The Netherlands

After returning from Paris the night before, finishing an essay, giving a presentation of it in class the next day and then heading right away for the airport again, I got on the plane to the Netherlands feeling a little bit too tired for travel, but fortunately the feeling quickly dissolved. I managed to continue a conversation in Swedish for half an hour with my neighbors on the plane and felt pretty damn proud about that. At the tail end of the flight, we could see the night-lit Amsterdam on the right and Utrecht on the left - quite a view.

Bodegraven:
I was picked up and went that night to stay with Manon at her family's house in Bodegraven, to the south and longitudinally between Utrecht and Bodegraven.
There's a dutch word, gezellig (pronounced: hhheezellihhh), which is a combination of coziness, solidarity, togetherness, comfort, etc. There's no literal translation into English but this family I was staying with was very gezellig. They had a very funny, good way of interacting with each other. They had two little dogs as well that were stupid, cute and somehow cuter because of their stupidity. I had purchased a packet of hard-to-find Korean noodles when I happened upon them in Utrecht, but unfortunately one of the little dogs tore through two layers of plastic wrapping and consumed one package, strewing my high-quality ramen (whatever that means) across the room.



On the first morning we drove out to a little bit of woods and took the dogs for a walk. The Netherlands is utterly flat, cut through with frequent canals of varying sizes. The farmlands were so green, the kind leaf-green, alive green. Cows and sheep everywhere. The hobbit side of me was delighted.
In this section of woods, we walked over many of these small canals/irrigation systems and, when in the open, they became a nesting locus for birds.





Utrecht:
So, later that day we headed to Utrecht, about 20 minutes away by car. Manon has an apartment there. I loved the city - it was a saturday and all of these splendid Dutch people were out on the streets, the buildings were very odd, small, scrunched together, eclectic. What I know of the Dutch, I ADORE. They are extremely open,honest, frank people. I think that some might call them, in some cases, rude, but I would say rude in a good way. Irreverant toward the right things. But this is only from small experience in the country.


A bridge over one of the canals/rivers through Utrecht.



The streets above the canals.



Public boat transportation (more prominant in Amsterdam).



Amsterdam:

The next day I headed on a solo expedition to Amsterdam. I really, really loved this city. It was eccentric, not a pretty place but an exciting place, a kind of busy, energetic city. Even with the rain there were a lot of people on the streets. Went to the Van Gogh museum and the Rijksmuseum. I noticed something about Rembrandt's women, which is that they always seem pleasantly unaware of how ugly they are.



Canals in Amsterdam:








On a whim I enterred this church because it's facade reminded me of St. Etienne, gorgeous building, and I stumbled into the middle of a service. Although my original inclination was to cut and run, I stayed. Maybe it's a vestige of my religious upbringing, now rationally crushed, but I'm always affected inside churches. I've detached the social and politial symbolism from my private experience of the place itself - religion, dogma are not things I even think about inside. It's a feeling, not a thought.






The birthday party
Manon turned twenty one last week and this trip to the Netherlands was to celebrate her birthday! They had closed down the rail station in her town and converted it into a restaurant where you make your own food and then the chef, while you sit and drink wine, fixes all the horrendous mistakes you made and cooks it for you.





Dutch countryside:









Clouds. This is a true story: whenever flying next to clouds I want to go running on them. Childish, fanciful, whatever it may be, so it is.


Sweden from the air:
Flying over the woods and rivers. Wanted to be on the ground in the woods. Also saw Stockholm from above, got a much better idea of the fourteen islands/archipelago.