Beautiful Women

Cabin 275 - Het Land van Bartje - Ees - Drenthe - The Netherlands

Crocus vakantie. Oh, what a beautiful thing. No one likes February. Everything is boring in Feburary. Christmas is over, and spring isn't coming, and isn't coming, and isn't coming. School isn't over yet, it isn't even almost over. Everything is just so: bleh, normal, boring, gray. And then, then comes... the crocus vacation. A week in February with no school. Heaven. We'd been planning our vacation from last week for a while. It started out with Milja, me, Anita, and Isabel- Anita's daughter, and then we decided to Adrienne (14) and Joleen (9) to come too. Then we had to decide where to go.

The Netherlands is really tiny, which is why it's still so suprising to me that if you drive for an hour, the landscape is different, the weather is different, and the people speak a different dialect of Dutch. For our vacation we ended up two and half hours away from Akersloot; in Drenthe. Drenthe is a province of the Netherlands in the most northern part, next to Friesland (where they speak Fries... no one can understand it!). The landscape is a lot the same as here, but there's less cars, people, buildings, and cities. Almost everything is farm land, and the houses are white stone cottages with thatched roofs. The older houses are built attached to the barn's or "kop, hals, romp" (head, neck, butt) like Milja had learned at school. There's the house, an area between, and then the barn- all built together.

This is starting to sound a little bit like we drove right into the wilderness and spent a week living with the cows and the sheep. That's not really how it was... with six people we stayed in an eight person house. There were two bathrooms, a bathtub, a tanning bed, a sauna, and four two person bedrooms. So, we weren't sleeping in a barn stall or anything.

We left for Drenthe on Monday afternoon and drove straight to The Land van Bartje (the park where we stayed).

Every morning we slept in, showered, and ate a long slow breakfast. By the time we were out the door it was usually noon or so. We'd do something in the area, or drive a little ways, and then come back and cook dinner. One of our afternoons was spent walking in the woods, another one grocery shopping, and playing games. One afternoon we drove around the entire area looking at "hunnebedden" these piles of rocks (to put it eloquently) where people were buried under during the ice age. I'm trying hard here, but I can't work up all that much enthusiasm for the hunnebedden. The first stop was interesting, but after a few stops I'd pretty much had it.

Though, in defense from the hunnen (who made the hunnebedden), I have to say that it was probably pretty hard work to pile all those rocks on top of each other. And they are an improtant part of Dutch history. So, I suppose I'm glad I got to see them.

The day after we went to the hunnebedden, we drove to a seal nursery about 40 minutes away. A woman started the seal nursery from her house with just a few seals, and it's grown into something huge. People from all over the Netherlands call this nursery if they find a sick or injured seal and then the volunteers come get them. The seals go through all of these different phases of rehabilitation, and once they're healed they get released back into the wild. Seals are much cuter and more exciting than hunnebedden. The ones outside in the water, that were going to be realeased soon were super active. They made noise, and rolled around, and played with each other a ton. After we spent a little bit of time by the seals we drove back to our "Drenthe huis" through a big city called Groninge. In the fall I ran a four mile race there, but I didn't get to see very much of the city or anything. This time we walked through the centrum and went in a few of the stores. We drove back home in the dark, and everyone collapsed on the couch.

On Friday we started the drive back to North Holland, but we made a few stops along the way. Our route was through Friesland, so I can check another province of The Netherlands off my list. The first stop was a town called Sneek, where we drank coffee and Anita bought a ton of things to hang up in the garden of our school. The next stop was much longer, and that was at a planetarium in a small town. The man who lived there had built a working model of the solar system in the 1600's. Don't expect an explanation of how he did it, but the earth, the sun, the moon, and all of the planets rotated around each other at the same speed that they actually do. It was a sort of huge clock made out of 10,000 rotating pegs. There was a weight hanging from a pendulum, and the weight made the pegs move and everything else with them. There were clocks that showed the date, the time, which star sign it is now, and the year. There I was in Friesland- looking at our entire solar system!

After we left the planetarium we made another very short stop by the afsluitdijk. It's a dike that separates the North Sea from the Ijsselmeer. The road is 32 km long, and that's all it is. The road, on water on both sides. We got out of the car for about 30 seconds, took a picture, and then got back in. The wind here is nothing to laugh about!

