I see London, I see France...

Clearly I have not been updating this blog more frequently as I had promised, but it's amazing how difficult it is for me to keep on top of anything here. At school, I can easily fit reading for four classes, writing a paper, going to work, and hanging out with my friends in one day (and still have time for The Daily Show). Yesterday it took me about four hours to write a two page response for my literature class. It's not that I'm lazy -- in fact, it's because there's way too much to do and work is so far from my mind. I'm on my bike, or poking around in a flea market, buying postcards, sampling coffee and bagels, making travel plans, and otherwise enjoying the great feeling that comes when you see something new around every corner. 

That being said, the last few weeks have nonetheless become busier and a bit more work intensive, and I've been spending more time than I would like to in my room doing reading. Although I can't really complain about the material (for the most part). I have nothing against reading Anna Karenina, Romeo & Juliet, and Donne for my lit class. Readings for Introduction to European Integration, on the other hand, is totally brutal. No offense to poli sci majors, but what is that you study? I will never understand the difference between constructivism, neo-functionalism, and intergovernmentalism. 

 Two weekends ago I went on a day trip to the Hague with a few other people from my program. We visited the government complex, the Mauritshuis museum, and a huge outdoor market. All in all the Hague was pretty boring compared to Amsterdam, but in its defense it was also a weekend. What made the trip worthwhile was seeing how different the demographics are from Amsterdam. I've been hearing a lot since I've been here about problems with immigrant integration in the Netherlands (and across all of Europe), especially with Muslim populations, but downtown Amsterdam tends to be overwhelmingly Dutch and white. The Hague is much different -- there, the immigrant population is very large and very visible. When we went wandering to find the market, we soon found ourselves in neighborhoods that seemed completely Muslim, where the stores sold headscarves and all Middle Eastern food. There were also neighborhoods that seemed largely African. We happened to turn down a small street just as a very boisterous Muslim wedding was pouring out of an apartment building, and it was a lot of fun to watch.

Last weekend I went to Paris for the first time. I only had a weekend, and I did not mess around. I took a night bus from Amsterdam along with a few other people from my program. We arrived in Paris at 6am on Friday, checked into our hostel, and took off. We went to the Eiffel Tour and took the elevator all the way up (I wanted to climb it but my companions balked). We wandered down the Champs-Elysees, climbed to the top of Notre Dame, went to the Louvre, and ate dinner in the Latin Quarter with my friend since nursery school, Sarah. While in the Louvre, my exhaustion overtook me (I didn't sleep for an hour on the bus) and I had to leave because I couldn't deal with the enormity of the museum in my delirious state. The next day, after finally getting some sleep, I went out to Versaille and toured the palace and gardens. As beautiful as it was, I couldn't help thinking it would be nicer in the spring or summer when there were actual flowers and the statues weren't covered with tarps. That night I drank wine outside Notre Dame, went out in the Latin Quarter, and otherwise tried to feel Parisian with Ethan, my friend from Brandeis. On Sunday, I rose early and went back to the Louvre. This time, rested and regrouped, I conquered it. I wandered through St. Germaine and then met up with both Ethan and Sarah at the Musee d'Orsay. The impressionist collection here in phenomenal, and I would have to say that despite all the grandeur and stateliness of the Louvre the Orsay is one of the best museums I've ever been in. We followed this with a tour of Montmartre and the Sacre-Coeur, and I had dinner at Sarah's homestay apartment before boarding yet another night bus back to Amsterdam. This time, thanks to the whirlwind of a weekend (and some helpful sleep aids provided by Sarah) I slept until I pulled into Amsterdam at 6:30am. 

I loved Paris even more than I thought I would, and I'm planning on returning sometime in April or May when the weather is a little more conducive to really enjoying all that the city has to offer. Still, I love Amsterdam the most. The difference in the way I'm treated as a foreigner by the Dutch and by the Parisians was night and day. If you even look lost in Amsterdam, somebody is liable to come up to you and ask you if you need directions, and it's completely possible that they will invite you to walk with them or just draw you a map on a napkin. In Paris, if I tried to ask for directions, people looked the other way like they didn't hear me. I know a lot of that has to do with my speaking English and their reluctance to allow French to become ma

rginalized in their own country, which is totally respectable. But I was glad to return to the Netherlands where people understand that they can be kind human beings and still maintain all the charm and integrity of their local culture. It really isn't so hard. Also, after all the grandeur of Paris, it was refreshing to return to the modesty of Amsterdam. All in all, it was a great first trip because I found another city I love, while realizing why I love the city I'm in the most. 

