To Amsterdam, Disneyland, A Highway in Belgium and Back Again

Every time I start one of these posts, I always feel a bit overwhelmed by the amount of information I want to share with you! So I'll take this slowly, one piece of my weekend at a time.


First off, I have been spending my time familiarizing myself with Utrecht and trying not to feel like a big, bumbling, non-Dutch-speaking fool. Fortunately, I think I've been doing okay. But let's talk about something really simple that is a good illustration of what it's like to be in a foreign country: grocery shopping.  Every time I go grocery shopping, I'm extremely anxious, because I'm terrified people will ask things of me and I just won't understand because they're speaking so quickly, but I've basically learned, whenever the cashier ever asks me anything, I should just say "Ja," or "En engels, alsjeblieft?" which means, "In English, please?"  Cashiers (and lines, and grocery stores) tend to be very busy when I have time to go (because that is when everyone else is going too, naturally) and so everything is usually just one giant nervous blur where I try to peruse and get things I find interesting, most of which I don't actually recognize, and then go to check out, use cash (we haven't gotten to the part where I'm brave enough to use my Dutch debit card yet) and just say "yes" when asked for...whatever it is they ask for. Usually it's if you want a receipt. Or a bag. Which, whatever. Yes, I would like both of those things. The other day some poor girl kept asking me if I had an Albert Hein (that's the name of one of the big grocery stores over here - they call it "Ah-pee" - nobody knows why...) advantage card that she could borrow, which I do, but poor thing, she finally just switched to English of her own accord. And I gave her my card. And felt embarrassed. It's a good thing I think well of myself, because otherwise this whole trip would be one long embarrassment. As it so happens, it has been very humbling but gratifying as well, when I can spit out one or two correct words, and feel very accomplished for doing so. When people talk to me in private (i.e. not in a bustling grocery store) they take a lot of time to enunciate, and then I can usually understand them. And attempt to speak back to them in Dutch. Most people here DO speak English, which is wonderful, and so switching back and forth between my broken Dutch and their English accomplishes almost everything I need to do. Like find out how to buy a train ticket to Amsterdam in a panic. Which also happened this weekend. But back to grocery shopping for a moment.

 Because I don't have a car, I have to bike everywhere, which for the most part is great - I absolutely love biking, as anyone will tell you - but it makes it a bit difficult to go grocery shopping, because everything has to then get placed in or around my bike. I have nice new bags on the back (thanks to Siri) that hold my groceries, but getting off the bike, taking out my keys, unlocking my bike lock, taking off my bike bags, relocking my bike lock, hefting my bike bags into the store, buying things, packing my bike bags, putting my bags back on the bike, unlocking it, and finally leaving - it's all rather a hassle, really. People in Holland have two kinds of locks for their bikes (who would ever have known that bikes are so complex?). One kind of lock is circular and wraps around the back wheel and in between the spokes, basically acting as a "bike boot" like what they put on your car when you've done something terribly naughty, like park somewhere for one minute longer than the time you paid for to park there... In any case, these are more convenient for just leaving the bike for a wee bit to do some shopping, whereas the more extreme lock is a thick (and we're talking THICK) chain in a nylon sleeve that you can hook up to something more solid - like a bike rack. I need to get a circular lock. They're much quicker than the chain - although the chain is a better guarantee that your bike will still be there when you get back. Anyway. I digress. Bikes. They're huge here.

Last week, after my nasty encounter with Nasty-Woman-Who-Shall-Remain-Unnamed, I went out and got what is called a "kip-stick," which I have mentioned previously - it is literally the best food imaginable. "Kip-stick" literally just means "Chicken-stick" but it's a special Dutch thing (I think, anyway) that is like - I've described it as a fried egg roll-looking thick soup. Like, they took chicken soup, and made it really thick and then breaded and fried it. At the Central Station in Utrecht they have these machines where you just pop in a euro and get a freshly made kip-stick. It's making my mouth water just to think about it.

The boxes where you can get a hot kip stick.

This is my delicious kip stick.

I've looked it up, and apparently these things are called kroketten (Dutch croquettes). The article I read says that the filling is a mixture of flour, butter and milk into a paste, and then the addition of food-processed (i.e. like hamburger meat) meat with onion and spices. Mix them together, coat, and fry. Delicious.

The kroketten flour mixture.

The kroketten meat and onion and spices mixture.

Mixed together.

 

 

Delicious kipsticks/kroketten!

So! This weekend. On Thursday morning, bright and early (I think around 6:30) I got up and got ready to go to Amsterdam for my first official Fulbright meeting. I looked totally awesome and completely Dutch in my skinny black pants, t-shirt, black vest, tan jacket, scarf, and cute little black boots.

