Athena’s Banquet

...Okay, this is not sign language.  This is a story told in visual-gestural communication.

Enjoy…

Girl meets bear

Today was our last day in Amsterdam.  Part of me is sad to be heading home, but mostly I’m relieved.  It’s been a really long trip, and I miss my life back in Seattle.

We had the day free to do pretty much whatever we wanted, so I went to Bagel Espresso for breakfast, just up the street.  I’m well past the point of cultural exploration through food now; I want familiar stuff, I want comfort food, I want a frackking bagel.

So I had one.  With cream cheese and smoked salmon and capers and onions.  It was delicious.

I also bumped into Trent and another student while I was there, which was funny because I had dinner with the same people last night.  I think I might miss this part of things – the part where you randomly run into people you know pretty much everywhere.  I wonder if the tradeoff of having my own apartment again is worth it (hint: OH MY GOD YES).

The Guan Yin Temple was next on my list – it’s a Buddhist temple in Chinatown.  I got there a few minutes before it opened, and just wandered around the square for a bit.  There was construction going on and most of the street was ripped up, with plywood put down to act as sidewalks.  It worked pretty well, although I got far too much sand in my shoe which is the sort of thing that irks me to no end.  A few minutes before the temple opened, a man came out to sweep the steps and continued sweeping as people started to go in.

It was definitely a bit touristy.  There were a lot of old Chinese women in bright clothes, but at the same time it was immensely peaceful.  Shortly after I came in a woman knelt in front of one of the statues and began making obeisances.  The rest of the people just flowed around her.  I guess that’s just how it works.  She didn’t seem to mind.

I stayed for a short while, and then went off to try to find the Jewish Museum.  This was unsuccessful, as it turns out – I found the neighborhood, I found the cross-streets, I did not find the museum.  There must have been some anti-Sarah force-field on it that day.

I did, however, locate a very large, very elaborate greenhouse – it would be more accurate to say that said greenhouse was sufficiently enormous to not be ignored.  So I went there instead.  It turned out to be part of the Hortus Botanicus—the Botanical Gardens.  Despite my apparent allergy to all things natural, I really like botanical gardens and this one was a doozy.  The greenhouse had three zones at different temperatures, and you could walk up a set of stairs and wander around the tops of the trees.  The plants were generally organized by evolutionary stage, so you could see the gymnosperms in one cluster and the conifers in another area and then the monocots and dicots and man, it was neat.  My camera died just after I got there, so I didn’t get any great photos.  This made me terribly sad.  They had an ENORMOUS lotus plant in a pond, which I had not realized looked quite so vaginal and dangerous—they have these weird fleshy spikes all over!  And then I walked up to a plant with enormous, beautiful glossy black berries.  I wanted very much to put one in my mouth, and then I read the little card that identified it as atropa belladonna – deadly nightshade.  Let’s not do that.

After I got hungry, I stopped at the little cafe on the grounds and had a slice of apple cake and a mug of coffee.  I have drunk more coffee and more alcohol on this trip than I ever have in my life—and I am so looking forward to detoxing.

(The coffee is wicked good, though.)

Dinner tonight was arranged by Trent at the Koffeehuis van’t Volksbond.  This was an amazing room, with huge painted roses climbing up the wall and an enormous painting of a comic-book superheroine—always a bonus!

The food was spectacular.  I finished with a dessert that consisted entirely of cheese and these weird little nutty toast things.  The cheese was very…um…fragrant; my classmates three or four seats down were commenting on it.  But so, so tasty.  They had shaved it into ruffles, so when they brought it to me at first I thought they had brought me a huge white cabbage leaf.  But no.  Cheese.  Nom.

And then we took the tram back to the hotel, since I would be rising at 4:30 to head to the airport (yaaaaar).  There was a smidge of excitement on the way home, since my mouth and throat felt weird and spiky.  I advised my two traveling companions of this and of the presence of my epi-pen, took two Benadryl, and coped.  Nothing exciting happened; I just love having the “Hey, guys, not to freak you out or anything but if I, like, stop breathing, could you please stab me with this and then call an ambulance?  That’d be great.  Thanks.” conversation.  It always goes so well.

But!  As I say, nothing exciting happened.  I went home, packed (throwing my favorite shoes away in the process, since they have sprouted actual holes in their bottoms), and went to bed for a scant four hours.  Then followed a thirty-hour period of more-or-less awakeness.  The first thing I did once I got through customs in Houston was buy a copy of Catching Fire.

And then I was home.  Home is beautiful.  I missed it.