On Thursday I leave for London, where I'll be staying with my Brandeis friend Jeremy. I'll be meeting up with Sarah yet again, checking out all the sights, and adhering to a strict diet of fish & chips and pints of whatever they drink in London. I have never been to London, and needless to say I'm very excited. Also, next week my favorite compatriot Liz will be arriving in Amsterdam for over a week, and we'll be heading off our adventures with a weekend in Belgium. So I have a lot to look forward to in the next few weeks -- check back for updates on whatever shenanigans we get up to. 

It rains ... a lot.

It has been quite some time since my last post and as a result it is very difficult to remember everything that I've done in the last week and a half and try to recount it. What does come immediately to mind is the weather. I only have one issue with Amsterdam, and that is the weather. If they can build dikes and stop the lowlands from flooding, they should be able to do something about the eternal wintry mix here, too. It's rained pretty much every day for about a week and a half now. Often it comes in spurts, and it's not like in America where it storms for a few hours and then the next day it's beautiful. It just kind of drizzles for a week here. The sun often comes out during intervals, and more than once I've seen sunlight out my window and been greeted with rain by the time I'm out of my building.

That being said, I love Amsterdam more every day. I love the people, the streets, the buildings, the canals, the food (especially the beer and the coffee), the flowers, the markets, my bike. I recently traded in my first bike for a different one, a 21-gear mountain bike type. It's a lot faster and being able to switch gears is nice, and I also finally have a rack for strapping a basket or a small person to. My biking skills have grown immensely since my first wobbly ride upon getting here. I zip through the biking lanes with confidence. I ring my bell at slow bikers. I squeeze through mathematically impossible spaces. I listen to music, talk on my phone, eat fries and mayonnaise, read Spinoza, nap, and compose poetry ... all while biking. When pedestrians see me coming, they flee in terror. I am like Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider, only far more dangerous and with better acting skills. 

Only part of that is true (I am definitely a better actor than Nicolas Cage). In fact, I experienced my first spill yesterday. It's well-known that you have to cross tram tracks in Amsterdam perpendicularly, otherwise your tires will get caught in them. Yesterday I was biking in pouring rain through the Dam (pictured here), the large square between the royal palace and the national monument, and in all the rain I managed to get my front tire jammed in a track. Needless to say I went flying over my handlebars onto the wet cobblestone. I was not seriously injured, but my pride may never recover (the Dam is a very, very busy area. I don't want to know how many people watched this hapless tourist eat the Dam yesterday). It didn't hurt until today. 

Last week I visited several museums: the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Anne Frank House. The Van Gogh museum is phenomenal and I can't wait to go back. The Rijksmuseum is basically the Dutch national museum and to be honest, it's a bit dry, though they have a nice collection of Rembrandt and Vermeer. It's housed in an incredibly beautiful building, but unfortunately much of it is under construction and as a result the exhibit is pretty limited. The Anne Frank house, which is all of a minute's walk from my building, was a great experience for me. I went with Will, who spent four or five days in Amsterdam last week with some friends from his program in Vienna. Actually seeing the building and the hiding area after reading the diary so many years ago is something I think everybody should do at some point. I won't try to describe the experience, I just highly recommend it. The museum itself is also very well done. 

Having Will here gave me the opportunity to show off my extremely limited knowledge of Amsterdam. It was really nice to be able to lead somebody else around "my city." I think I did all right. It also gave us the opportunity to pool our collective love of beer and make a careful examination

 of the cafes (bars) in Jordaan. Here, the nice ones are called "brown cafes" and there is at least one on every block in my neighborhood. They get the name from their dimly lit, mellow atmosphere, and the fact that many are quite old and almost all have wooden bars, tables, and floors. They are a far cry from the noisy, crowded bars in the touristy red light district and around much of Amsterdam centrum. Here we practiced the fine Dutch art of being gezellig, which is a difficult concept to describe but in my interpretation means having meaningful and earnest conversation with a few good friends over a beautiful glass of beer. Being gezellig also justifies drinking beer at any hour of the day. In this manner we discovered Rasputin, an herby, 5 euro per glass beer brewed after a 14th or 15th century recipe that makes Guinness taste like Bud Light and clocks in at 10.8% alcohol per volume. Beer culture here is nothing like in America.  You also can't really get drunk in a brown cafe--it wouldn't be looked upon kindly. This place is perfect for me. 