There you have it. A week of vacation in Drenthe, the Netherlands. Now when I read about the things we went to see, it doesn't sound like that much, but it was vacation, and what made it vacation wasn't running around all day long seeing even more hunnebedden, and museums, and who knows what. What made it vacation was being able to sleep in until 8:00, and sitting at the breakfast table for two hours. It was playing games when it rained outside, putting on mud masks, drinking cappucinos, sitting in the bathtub and the sauna, watching the younger girls get incredibly hyper from all the candy they ate, and baking chocolate chip cookies in the microwave. Vacation can't get much better than that.

FYI

For everyone who has just been dying to know.... I passed the Dutch test! 78 out of 83 points, so it wasn't as much of a problem as I thought is was going to be. Whew! I'm so happy that's out of the way. Not that there's any real consequences for not passing the test, but like I said before: I would have been SO embarrassed.


Since it's almost next weekend, I think it's about time to write about last weekend. Friday night was another non-fitness night for Milja. When I first got here, she told me right away how she likes to go the the fitness center every Friday after work. Well, that hasn't happened in about two months. T'here's always SOMETHING, and even though I won't take the blame for every Friday she didn't get to work out, I do have to say I'm probably responsible for the majority of them. I had worked out earlier in the day, so by the time Milja came home I was completely showered and ready to go watch salsa dancing in Amsterdam. Anita loves things like salsa dancing and concerts, so we all (Milja and me, Anita and Isabel, and Anita's friend and her daughter) got tickets to go watch some salsa dancer in a theater on the Leidseplein (sp?). Basically the only place's I've really been in Amsterdam are the Dam, where the main shopping street is close to, and the Red Light District. The two most important places, right? I'd never been to the Leidseplein before, and I don't know if it's just a really different part of Amsterdam, or if everything changes at night, but I had another one of those "I'm SO in Europe right now" moments. There were lights all through the streets, and all of the restaurants and cafes were full of people. It's hard to explain; there's not just one thing you can point out that makes it feel so Europy (yes, I just made that word up), it's more of a feeling. And the feeling was definitely there. Before we went to the theater we ate at a Mexican restuarant. I was a little bit surprised at how many English speaking people there were walking through the streets, and ordering food in English. I guess not all of the tourists that come to the Netherlands come to Akersloot where I can see them.

After eating we walked to the theater and went in right in time to sit at the last of three tables. Other than that it was standing room. At first we thought we were really smart for coming so early and getting a table, but as soon as the theatre started to fill up we realized that we had to stand up anyway, or we wouldn't be able to see anything. Once the dancers started, though, I forgot that I was standing up, because watching them was so interesting. The group was about five girls and three guys. A few of the girls could speak enough Dutch to tell the crowd what was going on, but all of the songs were in Spanish. The beat to salsa music is so fun to listen to- you don't get bored at all. And watching them dance is amazing. When they first walked into the theater the girls just looked like normal people, and after they started dancing they were incredibly beautiful. Their dancing has inspired me to be a salsa dancer in my next life- since we all know it's definitely not going to work out in this one. My favorite song? First, the one about bon-bons, because everyone likes chocolate (I take mine liquor free though) and second, the song about going on a diet. They sang about all of the amazing Dutch foods that make them fat when they come here, and how they always say that they're going to start on a diet... tomorrow.


Saturday was a quiet day. I slept in, went to the fitness center, did a little bit of homework, and grocery shopped with Milja. For dinner we ate fish by Opa, and everyone was in bed early. On Sunday, Milja, Peter, and I drove to Haarlem to do a walking tour of the "hofjes." Haarlem is another big city about half an hour away from us with the car- in the same directino as Amsterdam. "Hofjes" are houses from the olden days that are all really small and built around a type of courtyard. I did learn a little bit more about the "hofjes" than that, but I don't want to explain it innacurately, so I just won't try at all. When we first got to Haarlem in the morning it was all misty outside, and there was no one on the streets at all. Everything was so quiet and pretty, and we looked at the houses on the canals, and all of the hofjes. The "I'm SO in Europe right now" feeling came back again for the second time in the weekend. We took a break about halfway through the morning and sat in a cafe, then kept going on the route. The streets got a little bit busier as we went along, and before we went back at the end of the day we went in a few of the stores that were just starting to open. In the afternoon we watched Taiana play handball and Opa came and ate dinner with us.