Today was our last day in Rotterdam – definitely a little bittersweet.  I’m glad we’re coming to the end of the trip, but the hotel has become very homey and comfortable over the last few weeks, and I’m a little apprehensive about moving to another city and another hotel.  I’m also, just to be honest, running out of cope.

Several of us had made up a list of all the things we needed to do before we left Rotterdam, so I tagged along on several of these.  We went to the nearby windmill in Delftshaven, which was so cool.  They let us go all the way up these incredibly steep ladder-stairs (and when I say steep you must remember that I’ve been in Rotterdam for three weeks and my definition of steep has been well-recalibrated.  These.  Were.  Steep.) to see the various levels of the windmill,  which was running and  whoosh-whooshing past us the whole time.  And we could go out on the viewing platform, although they had (wisely, I’m sure) roped off the bits where you might actually get whacked by the blades.  The grinding stones were also not in motion, but you could see all the parts and where everything fitted together.  I thought about buying some flour from them, but then decided that it was too heavy for me to take home – I’m already running terribly close to the weight allowances for carryons.

The grindstone

So as I got on the train at the airport to head to Copenhagen Center, I kept hearing the little man in the intercom saying something about this train ending at Elsinore.  Elsinore, Elsinore, wait, yes, there’s that OTHER book about Denmark.  Some English dude wrote it.  Ends in death.  A fair bit of moping goes on.  Invented emo.

Of course, I speak of Hamlet, but not in iambic pentameter because I am not feeling creative like that right now.

Yes!  Apparently Elsinore (properly Helsingør) is quite close to Copenhagen, a 45-minute train ride and a fifteen-minute walk out to the castle.  Clearly it was meant to be.  (Aside: This is one of the awesome things about traveling alone.  “Oooh, a shiny!  Let’s do it!”  If my train had terminated elsewhere I probably would not have ended up exploring a castle damply, but it did, and I did, and it was lovely.)

So this morning I got up and ate the hotel breakfast (note: mistake; overpriced and also the sudden realization that your hard-boiled egg is, in fact, soft-boiled is both horrifying and messy.), then trotted two blocks over to the train station to head out.  There was a bit of confusion from me about where to validate my pre-purchased ticket (bought it yesterday), but I managed to get on the earlier train which left the station about ten minutes after I arrived there.  Perfect.

Eggs here have labels. Whut?

The ride was largely uneventful aside from a long wait at a station about two-thirds of the way there followed by an announcement from the conductor: “Ladies and gentlemen, please accept our apologies.  We were delayed due to false alarm because somebody was smoking in the toilet.”

Bear and Dragon wait for the train to start again.

Awkward.

At least the station is beautiful!

The weather had been variable all day and continued being so as I disembarked and started the walk to the castle.  I was a bit worried about finding it but it turns out that that was unnecessary.  It’s a huge bloody castle.  Sitting out on a promentory.  It’s pretty unmissable.  Rain kept periodically sheeting down, and my pants ended up quite damp not more than halfway to the castle.  Bear and Dragon had to hitch a ride under my raincoat.

As I said, unmissable.  This was from right outside the train station.

I passed this fountain, in the center of a small but lovely garden right at the intersection of two of the larger streets.  The flowers were beautiful, but I felt like Death of Snails as I tried to very carefully pick my way in to take some photos.

I bought a ticket for all four parts of the castle area (Royal Chambers, Cellars, Chapel, and Maritime Museum), but I only have pictures of the castle since my camera battery died halfway through.  Major bummer, since the cellars were absolutely astonishing and the Maritime Museum had the world’s oldest shipbiscuit and a model ship made out of cloves.

Guards kept walking past and giggling slightly when they saw me taking photos.  But nobody said anything, so that’s okay.

I did not see anything I recognized as an arras.  I was disappointed.

This bed giggled though.  It was odd.

This was on the ceiling in one room.  I hope it wasn’t anyone’s bedroom.

There were lots of tapestries though.

Playmobil makes for strange and uneasy oil paintings.

I wished I had gone ahead and bought the flashlight for the cellars, since about halfway through they give up on lighting them entirely and I think you’re just supposed to find your way out.  That part was creepy to the point where I got weirded out and left, back the way I’d come.  The statue of Holger Danske down there is also strangely majestic and awe-ful.  I would not like to meet him in battle.  Once again, American Gods made oddly appropriate recent-reading material.

The statue looked like this, except rounder.