Also, it turns out I'm taking classes here. That was a big surprise last Monday. For the most part I don't have class until 12 or 1, but I do have a 9am on Wednesdays, which is brutal. I'm taking a film class called Europe-Hollywood-Europe, Introductory Dutch, Introduction to European Integration, and an English class called Literature, Love, and Lust (many fellow Brandeis English majors will recognize this one from last year ... I think this course must be taught everywhere). Everybody says that studying abroad is an academic joke, but I feel like I have a pretty decent amount of work to do (though granted less than I would have at Brandeis). That being said, there are relatively few assignments. Dutch academics pretty much put all the responsibility for keeping up with readings and lectures on the student, and most of my classes only grade a midterm and a final. My classes are through the international school here, the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences, so unfortunately I don't really interact with Dutch students in the classroom. On the other hand, I meet people from all over the world: Kenya, Kazakhstan (I did not reference Borat), Azerbaijan, Norway, etc., etc. 

My film class is awesome. It covers the mutual influences between American and European film in a really interesting cultural context. The readings are fascinating and the professor really knows her stuff. In three weeks I will be making my midterm presentation to the class about Polanski. Hail Satan! Dutch is crash course. The language is grammatically very easy but I will never understand the pronunciations. The professor, however, is awesome, and lectured for well over twenty minutes yesterday about how to properly order a beer in the Netherlands. European Integration is the first political science course I've ever taken, and I have to say it's pretty interesting. I don't know anything about how the EU works, and I suspect most other Americans don't either. Our professor is amazed that we haven't heard much about the basic problems the EU faces today, and doesn't seem to understand that the American media doesn't really report on them. My literature professor is great, but the class discussions so far have made me appreciate the level of instruction and engagement I've had in my Brandeis English classes. Also, I'm supposed to find the time to read Persuasion, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina (along with "other light readings") sometime while I'm here. Thankfully I have already read Anna Karenina and hopefully a quick browse will suffice. 

That's all for now. I hope to update more frequently in the future, so please do check back. Or don't, but I'll keep writing anyway. 

Ik kom uit Amsterdam!

Hallo! This is my first post from Amsterdam. It's hard to believe this is my fifth night here. The past few days have been a blur of bicycles, cobblestone, cheese, beer, canals, red lights, new names and faces, and very little sleep. It would be hard to cover everything I've done since getting here, but I'll try and describe it.

My flight landed on Wednesday morning around 8:30am. A lot of people f

rom my program, CIEE, were on the flight, and we met up with many more at Schiphol airport. A good number of students had already been in Amsterdam for a night or two. All told, there are a little more than 60 of us. We all go to school in the States, but there are some from other countries: Serbia and Bermuda, for example. 

The day was spent getting our bedding, room assignments, and keys from De Key, a housing corporation that owns 35,000 units in and around Amsterdam and helps the Universiteit van Amsterdam place students. I could have done a lot worse with my housing; in fact, I definitely live in the best neighborhood of all the dorms, and one of the nicest neighborhoods in Amsterdam, the Jordaan. It's about ten minutes walking distance west of city center and is exactly what I thought of when I imagined Amsterdam: beautiful buildings, wide canals, restaurants and bars everywhere. I live on Prinsengracht, the outermost canal of the canal belt that surrounds the city. I'm a block away from Anne Frank's house and see the tourists lining up every morning, and just two blocks away from Westerkerk, one of the most beautiful churches in Amsterdam and the burial place of Rembrandt. Anytime I mention my neighborhood to a local, they go on and on about how difficult it is to live in Jordaan and how I live in the greatest location in the city. I won't dispute that. There are only 8 people from my program living in my building, however. Other people are split between a few other locations, and it can be pretty difficult making plans together and getting around (I bike, of course--more on that later). Some of the other rooms are nicer. My room includes its own fairly pathetic kitchenette with a hot plate and a microwave, and I share a bathroom and shower with one other person. I'm working on making my room homier, however, and I wouldn't trade my location for anything. I met my suitemate on the first day and haven't seen him since. He's from Jakarta, Indonesia, which I would have liked to ask about but he told me he doesn't ever go out and doesn't know anybody else in the building. So I guess I'll see him around. The pictures I posted are all from right next to my building: Prinsengracht canal and street, and Westerkerk. 

Orientation took up the first full three days. The University has buildings scattered throughout the city, most of them in the center. We had lots of information sessions, walking tours, etc. More fun are the borrels, a Dutch concept that basically means "a relaxed drink with friends." The ones I have attended so far have not exactly been relaxed. They have included open bars, hundreds of people, dancing and crappy techno (but who cares?). The first was held by the housing corporation De Key (what a great company!). Immediately afterwards was a borrel thrown by ISHSS, the international school. I just returned from my buildings borrel, which was supposedly a meeting with the RAs. It was just like a hall meeting at Brandeis, only with music, free beer, lots of cheese, and no rules or admonitions. Dutch society definitely places a lot of responsibility on the individual, and everybody is just expected to handle themselves like adults. And for the most part, everybody does. The result is a very respectful environment.