Another important thing this week: I finally started running with TDR again. The physical therapist wrote a two week program for me, so I get to go to the practices, but not do all of the same things that the rest of the girls on the team are doing. I don't feel like I'm doin very much; the training plan involves lots of slow repeats and lots of resting, but I guess it's important to start slow. Mostly I'm just happy not to be spending my Tuesday and Thursday nights on the stationary bike anymore. Or worse- in front of the t.v. Hopefully it won't take too long to get back in shape, and I'll stay healed and inury free!

A Few Moments...

Strange Things

It doesn't feel that long ago that I walked out of security in the Amsterdam airport, went home with some strangers to their strange house, in a strange town, in a strange country. I ate some strange food, heard a strange language, went to a strange school, talked to strange kids.

Slowly it became a little bit less strange. The strangers became my family, the strange house became a home where I lie on the couch and leave my clothes on the floor. The strange city became a place where I wave to people, the strange country became a place I don't want to leave. I cook the strange food, the strange language rolls off my tongue, I find my way through the strange school, and the strange kids want to come to Wisconsin someday.

And just after the strange things all stopped being so strange, and I started getting used to them not being strange, I realized that ten months was halfway over.

There's a pink piece of tagboard hanging on the kitchen door with things I still want to do here. Lots of people have written things on the list, and it's getting so full it's going to be a strain to get even half of them done. I want to do all of the things on the list, and much more than that. Also though, I just want to be here. The things on the list are all fun Dutch things to do, but most of the things that are the best for me here aren't the things that you think of when you think of the Netherlands, they're just... "life things" and people, like sitting for an hour after dinner and talking, biking to school in the rain, grocery shopping in the tiny grocery store, candles on at night, drinking tea.

But then I miss the "life" things at home too, and the people. There's a million little things a day that make me think of home, the most random things bring this wave of memories over the tiniest, most unimportant "life" things that aren't a part of my life here. The other day I missed the Cosmopolitan magazine I always used to get in the mail so much. And eating out a few weekends ago made me think of my mom and how when we were little she always used to tell stories about what was going on in the kitchen while we were waiting for our food to come. The sound of bike wheels on the pavement still says "Dad" to me and the youngest kids in school with their gameboys and tough swagger are so Joakim. I see my friends in everything too, and even things that remind me of people I didn't even realized I missed.

Strange things that aren't strange anymore, "life things" I'm going to miss, "life things" I do miss. There's no way to describe everything going on my head. How incredibly happy I'm going to be to go home again... and how incredibly sad I'm going to be to leave.
Deciding to come here was the best decision I've ever made in my life.

"The Test"

Once again, I missed a few weeks, and though I could go back and write about everything that happened in great detail, I won't because it would be boring to write, and boring to read. I will say that Taiana turned 18 (the poster with "eindelijk volwassen"- finally grown-up- is still on the wall) and she had a great party to celebrate. Also I spent a day in Den Haag with Milja and her dad picking up my Swedish passport, visiting the Dutch government buildings, and seeing some Dutch art. And, I'm still not running with TDR, but am getting closer every day.

Saturday was "The Test." All of the hours that I spent doing lessons out of my blue "green book" that I got when I first came here, the Dutch grammar I've worked so hard to perfect, the nights I spent listening to Dutch tapes before I fell asleep, finally paid off.

Not.

