Amsterdam

Very nice to meet you, Lessica.

BrookeLeave a comment

At Artis, the Amsterdam zoo, the animals aren’t allowed to have names because it humanizes them.

It’s a new rule, or new-ish. Caesar the lion was 23 (very old for a lion, said the zookeeper) when he died last year, so now the zoo has one less animal with a name.

Ever since I learned about Caesar I’ve started thinking more about the things I love with names I don’t know. Like the smallest but brightest star in Minnesota, the yellow flowers that bloom in the mountains in Oregon, and literally every street in Amsterdam besides the one we live on. (I know the canals.) Not knowing their names doesn’t mean I love them any less.  It feels right when I say it about stars and important — more humane even — when I say it about lions. But it’s a bad excuse for not remembering someone’s name after you meet them at a party.

In the western United States a lot of mountains and lakes have women’s names. In Yosemite, Elizabeth Lake, Mary Lake, Dorothy Lake, Avonelle Lake, and Polly Dome are all named after the wives and daughters of the explorers and park rangers who climbed them first. How can you really know you are first to climb a mountain? If someone’s already climbed it, it might be just another name you don’t know.

And if you name a daughter and give her the name Dorothy, and then climb a mountain and name it Dorothy, are you naming the mountain after your daughter or do you just like the name Dorothy so much you used it twice?

Maybe the best way to love things that aren’t supposed to have names – wild things like mountains, and daughters, and 23-year-old-lions, and Dutch streets, and nice people at parties – is to give them a new name every time.

Mark Meyer
photo of nameless mountains by Mark Meyer

The information about mountains in Yosemite is from this essay by Lucy Bryan Green.

It’s always sunny in Amsterdam

Brooke, , , 2 Comments

If someone had asked me yesterday what my personal hell would be, I wouldn’t have known off the top of my head.

It seems like an easy enough question to answer – but those are the questions that are hardest to answer.

How many beans can you hold in your hand? No one’s ever asked me that, but tell me the type of bean and I can make a good guess.

What’s the capital of Ohio? I would probably think of it eventually. Those kinds of questions are fine.

But questions about yourself are tricky.

Answers to the questions about yourself are like feral cats, they sneak up on you when you’re alone and least expect them. And they rub against your jeans and you wonder why, and then you’re nervous to smell your jeans later.

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That’s why if someone had asked me yesterday about my personal hell, I probably would have just described the average personal hell. Maybe very loud construction, or being in a cab and realizing you don’t have enough money to cover the fare.

Last night I learned what my actual hell is because we had to try to sleep through it: constant daylight.

People talk a lot about the length of days in Amsterdam, and they complain about the short ones. They complain about how in the winter it’s dark all the time. Bring on darkness. I go to the movie theater and pay ten euros to sit in darkness. No one is paying ten euros for constant light, but here in the summer you get it for free whether you like it or not.

Last night I took a ton of cold medicine and got in bed ready to welcome sleep but the sun was still out, and there was daylight deep into the night until pretty much forever, until somehow it started getting even brighter. Then we called it morning and I got out of bed and changed from pajamas to work clothes and went to work with people who all witnessed the same thing, and we’re all pretending it didn’t happen.

There was no night last night. Can it even be morning if it wasn’t night? How do we know today is today and not still yesterday? How did anyone sleep? This doesn’t bother anyone else. And that’s what makes it a personal hell, I guess.

So, if you were going to ask, now you know.

Here’s a photo of a pigeon unsatisfied by the things it found in the trash:

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The first of probably many posts about bikes

Brooke, Leave a comment

Growing up in Minnesota there were two family sizes: regular car or minivan.

I was only eight when we became a minivan family so I don’t remember it clearly, but for other families, switching from regular car to minivan was a rite of passage. Whether you like minivans or not: four kids is too many to have in a regular car backseat. Unless one of them is only two inches tall and can sit comfortably and safely in a teacup or an Altoids tin. (Having a kid who’s only two inches tall seems really stressful. I’d much rather have two-inch-tall dad.)

I haven’t seen too many minivans in Amsterdam, but parents are definitely bringing their kids places, it’s hard to miss. And it seems like there is absolutely no limit to how many kids you can have on a bike. No matter how big your family is, it is a bike family.

The popular thing in our neighborhood is dads biking around with a small child in a little seat on the handlebars, and a larger child standing on the bar behind the dad’s back. It’s strange to see three faces stacked like that, all facing in one direction, all sort of grimacing because of the wind.

People also set two larger kids over the back wheel, sitting with their legs dangling on one side, like little ladies.

And then there are the bakfiets, where kids sit in little chairs squinting if it’s nice out, or covered in plastic like enormous leftovers if it’s rainy.

I haven’t taken any photos of people, so enjoy this family of models in a bakfiets:

bakfiets

Do you like that photo pretty much exactly as it is, but wish the kids were wearing helmets? No problem:

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Other popular ways to cycle include holding an umbrella with one hand, reading something on your phone, or listening to music. This morning I saw a woman biking without using the handlebars, because in each hand she was clutching a tote-bag sized bundle of lettuce.

Then there are the people who look just like everyone else, but I bet if you look closely you can see a little bit of hair peeking out of the pocket of their backpack, and tiny little fingers, it’s their two-inch-tall dad, on his way to work.

Ghost apartment

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Our new apartment is great, I’m not complaining about it. It’s so great that it has a fancy thermostat, the kind you control not only by adjusting the display on the wall, but also via an app you can download.

The apartment’s former tenants used the app to set the thermostat on some sort of schedule, but we don’t have the app yet. It’s only available in the Dutch iTunes store, which we need a Dutch credit card to access, and the bank won’t give us credit cards until we’ve been receiving paychecks for 90 days. So for the next 40 days our thermostat adjusts itself as it pleases. It’s like living in a great apartment with some very finicky ghosts.

Our invisible roommates will get very warm, maybe they’re doing ghost workout videos or baking ghost bread, and they’ll turn the thermostat down to 16 degrees.

We put on sweaters and go to sleep but the ghosts wake up in the night, peckish and FREEZING, and they the thermostat up to 22 degrees to make themselves comfortable.

For those of you who haven’t been thinking about Celsius thermostats as much as I have lately, which is hopefully everyone, 22 degrees is very warm. I’ve been thinking about thermostats a lot. The goal of a fancy thermostat might be to think about the thermostat less, but ours makes me think about it almost constantly. I don’t mind. I like our ghost roommates, they’re helping me get the hang of Celsius way faster than I anticipated.

Our apartment has floorboards that used to match up, but right now there are quarter-inch gaps in between some of them because the apartment is a little bigger this year than usual. The apartment’s size fluctuates a bit, because of wind or because the entire city is built on sand.

Sometimes we’ll be sitting at the table and everything will adjust slightly, and sometimes I’ll wake up in the night because the ghosts have turned up the heat, and I’ll hear all kinds of shifting sounds.

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