netherlands, I was too young to know what a "brown cafe" was, or to drink coffee. Let's just say I went into three coffee shops, all of which were on main streets and looked very upscale and classy (seriously, they didn't even having leaves painted on their doors, and all of the names included the word "coffee" and not the words "weed" or "herb"), before I gave up looking for caffeine, discouraged by the heady wafts of marijuana smoke in each establishment.

I went instead to a grocer and bought tea and am trying to stay ah- ah- awa....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.