There were no hours spent doing lessons out of my blue "green book" (well, maybe one, but not much more), no hard work spent perfecting my Dutch grammar, and definitely no nights listening to Dutch tapes. What there has been is countless mistakes that made me blush bright red, a varity of imitations of my "Wisconsin" accent, Swedish words that I creatively turned Dutch, several nights of poorly dreamt Dutch, physics books in Dutch, and months of hearing almost nothing other than Dutch. And I can only hope it paid off. We knew from the beginning of the year that we would have a Dutch test halfway through the year, which is why we got the blue "green book" from AFS Netherlands to study from.
In my own defense, I really didn't need the blue "green book" to learn Dutch. Now, after five months here I can get across just about any point that I want, even if I have to repeat the sentence a couple of times. The worst case scenario is that I get frustrated after the third time and end up yelling what I wanted to say instead of using a normal tone of voice, but it always works out in the end. Nobody speaks English to me anymore except for people who have just met me, but I'm not even going to get started on that because it makes me SO MAD. Phone conversations with people I don't know are also still hard, but most of the time they work out.

About the test. All of the AFS Netherlands students, whether they were from Indonesia, Hong Kong, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, or America, had to take the test. Half of us took it last Saturday and the other half took it on Sunday. We had to go to a city called Utrecht- an hour away by train, which turned out to be an incredibly beautiful city. The test started out with a 100 minute reading test. The instructions, the text, and the multiple choice questions were all in Dutch. When I first started the reading test I panicked a little right away because the first thing I saw was a packet full of text about all sorts of complicated subjects. Once you started reading though, and trying to answer the questions, it turned out that you didn't have to know the exact meaning of most of the hard words to be able to answer the questions. The difficulty of the words did make it harder to focus on the text, but overall I think that the reading part of the test went okay. After the reading test came the real hard part.
I was expecting the listening test to be easy, because listening tests aren't hard. Though I guess that my experience with listening tests doesn't go much further than my English class here, which definitely should be easy for me. The subjects of the interviews in the listening test were so boring and complicated, I can't even remember most of them. I know that the first one was about a lady who made jewelry, that one wasn't too hard. Then, there was one about a woman who gives driving lessons to people who have to drive company cars- or something like that, I know that part didn't go very well. The last one I can remember was supposed to be a lesson in higher education about caulking (sp?). Really, where would I ever have learned the words about that in Dutch? Besides the fact that the subject of all the questions in the listening test were hard, it was hard to focus for a full 70 minutes. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it went well, but I'm really not confident about the listening test- or the reading test for that matter.

Sometime this week the results from our tests come in the mail. There's no real consequences if you don't pass the test except that you have to take another one in a few months. If your test results are in the best top three, then you get to take another harder test (yay! who wouldn't want that?) that is apparently the standard Dutch test for immigrants, or something like that. I know for sure I won't be in the top three, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I passed, because I will be extremely embarrassed if I didn't. Milja says that it's okay as long as I did my best, but she always says that and it's something we generally disagree about. So, if my best wasn't good enough to pass the test, I'm still going to be embarrassed!

And the rest of you are all keeping your fingers crossed for me too, right?

Days of the Week

Should we start by talking about my feelings? The week started out a lot bit rough, not because I was homesick or anything. Homesickness is way behind me now. I mean, the year is almost halfway over. (THE YEAR IS ALMOST HALFWAY OVER?!) My frustration with not being allowed to run, combined with proefwerkweek (I explained that already- exam week, remember?), combined with who-knows-what-else, made me go a little bit crazy during the beginning of the week. On Thursday the week started to go a little bit better, though I did have an incident with my debit card.

The incident goes something like this:

Thursday afternoon I decide I need to go to the ATM and get some money so that I can pay the lady who's going to cut my hair later in the afternoon. I ride my bike happily to the ATM on my way to the fitness. Standing in front of the ATM I start to think about my pincode. "Gosh, I think to myself, I haven't used my debit card for a while. Do I still know my pin number?" I laugh at the idea of forgetting the number I've punched in so many times, in so many different stores. Like that would ever happen! I punch in the number and choose the amount of money I want to get from the ATM. The machine takes a while and then says, "You have entered the wrong pin number. Please try again." I laugh joyfully to myself, thinking that my finger must have slipped, and punch the pin code in one more time. I look around at all of the seagulls flying in the air, and the bikers riding along the canal as I wait for the machine. It beeps. "You have punched in the wrong pin code, please try again." My smile begins to slowly turn into a frown. "Did I really have the wrong number?" I think. I stand still looking at the machine for a while and contemplating it some more. Finally I smile again. I had punched in the wrong number! What was I thinking? Singing along to my iPod I punch in the right pin number that has just come to me. I stand patiently with my hand at the slot in the machine waiting for my money to come out. It doesn't. The machine beeps again. "Your pin number was not correct. This bank card is no longer usable." Oops, apparently my epiphone of the right number wasn't so brilliant as I'd thought.