Today was the first free time I've had since arriving. We had brunch at a famous pancake house just down the street (note: these are not Aunt Jemima's pancakes. They have the texture of crepes, and are the size of your plate, with ingredients that you never would have imagined in pancakes before. I had chorizo and cheese; somebody else had strawberry and ice cream. I didn't eat for another eight hours). I spent the rest of the day walking through Jordaan and the surrounding streets, trying to learn my neighborhood and make sense of the concentric canals. We tend to get very, very lost when we go out at night. Luckily, the Dutch are very helpful with directions and in general far friendlier than they even need to be. I have delightful exchanges with Dutch people on the streets all the time. Nearly everybody speaks fluent English, and if they don't, they just smile and say 'hallo.' I also bought kitchen equipment, because my kitchen was completely empty, and new bedding to replace what we were given by De Key (it was so inadequate that for a joke the comforter and pillow case had a cardboard design on it. I think the idea was that it could be worse, and we could be sleeping in boxes. It was funny until I had to sleep on my backpack because my pillow seems to be made out of gauze). Wandering the streets and poking into stores, restaurants, and bars has been the best thing I've done here so far. Everywhere I go I find great food, fun novelty stores, beautiful structures, and of course, Heineken, Grolsch, and Belgian beers flowing like water. I will get used to this place quickly. 

As I mentioned, I got a bike on my second day. There are over 600,000 bikes in Amsterdam (and 150,000 bike thefts per year). There are bikes everywhere you go; there are entire parking garages built for bikes. You'll see entire families biking down the streets together, people grocery shopping on their bikes, people eating on their bikes. I even saw a bike alarm go off last night. Unfortunately, we got ours from a rental company called Orangebike. It is not nearly as cool as the real bikes, and has the company logo all over it to make sure everybody knows that I'm a tourist. I'm planning on trying to return it so I can buy my own. That way, I can spray paint it and customize it a bit, like everybody else here. 

I was terrified the first time I got on my bike. Most streets have biking lanes, next to the car lanes, which have tram lines through them. So when you're biking, you're always in a mess of traffic: pedestrians, trams, other bikes, the occasional horse-drawn wagon. There is a pretty detailed traffic system in place, but everybody just seems to go by common sense. I haven't seen any kind of accidents yet, but when I'm biking I often have bikers directly in front and behind me, and cars passing by only a few inches away. It will take a while before I stop fearing for my life every time I cross a street. 

Since I know everyone is wondering, I will tell you a bit about the red light district. One of the borrels on my second night was right at the edge of the district, and a CIEE student who is studying for the entire academic year offered me a quick tour. I probably shouldn't have marched in so unprepared on a busy Thursday night. It really was one of the most disorienting experiences of my life. Everywhere I looked, I saw things I've never seen in public in America. You get used to smelling pot smoke on the streets all over Amsterdam, but here it was hanging like a cloud in the cramped alleys. There were people clearly on some face-melting trips staggering around and falling. Bright lights come out of all the bars and restaurants, and all the coffee shops are pumping music. And, of course, there are the windows: hundreds and hundreds of red-lit windows with women behind you. I would have thought they were all mannequins if not for the fact that they were beckoning me to their doors. It was actually incredibly uncomfortable, especially when you see the clients walking in and out, drapes being drawn, etc. The whole thing was so surreal. One of my companions aptly described it as "the end of the earth." We could honestly only stand it for about five minutes before we retreated the comfort of the borrel.

Since that first experience, I've been in the district almost every day. It's full of great food and shops, and it doesn't take long before you don't even notice all the bars advertising live sex shows and women in the windows. It's also right in the center of the city, so I pass through it constantly. Now that I've gotten used to it, it barely even seems unusual to me anymore (just like the ubiquitous coffee shops and smart shops all over town). The Dutch are protective of the district; it represents the tolerance their society is based on (for a great example of this live-and-let-live policy, you'd have to see the beautiful 14th century church Oude Kerk, in the middle of the district, and the prostitute's windows directly across the street). The truth is, there is nothing in the red light district that doesn't go on in every other city in the world. The Dutch just don't try to pretend like it's not there. 

Tonight is my night off -- all this excitement has run me down considerably and I'm now nursing a winter cold. I'll start filling in all the details of life here once I've settled in some more, but suffice to say for now that I made a great decision in coming here. My list of things to do this week includes the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh museum, maybe a visit to the Artis zoo (third largest in the world!), tons of poking around and walking the canals, plus visits to local breweries and, of course, class (I start tomorrow). So please look out for updates -- I miss you all!

Jeremy