There were, of course, multiple references to Hamlet and to Shakespeare, including a few costumes and several images from the plays that are put on each year.  Some of them looked quite spectacular.  I didn’t get any pictures of these, unfortunately.

I had lunch before heading back to Copenhagen.  I wish I could say it was delicious.  It wasn’t.

Tomorrow I’ll head back to Rotterdam for a week or so before we collectively move to Amsterdam.

I feel a little bit bad and a little bit like a poser when  I accept guide book recommendations on eateries.  If I were a real traveler, one of the people who charges into the Australian outback armed with no more than a bowie knife and a flask of whisky, I’d be…well, I’d be dead, to start, but I’d also be ashamed to be caught with a copy of “Lonely Planet Australia.”  Which I expect tells you exactly which bowie knife to purchase from Levenger.

No, real foodies stride into local eateries with intent and purpose, ordering fearlessly things wot they know knowt of and which turn out to be delicious and delightful local concoctions that they then learn how to make and take the recipes home to all their friends and families.

Or they turn out to be herring.  I have a rant about herring coming later.  Spoiler: herring is evil.

At any rate, here I am in Ankara, a Turkish place recommended by the guidebook, after eating last night at another place recommended by the guidebook and absolutely swamped with tourists and their broad flat American accents.

And I suppose I was adventurous this morning, what with the going off half-cocked to find a bakery.  But by the time dinnertime rolls around I’ve usually expended most of my energy for the day, my feet are appallingly sore, and I don’t quite dare to have a bad meal.

So that’s the thing.  A meal from a guidebook restaurant is often not spectacular; lowest common denominator and all that.  But it is, almost always, at least passable, competently executed, and edible.  Also, they usually tell you roughly what it will cost which is pretty vital at this stage.  The opportunity cost is way too high for me right now to go rambling off.  Even in Rotterdam the pressure is  lessened – I have almost three weeks there, while in Copenhagen I have three dinners, three lunches, three breakfasts, and a semblance of a budget to worry about.  It’s quite entirely possible that the crowded and charming brasserie down the street is much better than this, but it’s also quite possible that they serve nothing but herring.

And anyway, Ankara really is pretty good.  So there.

Today I skipped the 85 kroner hotel breakfast in favor of wandering the streets in search of food.  This worked out better than I had hoped, as just a block away was this wee hole-in-the-wall bakery (you will know the bakery by the sign of the giant plastic pretzel) where I was able, by dint of a fair bit of pointing, to obtain for myself a almond-yellow hand-sized pie-shaped thing, which upon further inspection of the oral variety turned out to be a cold sweet cakey pastry with a nice creamy filling.  It tasted a bit like underbaked cake, and was delicious.  And cheap!  Only 10 Kroner for a most satisfactory breakfast.

I ate it as I walked over to Slotsholmen, where they have a variety of castles all stacked on top of each other, some of which you can wander around inside at will.  Apparently the Danes have real issues with fire security, and have managed to burn down their castle more than a few times (which is on top of the times when it’s been sacked by the Swedes and a team of rock-cutters (no,  seriously!) have been called in to dismantle it.)  But they keep building it on the same site, so there are giant underlayers of castles underneath the top one, and for a mere 70 kr. one can go ramble around the underside.

Or, as happened in my case, you could get there a few minutes before 10a, walk around the courtyard and top castle, find the entrance to the undercastle (okay, it’s called the Ruins of Absalon cause he was the dude what built the first castle, but I like undercastle better), note the rather absolute state of its closure, walk around for a while, return to the entrance, note its continued state of closure, walk to the Jewish Museum a few blocks away, note its closure until 1pm, walk back to the entrance, give up and find the gift shop, ask if the ruins were open today, and find out that the guy in the gift shop who was supposed to open the ruins forgot that it was his day to open the ruins, watch him blush furiously and get (one assumes) ribbed in Danish by his coworkers, and then get escorted down and let in for free.  It was lovely and dark and creepy down there, and reminded me strongly of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico although rather more man-made and on a substantially smaller scale.

The Jewish Museum didn’t open until 1, as mentioned before, so I pulled out my guidebook and figured out that the Royal Library was also quite nearby.  Being a library sort of person, I decided that this would be a very adequate place for a stopover and wait, so I found my way in (through a long wind-tunnel formed by two very tall buildings, and I assure you that the wind really needed no assistance), mucked about the gift shop for a while, buying myself a few small notebooks and pens because I am an absolute sucker for European school supplies, and then got a mocha that started with a enormous glob of solid chocolate paste being dropped into the bottom of the glass.  Which is, really, how all good drinks should start.  I decided that one of the notebooks would be a travel journal and the other could be a quilting notebook (it has graph paper inside!) and so began journaling in the one I had decided was a travel journal.  Which is what I’m transcribing now, several days later, and with more funny put in.  One hopes.