What did I do next? Well, I used all of the independence that I've gained from being on my own in a strange country to contact the person I've become very dependent on. Milja! She didn't answer her phone right away, but of course she called me back during the next two minutes. Her first suggestion of going to the bank and asking them to fix it for me didn't work, since the bank was for some reason closed. After the second time I interrupted her meeting with a client (in my defense, I didn't know she was in a meeting), she convinced me that we would figure it out, and I let her get back to work.

Friday was also a day with a lot of feelings, though I didn't majorly mess anything up. First, I had to go to the physical therapist early in the morning, and she said that I wasn't going to be allowed to run again until all the pain in my leg was gone. It's not that I'm ever in a lot of pain, it's that most of the time I have a little bit of pain and if someone (for example the physical therapist) were to press down on the spot where it hurts, then I would temporarily be a lot of pain. The fact that she said I had to wait until the pain was completely gone was scary, because until then it hadn't been going away very quickly, and I hate the thought of not being able to run when I have the opportunity to run with TDR. After going to the physical therapist, I went to school to take my Spanish test. Let me just say that my Swedish is barely making it through the process of learning Dutch and my English is also suffering a little. My Spanish is completely gone. This made the Spanish test a little bit of a struggle, and when I was done I had a horrible feeling about how I did. We still don't have the results back, so that horrible feeling hasn't been put to rest yet.

When I got home from school around 11:00 on Friday, I spent a few hours feeling sorry for myself and laying on the couch. I tried eating some chocolate to make me feel better, but that didn't work very well, and only made me feel guilty for eating junk food when I wouldn't be able to run it off. Luckily, I didn't have to spend the entire afternoon laying around, because Danique (one of the few girls I know who lives in Akersloot) and the neighbor girl, Pip who's eight, came over to help me make apple pie. They do have apple pie in the Netherlands, but it's more like apple cake. We made apple pie (though the Dutch kind is really good too). The afternoon with Danique and Pip made me feel much better for a while, which proves the fact that it's hard to feel sad if you're busy. After they left I still didn't have much time to wallow in self pity, because the kitchen was an absolute disaster area and I wanted to clean it up before Milja came home.

When Milja got home from work though, I told her everything that the physical therapist said and of course in the process of explaining it got myself all worked up again. Then Milja decided that we weren't going to sit on the couch all night, we were going to do something. She called Anita, and then we went to her flat for a few hours in the evening and planned the trip we're going to take in the February vacation. We're going to Drenton, another province of the Netherlands, and staying in a cabin there. Who would have known, Planning the vacation did actually make me feel better (the house has a sauna! and a tanning bed!).

What else happened over the week? Saturday I went out with Danique, for the first time without Taiana... I'm growing up!
Sunday we ice skated with all of the other students from AFS, which was fun, because I got to see everyone that I hadn't seen in forever, and catch up on what was going on in everyone else's lives. Also on Sunday we went out to eat, "gezellig" as usual, plus I spilled a glass of water all over the table.
Monday was Taiana's 18th birthday, plus it was on January 18th, so she was 18 on her golden birthday. I don't think they do anything with golden birthdays here though. Peter drove me to the foot doctor that morning, and he had good news. Apparently my calf muscle is short, and my foot tilts inward. The combination is pulling too much on the tendon that runs underneath my foot, and makes it hurt. See, it wasn't even that complicated. The good news is that after I get new insoles for my shoes, it should stop hurting. We got back home early in the afternoon, and then people started coming for Taiana's birthday. By the end of the evening, almost the whole family was there, plus about ten of her friends. We all ate soup and sandwiches for dinner and sat around talking. Plus, there was a cake with a picture of her on it. And on Monday I only did one thing wrong. It involved a plastic bag of bread sitting on the stove, and a burner that I turned on... but hey, everything was okay in the end!