Athena’s Banquet

Today we left for a weekend excusion to Arnhem, with exciting bicycle complications.  A group of people wanted to bike part of the way, a few (a very few) wanted to bike the whole way, and some of us were lazy and just wanted to take the train.  I fell into that last category.

So the morning was pretty chaotic, with various people getting various tickets for various legs of the trip, and then some people deciding to do laundry and other leaving early to wander around Utrecht, and me deciding to hang out with the laundry contingent, although I didn’t actually hang out with them, as they were off doing laundry and I, instead, went on a hunt for expectorant.  Yes, it was thrilling.  It’s quite difficult to communicate “expectorant” in a foreign language, even when the other person is actually pretty good at English.  “I have a cough.  My cough has phlegm?  ...Mucus?  ...Gunk?  I want to cough more to make the phlegm come up.”  *puzzled look*  The second pharmacist I tried seemd  to get it and sold me something that tasted like dead, painfully alcoholic cherries combined with essence of vile, and it…seems to work?  These things are hard to tell.

The three of us left Rotterdam for Utrecht (where one has to change trains) around 2, then met up with a member of the earlier train group who decided to split off and join us instead.  We got in to Arnhem around 4, then took the bus to get to our hostel.  We got off at this stop near this huge hospital in  the middle of nowhere (I have noticed Dutch cities seem to incorporate a lot of nowhere into them.  Maybe this is a thing.) and then hunted around for signs for the Stayokay Arnhem.  A very friendly, excellent speaker-of-English woman was happy to point us in the right direction, and we made our way to the hostel just ahead of very ominous skies.  The room was…hostellish; four bunks, four cubbies, a sink, and separate closets for the toilet and shower, which is actually pretty smart design if you think about it.

Then we waited.  Gradually other members of our party showed up, and we all congregated in the bar where several members of our party had inquiries made by a bachelor-party’s worth of (German?) tourists as to whether they would like to “fucky-fucky.”  Those propositioned politely declined, although I have no doubt that the offer was made in a sincere attempt to honor our individual personhood and the goddess within each of us.

Once we had all convened (the bikers were thwarted by the complexity of escaping Rotterdam’s gravity well and ended up making it only as far as Gouda before getting on the train), dinner plans were made, which consisted mostly of taking the bus back to Arnhem Central and looking around for a likely restaurant.  My splinter group settled on a Mexican place, although we had our doubts about European proficiency with said cuisine.  It turned out to be really very good – a bit odd with respect to the inclusion of feta cheese in most dishes (I can only assume that at one point someone saw some queso fresco and got confused as to its nature and provenance), and there were several dishes on the menu that included things like raisins and nuts, but on the whole it was one of the better meals I’ve had so far in the Netherlands.  It had, at the very least, more than a passing familiarity with vegetables other than cheese.  Or meat.

Our return to the hotel was marked by a sudden downpour which utterly soaked my socks.  And thence to bed.