The library was right on a canal, so the tour-boats kept going by and the gulls kept diving down to eat whatever they were eating.  It was very wild and very pleasant.

At 2 (I got sidetracked by a public access computer terminal and some emailing) I went over to the Jewish Museum, which had a rather spectacular collection of artifacts particularly focusing on the Danish rescue of their Jews during World War II.  This was one of the reasons (okay, most of them actually) that I wanted to come to Copenhagen, because of  Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars and its recounting of how the Danes snuck most of their Jewish population out to Sweden.  It was also pretty architecturally amazing, with off-kilter walls and subtly slanted floors.

By 3 (it’s a small museum), I was horribly hungry so  went back to the library cafe and got a sandwich for 40 kr ($7).  I also checked on the status of the ballet, which sells substantially discounted tickets the day of the performance, but they weren’t actually performing anything that night, which was very very sad.  At 4 I headed over to the National Museum (free admission!), but I didn’t realize that they closed at 5, so I got to do a quick run through the Egyptian amulet collection (which was a TRIP after just finishing American Gods, I tell you what), check out the scent room (Really!  A room of smells!), and then head back to my hotel for a well-earned collapse.

The next day I went to Elsinore.

I managed to perfectly time my trip this morning – trains pulled into the station just as I got to the platform until I got to Rotterdam Central, where I had a 25 minute wait, which gave me just enough time to use the bathroom and grab a sandwich and some juice.  The juice turned out to be very odd juice, with chunks of fruit inside it, which was baffling.  And also nearly made me spew it across the seat in front of me since I do not usually expect things to bob up against my lips as I drink juices.

My flight to Copenhagen was uneventful apart from the part where I worried all morning about the weather in Rotterdam, which was awful.  Rain kept sheeting sideways, and then the sun would break out, and then the building would judder from the wind.  It was distressing, but ultimately irrelevant as we took off precisely on time.  I slept for a good chunk of the flight and read American Gods for the rest of it.  Arrival was likewise uneventful, aside from the part where I asked the very nice (and not-uncomely…this was a bit of a theme) gentleman at the tourist information desk in a faint panic if they even had passport control here.  No, evidently, once you’re in the EU you’re quite welcome to hop from country to country with scarcely more than a by-your-leave, although they did check my passport before I boarded the plane.  Still, the European habit of having a customs station that consists entirely of an unguarded doorway marked “Nothing to declare” is deeply strange and unsettling.  They also evidently don’t care if you have 100 grams of toothpaste in a tube that could, conceivably, hold more than 100 grams.  This would just never fly in the States.

My hotel here is all of two blocks from the train station, which is a quick and direct ride from the airport.  The money is absolutely gorgeous, and the women have great hair and better sweaters.  My hotel is also very evidently in close proximity to the red light district, unless the middle-aged well-suited gentleman I passed has a very inappropriate, highly physical relationship with his daughter or his secretary.  And it’s also quite possible that the young woman with fascinating taste in footwear  just really needed directions.  But I kind of doubt it.

The weather is tumultuous here; I think there’s some big system affecting all of Europe.  It goes from sunny to squalls to knock-you-off-your-feet gusts of wind in quick succession.  The horizon as our plane approached was smudged out by low grey clouds and disappeared in watercolor mists.

I had dinner at Lê Lê, a Vietnamese restaurant recommended by my guidebook (yes, I’m aware that there’s something absurd about going to a Vietnamese restaurant in Copenhagen, especially as I’m from Seattle, which has all the Vietnamese food you can shake a stick at).  Despite that, it was both delicious and full of vegetables, but also spendy and full of tourists, which is fair enough since I am one.  I had the bun with tiger prawns, which were enormous, warm, and wrapped in herbs and fried phyllo dough.  It was fantastic.

My hotel room is small and expensive, but comfortable enough.  The shower has enough water pressure to flay you alive, and I sort of want to bring it home with me; it’s also approximately the size of a breadbox, is missing floor tiles, and gets water ALL over the bathroom floor.  The toilet is waterstained, construction crews start work at 6 a.m. sharp, and I’m having a wonderful time.