I got out the door just a little bit late and missed the bus - it was literally pulling away as I ran up to it - and had to take a later one that got me to the Central Station just a tad too late to catch the early train to Amsterdam, which I was upset about. So, there I was, rushing and freaking out about how to get a ticket to Amsterdam, and then I asked, and was told I didn't NEED a ticket, I just had to scan my "OV-Chipkaart" onto the scanners at the station I get on, and the station I get off at. The "OV-Chipkaart" by the way, is like a credit-card bus pass that you can put money on to use for bus fare, train fare, etc. They're awesome. I think I've mentioned this before. So anyway, rushing around Utrecht central station. Well, then it turns out you can't buy a train pass with less than 20 euro on your OV-Chipkaart, and to put more money on it, you have to wait in this huge long line. So I did that, for about fifteen minutes. Missed another train. Slightly hyperventilating at this point, with my giant backpack on, I finally managed to get on a train headed to Amsterdam. The good news is, the trains here are wickedly fast (They're called, "Sprinters") and so I got to Amsterdam from Utrecht (about a 45 minute drive? Without traffic?) in about 20 minutes. I got off in Amsterdam at about 9 AM, and had to hoof it to find the right bus and busstop that would take me to the bank where I was supposed to set up an account at 10. Miraculously, I found the right bus, got off at the right stop (for which I allowed myself a happy dance), and found the bank, so that I ended up getting to the bank about 30 minutes early. Which is much better than being late. I felt terrible though, because upon entering the bank, the nice lady offered me some coffee, which I promptly (in my shaky anxious-state) knocked over their entire desk area. Oof. She was really nice and insisted upon cleaning it up for me AND she made me a new espresso. So nice. Setting up my bank account went absolutely swimmingly. The man was really nice and kept jokingly asking me if I thought he had ADHD. He didn't, but it was still cute of him to joke with me in my poor, broken Dutch/English. Dinglish.

Here are some things I saw on my walk after the bank appointment, including (lol), the exact canal view featured in my blog's header. Which I then had to take a picture in front of.

Amsterdam! Land of Canals and such.

That's right. Lots of Cheese. "Kaasland" literally means, "Cheese Country."

In front of aforementioned canal.

The canal!

A very sweet river boat covered in plants.

After wandering around for a bit, I did end up finding the Fulbright center - about an hour early - so for a while I just sat across from that river boat up there and read my book on my Kindle. I love my Kindle. I'm so, so, so, so glad I bought it. It's made being here a lot easier, I just know. Because I can read books and just do what I do when I'm stressed out for anything - disappear for a little while into someone else's story. Since I got here, I've read like, four books! And I've only been here for a week and a half! It was weird, this day, waiting to go into the Fulbright center, because my book was about this nasty dystopic future in which love is a disease, and the "cure" is a neural procedure everyone undergoes at 18. And in the book, the people who don't agree with this system, who don't think love is the bane of society, get thrown into this horrible jail called "The Crypt," and as the book was describing this looming building, I, who was surrounded by looming buildings, was getting increasingly freaked out, and then it got really cold, and cloudy, and I decided I couldn't finish that part of the book until I was somewhere else! That somewhere else ended up being Disneyland, so, I mean, what's a better way to fight off a scary/sad part of a book than to be full of the joy and wonder of Disneyland? But more on that later (as in, another blog post, because baby, I am le pooped).

The Fulbright meeting itself was wonderful. All of the Fulbrighters are like...like my best friends at the HTC. Not the annoying HTC people. The really nice ones, who are actually socially adept (look, if you're reading this, then you're one of these people, okay?) and who care about others, and who love what they do, and are excited to learn about new things. It was great. The people who run the Fulbright center in Amsterdam - Linda and Marcel, are also wonderful. Linda is English, and Marcel is Dutch, but they were both so kind and understanding and funny. They seemed really laid back - in a good, organized, "this is a once-in-a-lifetime-cultural-experience-not-a-race-to-get-an-article-published," kind of way. They talked to us for several hours about what to expect in Holland, health insurance, what they expect of us, etc. It was also really excellent to get to talk to the other Fulbright people for a good long while (we had lots of drinks and snacks after the "official" meeting). After the meeting, Remco (Siri's boyfriend) picked me up, and well, the rest is for another night. I have a photo shoot tomorrow (I know, I am so faaaabbbulous) for promotional photos for the fundraising campaign for OU (for the HTC's fundraising part, specifically), so, erm, wish me luck with looking extremely excellent and, err, like you would want to pay a lot of money to become someone like me, I guess, since my photos are going in a brochure meant to generate support for the HTC!

A photo shoot. What have I become? I was even told by the lady who is doing the photos to bring several outfits to the shoot. We're meeting in downtown Utrecht to take pictures by the canal and such. At least it will yield some nice pictures, eh! Till tomorrow, and the re-telling of my Disneyland adventure in all its glorious detail.