In Holland, land of many bikes.I've been travelling a lot since the last time I let all of you loyal "blog" readers in on the details of my life, which in part explains (but perhaps not excuses) the lack of updates. Now that I'm back in Berlin for at least a little while, I thought I'd share with you a few of my simple-minded impressions of the places I've visited over the past several weeks:
The latest in traffic engineering: In the Steiermark (Styria) at least, Austria seems to be well-groomed, neat and tidy. Flowers are organized into neat and tidy rows. There are many traffic circles, and at one point we drove through a traffic figure-eight, something I had never seen before and which I found to be a bit frightening. There are also many tunnels; one north of Graz went on for over 10 kilometers. Fortunately there seemed to be many emergency exits, so I did not become claustrophobic. The local cuisine prominently featured meats and dumplings, which never bothers me. We regrettably found that there isn't much to do in Klagenfurt on a Sunday afternoon, although we found ample parking and some tasty ice cream.
Where everything's small but the people are tall: Having previously had my fill of Amsterdam, my explorations in the Netherlands were confined primarily to the university town Groningen and the province of Drenthe. The many pubs of Groningen, while seemingly always open, do not really get crowded until 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. If you show up at 11:00 p.m., they will be practically empty. Memorable cuisine there can be had in great variety, from the meat-and-potatoes-based traditional Dutch dishes, to the Indonesian dishes influenced by the former colonies, to crepes-like egg pancakes, or to the cheap sandwiches and fried snacks one can acquire from vending machines after a late night at the pubs. Bikes. Bikes bikes bikes bikes bikes. There are so many bikes in Groningen, and I found myself rather confused by all of them as I tried to cross even very narrow streets. Indeed, space in Dutch cities is always a rare commodity. Still, I was surprised to find that in the more rural areas of Drenthe, there was actually far more space than one might expect. Near the towns of Zuidlaren and Schipborg (the hometown of my friend Laurens) there is beautiful and fairly expansive park space made up of fen, heath and dune, which is well-suited for bicycling. There are also plenty of the Netherlands staples: canals, windmills, and bike-trails.
Confessions of a Eurosnob: From Holland, I flew to my hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Maybe it's just that I really haven't been doing any serious work for the past several months, or because driving around in cars has become slightly foreign to me, but it seemed like everyone back in America was in such a damned hurry. They keep erecting new buildings and malls and building new roads, and everyone seems to be eager to drive their cars to these new places on these new roads, all the while keeping one eye on the price of gasoline and the other on the news crawler at the bottom of CNN or Fox News. Speaking of the news, I saw it from quite a different perspective this time -- or at least I thought I did. Being stuck in airports on a couple of different occasions, where "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer seems to be perpetually on display, it was difficult not to notice how much time the cable news programs in America dedicate to soundbites, fluff-stories and self-promotion and how little effort is given toward substantial news reporting and explanation of the significance of more complex themes. I suppose that's just TV journalism to a degree. But then when reading one of the local papers near where my grandmother lives, I was shocked to read an editorial actually defending the antiquated method of presidential election in the United States. It saddened me to see the way many Americans seem to be indifferent to the fact that our country has lost so much standing in many other parts of the world, although I suppose I expected that as well. Nonetheless, the purpose of my visit was to see family, which I enjoyed.
Provoking the conservatives: In the middle of my visit to Ohio, I went for two days to San Antonio, my home of six years until last fall, to catch up with some friends and to see if the grass on my front lawn had survived. (It had.) Probably the intellectual highlight of that sidetrip came when my friend Edwin and I sat down at a local bar for a couple of beers to talk politics. It's something of legend that politics is a forbidden topic at bars -- or at least I thought it was a legend, until the barmaid told us that we ought to keep our voices down if we were going to insist on talking about the benefits of socialized medicine or federally-funded public schools. Of course neither of these concepts are popular in Texas, nor is the concept of gay marriage, which I brought up just to see what would happen. The grumbling but otherwise uninterested reaction was somewhat disappointing, actually -- we'd secretly hoped for some kind of shouting match to ensue -- but it made me wonder if such places are actually where opinions can be shaped and minds changed. There seem to be few forums for social activity in Texas (and in America on the whole) aside from the workplace and church, neither of which really constitute a grounds for positive progressive discussion.
Waffles, diamonds and Peter Paul Rubens: Anyway, after my short visit to Texas and another night with my parents in Columbus, I was headed back to Amsterdam's airport for a weekend with my wife. After landing, our destination was Antwerp, Belgium, a place that in my opinion has a lot going for it but perhaps hasn't quite figured out how to market itself. The city has long been an important center for the diamond trade, and near the train station there are dozens of jewelry shops, many of them run by orthodox Jews, which gave that part of town an interesting flair. Nearer the center of town along the right bank of the Schelde river we found a number of pleasant plazas, restaurants and cultural highlights. We ate and drank all of the obligatory Belgian consumables: waffles, fries, quiche, baguette, beer. And we saw perhaps two dozen paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, the Dutch Renaissance painter who spent most of his life there and is now perhaps the town's favorite son.
So that is what I've been up to. For now I'm back in Berlin, my wife is getting plump with child, the trees are thankfully turning green, and I'm about ready for parenthood. It's been nice seeing as much of the world as I can, generally living the high life before my daughter arrives in a couple of months and I have to get serious again.
