Hey Lady, How About The Fringe Element?
I love Paris, but finding myself in the city unexpectedly with no room reservations, and all my bags clacking behind me as I dragged them out into the hot sun, has to be somewhere near the bottom of my list of how to spend a random Saturday afternoon. I walked in off the street into several hotels to ask if they had a room for the night, but most of them were full, until I chanced upon one that was part of a chain, and one of their member hotels had a vacancy over by Place Vendōme.
Someone must have bribed someone into getting that hotel its three stars, because it was truly a poor man's (or woman's) Crillon, although the staff was nice and there was internet in the lobby. I don't know how the star system works, but you must get one star just for being in Paris, one for being around the corner from Place Vendōme, and a third star for having a TV set in the room. Otherwise, the place was completely forgettable. The carpet in the hallway had a stained look, as if there was water damage (or an unsolved murder), the rooms were shaped as if carved out by Picasso and Van Gogh on an absinthe bender, and the bathroom door slammed shut if you didn't prop it open with a chair. The only window looked out onto the courtyard -- the upside being that nobody could get in and kill you in your sleep or steal your valuables because they'd put bars on the window. The downside being, if there was a fire, you would slowly roast to a crisp in the jigsaw-shaped room while you watched German news on the television set and the bathroom door slammed shut on your screams of death.
There was nothing to do for it but get even by filling the enormous bathtub with hot water and all the shampoo and shower gel (the same substance, trust me) and boiling like a Lean Cuisine and then going out into the city to get out of the weird little room, even though it was the first exposure to TV in weeks and things were just starting to get interesting with the SDK scandals and Arnold Schwarzenegger's baby scam.
The construction outside the hotel was an eyesore but the cocktails down the street were much nicer and there was no techno music. People will leave you alone in a cafe; a person might have just been fired/been dumped/dumped someone/been walking the streets of Paris pondering the universe/strolled the museums and gazed upon the soul of art and now needs a drink/wandered through the crypts and seen St. Denis wandering around with his head under his arm and pondered his own soul and now needs pull up a rattan chair and hold his own head in his hands and ponder What Does It All Mean??? You are free to sit and enjoy the things that are nice about Paris: you can look up and see someone's rooftop garden; I like chalkboards with the day's menu on them and waiters who meant to do that for a living, and secret doors on city streets that open into courtyards and pointy-nosed men and women walking by with baguettes. There are little old ladies clutching flowers as they wait for the bus; their own heads of hair have gone to seed; nothing but dandelion tufts of madness, but they are still bringing home cones of flowers.
Phrases you won't find a French menu: "heart-healthy," "lite," "carb-conscious," or "diet." On the other hand, you will find a wine list all day long -- maybe because there are so many foreigners passing through who are existing in a different time zone, or maybe because they have a different attitude towards drinking, or maybe because there's enough people who want to sit in the sun all day long and buzz out. But it isn't like the U.S., where there's just a few options -- after 5 pm -- where you can choose one or two wines by the glass, because they're not going to open a whole bottle of wine just for you. In France, it appears that all the bottles are open, all day long...what would you like?
This continued on the train to the Netherlands. It was barely past noon, but they started rattling through the car with one of those carts you see on planes, with sandwiches and fruit and cakes and free drinks. What would you like? Red or white wine? (If you are interested, all the non-drinkers chose Cokes. And they gave you a bottle of Vittel water, regardless, so there was no point to the "Just water for me," stance.) They wheeled that buggy through three times before the trip was through, trying to get rid of those sandwiches, and offering drinks each time. I calculated that a serious drinker could get a serious snootful of free wine before weaving off that train, long before 5:00 ever rolled around. In the U.S., we'd have started including leaflets asking diners to ask themselves if they had A Problem.
Before leaving for Europe, I tried to come up with housewarming gift ideas for people I was visiting. What to bring Ron and his new wife in the Netherlands? What do you bring a guy who has retired to the Netherlands to paint? I asked my brother, also a sci-fi buff, for suggestions. Has he seen "Fringe?" he asked me. I like sci-fi but I am not a bonafide buff, so I said, I haven't seen "Fringe."
"It's the thing," he said. "Even if he's seen it, you can keep the DVD series." He assured me it was the perfect thing. I ordered it from amazon.com and stuffed it in my bag.
The whole point of visiting your friend who has married someone from another country and gone off to live there is to check out their new life and to see them doing well and happy. You want to see all their stuff in the new place for yourself. You want to see them living well. You want that for them. Plus, the only thing I had seen of the Netherlands was Amsterdam, the smokey-smoke stuff, the Red Light district, the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh museum, which was kind of like saying you'd seen London when all you'd seen of it were the bathrooms and the duty free shops in Heathrow.
On the surface, since the Netherlands is a European country, at first you think that it would be easy to move there and live since people are mostly friendly ("hello" is "allo" -- no problem there...not like, say, Switzerland (lol), and many people speak English without getting huffy about it). At closer range, you discover that you would have to reconsider many things...(and you thought the French were relaxed about drinking)... 8-/
Arnhem is a three-kiss town (three kisses on the cheek to say hello or goodbye, as opposed to Paris, which is a two-kiss town, and Reims, which is a four-kiss town. At a wedding in Reims, with eight people in the room, it takes 32 kisses just to get out of the room 8-) I had never met Geri, Ron's wife, before, but I liked her immediately. We went back to their apartment and the very nice guest room (for any HCC people who are thinking of visiting), caught up on old times, admired Ron's artwork on display in the apartment (which put the art in the museum we visited later to shame), had some wine and home cooked food, including white asparagus which I had heard about but never seen before, and came to the immediate discovery that Ron had not seen "Fringe" :)
One episode of the pilot later, we were all hooked (thanks, Bill), especially as each show got progressively weirder and more interesting.