Two of my classmates had an entirely frumptious wheeze.  People would get into groups of three, contribute 5 Euros to the kitty, and go forth to the Tuesday market, where we would endeavor to assemble the craziest, awesomest outfit we could put together.  One member of the group would don this outfit and “strut her stuff” as I believe the kids are calling it nowadays, and John Baan, the proprietor of our hotel, and whomever else we could gather up would judge the whole affair.  The judging would be very official, with points and scorecards and all that sort of thing.  The winners would get infinite praise and adulation and also drinks.  We are very motivated by beer, we are.

The three of us went to the market last afternoon, and most of our shopping process went about like this:

• Person picks up item of clothing.


• Other people look at it.


• Hmmms all around.


• “No, you know, I don’t think it’s heinous enough.”


• “Yeah, you’re right.  It needs too be more heinous.”


• Picks up something else heinouser.


• “YES!” (in chorus)

We ended up with:

• hot-pink hot pants with red embroidered hearts


• an aqua tube bra


• enormous orange spangly earrings


• three neon scrunchies (purple, yellow, and blue)


• a heinous green plaid pre-tied tie


• stripey footless stockings


• an enormous jeweled gold shiny hair grippy thingie


• a horrible floaty yellow gauze and red-satin-stuff shirt.

Before the show tonight I went up to A.H.’s room, where I put on all of it, in its horrible clashingness, and then got made up with purple eyeliner and hearts by my eyes and all kinds of shimmer stuff.  It was sad that none of us had any really horrible makeup.  I didn’t pack any at all, reasoning that I had no reason in particular to dress up and I didn’t want to take the space, and the other people in my group both just had, you know, tasteful stuff.  Stuff they actually wear.  Weirdos.

I was soundly defeated by the topiary tits.   Sad, but really, nobody stands a chance against a shrubbery.

So we’ve all been burning our candle at both ends a little bit—okay, a lot—and wanted a nice quiet night in.  Our professor had brought his banjo (apparently it’s a critical part of his sanity routine, which explains so much) and L.M. had brought her guitar; quite a lot of my classmates had brought their wicked amazing singing voices, and when you combine all of these with a little bit of wine from the grocery store you end up with a spectacular evening.

It was really, really lovely.  I don’t have any pictures or video, but it was exactly what I needed tonight.

We spent Saturday in a Dutch national park, “De Hoge Veluwe”.  It.  Was.  Awesome.

The Dutch national obsssion with bikes apparently led to the creation of this park, which is, admittedly, out in the back of the beyond and requiring two separate bus trips (one of them very, very long) out there.  Then this wee little shuttle picks you up at the bus stop and whisks you further out to the countryside where a guard waits at a gate and a little hut houses two friendly Dutchwomen who will be happy to sell you a ticket to the park (but not the art museum inside) for a mere 7 euros.  Once you’ve shown the guard your ticket, you can walk over to the bike racks which house several hundred white, not-terribly-nice-but-still-effective bikes.  Some have baby seats in various locations, but most are just plain old bicycles.  Grab one, hop on, and bike (following the directional mushrooms) to the museum at the center of the park,whereupon another Dutch gentleman will be happy to sell you a ticket to the Kröller-Müller Museum (student prices 3.50 euros; not sure what regular price is) and yet another will very politely coat-check your jacket and purse, and then you are free to explore the museum and the extensive and awesome outdoor sculpture garden.

There was an extensive and spectacular collection of van Goghs (of course), quite a lot of pointillist stuff, a few Mondrians (I took some photos in case I decide to make quilts out of them), and a bunch of stuff by an artist I had never heard of (look, art is not my thing.  Don’t hate me.) named Jean Metzinger.  I had honestly never gotten van Gogh before this trip; I’d seen plenty of prints and had a sufficiency of art teachers wax rhapsodic, but nothing really captures the buttery texture of his light like seeing it in person.  It was wonderful.

There was also a room with two works by Ana Maria Tavares, The Wish-ribbon net and Crystal Waters.  Both were very, very lovely and made me happy in a very deep and quiet way.

(Also, apparently my camera is somewhat flaky and only takes photos about half the time I tell it to.  I am displeased, but will struggle through.  I guess that little flashing hand warning symbol actually meant something…who knew?)

I did a quick walkthrough of the sculpture gardens but was pretty arted out by that point, so instead two friends and I went for a ride around the park before riding back to the entrannce.  We met up with a larger group heading back into Arnhem at the bus stop, then about six of us decided to head back to Rotterdam that afternoon, as we were pretty pooped, not sleeping very well in the hostel, and in need of a quiet day of leisure.  Which is what I did.  which is when these entries got written.

Backdatedly yours,
Sarah