Info online for anyone else who wants to go down that crooked little path as
well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_%28TV_series%29
For the next few days, I followed Ron's Retired Life, which involved sleeping until 11 am (which I highly recommend to anyone who can get away with it), and then having breakfast, looking at your email to see if anything is going on (I would tell Ron about Colleague being back online again and he would laugh and say that he did NOT miss those messages), and then deciding whether today was the day to visit the modern art museum or to walk into town to shop.
They had really interesting exhibits at the Het Kröller-Müller Museum of Modern Art =8^o -- extremely weird stuff by Jan Fabre -- but I liked the Van Goghs best -- they had so many of his older paintings, and I had no idea he started out so dark. They had a lot of my favorite paintings by Van Gogh, so it was a real pleasure to walk through the gallery, which more than made up for some of the disturbing stuff that they had out front and center that was meant to shock and gross you out.
Everywhere we went: so many bikes everywhere -- and not the glorious ten-speeds we are used to seeing in the States, but just average bikes, junky bikes, ratty old bikes, serviceable bikes, something that will get you around, something that won't break your heart if someone steals it, but bikes everywhere. And the whole city given over to bikes, with real bike paths, not the half-assed paths we have in Columbia that dribble away to nothing, and the cars crowding them off the roads, but a city planned around the idea that bikes exist and need to be taken into account. Ron shipped his car to the Netherlands and had to have it retrofitted to coexist in a bike-centric world, with lights added to the mirrors and other modifications. He said that as soon as kids come out of the womb, they put them on a bike, and I believed it after a couple of days of watching people go by. Every time I turned around, there was someone bearing down on you or whizzing past you on a bike. Children, grandmothers, housewives with groceries, people carrying armfuls of flowers, schoolkids with backpacks, businessmen in suits, athletes in Lycra. None of these people were wearing a helmet. (Mind boggling, of course...insert American spaz over safety here.)
What happens when it snows? They just let a little air out of the tires, Ron said, and keep on going, right over the ice. They don't close schools; they just send the kids out like any other day. (Pause for OMG no way, since we close schools for a single white flake falling from the sky.)
Geri and I walked around the city, picking up Indonesian food to bring back for dinner, stopped for ice cream cones (no choc-van-straw...more like lavender and hazelnut) and chatted, looking for classic Netherlands souvenirs and tulip vases and coming across the remains of the Red Light District before they tore the block down (a razed parking lot now, but you can still see the house built on the second floor where the pimp set himself up so he could watch over his "stock" -- bizarre...!
Geri was a gourmet cook without needing cookbooks or the FoodNetwork, and could work a chignon and be chic (me, I looked like a dorky librarian). On our way back from the museum, she pointed out her old school where she biked back and forth (did she say fourteen miles???) and I asked if she had ever fallen off her bike and she offhandedly pointed out bones here and there that had broken and mended like it was nothing.
(Pause to think of the elementary school back home where mothers regularly stop traffic to open all their minivan doors so the Little Baby Jesus or the Nouvella Immaculata can get out and they can put his/her hand-packed lunch in his/her hand with the hand-peeled baby carrots and the handmade soup, and she can look out for puddles and rocks and bullies and other obstacles and then and ONLY then get tearfully back into her minivan and contemplate the bleakness of the empty hours until her progeny is returned to her bosom.)
I was surprised by the number of coffeehouses in town. I had thought they were limited to Amsterdam, as if Amsterdam was Las Vegas, but they were everywhere in Arnhem too, and seemed to attract the same type of stoner dude, but no women getting high or looking to get picked up by these guys, the way you'd see at a normal bar serving good old (safe and legal, ha!) alcohol. Inside one, you could see pool tables and signs for things you could order to drink -- alcohol, Red Bull, etc., but no posters for live music or indications of activity other than what the neon marijuana leaf in the window indicated.
As we walked by one of them, someone mumbled, "Hey lady -- " but I didn't turn around or acknowledge it, because everyone knows that nothing good ever follows "Hey lady" -- it's usually of the "got any spare change?/you have toilet paper stuck to your shoe/wanna see my wang?" variety of discourse.
So what would you be doing if I wasn't here? I asked Ron over breakfast the second day. Studying Dutch, he said. It was one of the requirements for becoming a permanent resident, although he was planning to go through the standard course and leave it at that, because he wanted to spend his time painting. Apparently, learning Dutch is harder than it looks. An interesting fun fact to know and tell about Dutch: there is one word (folie) for both cling film and foil, which I think would cause confusion with microwave oven use -- to me, cling film and foil are two completely separate things and need different words, but the Dutch get by with using the same word for both things. How is this possible?
Also, in the Netherlands, it is necessary to register yourself in the city where you are living. Ron said they asked him if he had de-registered from Columbia when he left the States. No, we don't do that in the United States, he told them. (Insert conspiracy theory here if we started doing that in the U.S....if someone tried to get that instigated, I would think it would get them...well, in Dutch :)
A couple of days later, I was sorry to leave Ron and Geri and their warm hospitality (and before seeing how the first season of "Fringe" ended...!) and I sneaked out of the Netherlands without alerting the authorities, but then, I didn't let them know when I came in either, so I guess it doesn't matter ;-)