29 Jul 2012: Laundry Friends

29 Jul 2012:

Laundry Friends

Amsterdam, North Holland, the Netherlands

H: 20 L: 13 Weather: Partly Cloudy, Rain Late

After my time in London, I was ready for a quiet day in Amsterdam.  I didn't want to do nothing, but I definitely wanted to make sure I didn't have any disasters during the day.  I let the French students staying in the hostel wake me up with their noise, then went to get dressed.  Ugh.  My room was a pigsty.  Wrappers were lying around everywhere, and clothes were piled on top of each other haphazardly.  Over it all, the room smelled of products that one would typically associate with Amsterdam.  I quickly gathered stuff together and headed for breakfast.

Breakfast was pretty great, actually; the first "continental breakfast" that was actually continental in nature.  I tried swirling in muesli with the plain yogurt they offered, and it was actually pretty tasty.  (I have no idea if that's at all a normal thing to do, but it seemed like a good idea!)  After breakfast, I helped an Israeli man with tech support.  He apparently had gotten his first laptop (a fact that was painfully obvious) and needed some help connecting to the free wireless internet in the hostel.  My advice basically amounted to "have you tried turning it off and on again?", but it seemed to do the trick.  He was friendly enough, and I wished him luck in finding a job, which he was in Amsterdam to do.

After that, I was off to lunch, at a place recommended by Tripadvisor (my Bible for this trip).  It ended up being well worth it.  I had some sort of honey ham sandwich that came with a wonderful salad.  I'm not usually one for salads in the US, but salads in Europe are a completely different deal: this one had pineapples and strawberries in it, as well as what you might expect out of a salad.  This compared favorably against the American tradition of salads being lettuce topped with lettuce garnished with lettuce and additionally a bitter sort of salad dressing.

However, Europe has a way of teaching you how different it is from the US.  When the waitress asked whether she could get anything else for me when I was done, I said, "No thanks," which in the US is a sign for the bill.  In Europe, it's a sign for "no I don't need anything go away".  So, she disappeared, and I had to hunt her down to pay for my meal.  After I did so, I faced the very real situation of "omg is it polite or not to tip".  I remembered, though, that in the Netherlands tips are not expected but are only to be given if there's particularly good service.  As I didn't have extraordinary service, but was still extremely concerned that somehow I would be rude by not giving a tip, I took my change and FLED IMMEDIATELY, because when in doubt RUN AWAY.

I was off to the Tropenmuseum, a museum about the tropics, not about tropes.  It ended up being a fascinating museum.  The museum started as a way for the Dutch to show off how awesome their colonialism was, and the museum is now interesting in that some of the exhibits are basically about how exhibits about the tropics used to be exhibited, and what that could say about the society of Europe.  The museum had a rotating exhibit about death and the afterlife that I found particularly interesting.

It's a coffin with a duck.  Yep.

After navigating exhibits about just about every corner of the Earth one could think of, I came away convinced that I was looking at a certain Bailey's future workplace.  Marvelous!

On the way back from the museum, I walked through a beautiful park, where a live band was playing.  It was nice to sit down, listen to some good music, and do some people-watching.

Then, I set off for milk.  I had seen a supermarket on the way over, and decided to stop by and see whether I could get a meal to go - such things were very common in the UK, so I assumed they must have been in Europe, too.  However, as soon as I entered the grocery store in Amsterdam, I saw that things were a bit different on the Continent.  I was trapped.  When entering the supermarket, I had to go through a gate, and it was impossible for me to leave without going by a cash register.  Obviously, this wouldn't be a problem if any of the cash registers were open, but the ones that were had closed gates that prevented me from leaving.

Well, this was a problem.  Not only could I not get what I was going for, this awkward situation made it impossible for me to rely on my default "flight or even more flight" reflex; it was clear that I couldn't leave without buying anything (or going through the line with... nothing).  I became more and more alarmed, before I saw a way out: milk!  I managed to spot a little 500 mL carton, grab it, and get in line.  This led to my very first complete conversation in Dutch, at least from my end:

• Clerk: Hallo.
• Me: Hallo.
• Her: (says what the price of the milk carton was)
• Me: (gives her a Euro)
• Her: (asks me whether I want a receipt)
• Me: (extends hand)
• Her: (gives me change)
• Me: Dank u!
• Her: (puts receipt in hand, smiles)

I considered myself victorious.  She was clearly awed by my linguistic finesse.  (Actually, the Dutch were the friendliest in Europe when you spoke their language.  They're clearly used to speaking English with outsiders, so they seem to enjoy it when outsiders attempt their down language.  Also, "u" is the polite form of the second-person accusative pronoun—like many languages, it also means "y'all" or "you guys"—so perhaps they're also amused that I'm being (probably unduly) polite.

The milk tasted LIKE VICTORY.  Also, Canadian painting exhibition?!

Returning to the hostel, I made plans to have a quiet evening.  There was a school group that was pretty loud, but I had some laundry to do and dinner to eat, so I made do.  The hostel offered a pretty reasonable dinner, actually, including a delicious strawberry mousse, for an appropriate price.

Doing laundry, though, afforded me an opportunity to meet other non-school-group people in the hostel who were doing laundry.  I befriended a group of Basques (who had just graduated from high school and were headed to do medical research).  They were amused by my adoration of the Basque language and had no idea how well-loved the language is in linguistics in general.  There was also a husband-wife pair of Canadians; she was a primary school teacher (the second Toronto-area primary school teacher I met, incidentally!), and he (his name was Ransom) was in some sort of business job, though he was thinking about switching to education, too.  It was the hostel bar's happy hour, so we got some cheap drinks and sat around talking about the split between religion and science, the education systems of our countries, and various sundry matters, then planned to head to the Anne Frank House together the next day.  Trust me on this one: meeting people in hostels is a lot of fun to do!

By the end of the evening, I was pretty wiped, so I headed up to my room, dreading the mess.  Luckily, the group that had made the mess had left, so the room had been cleaned.  At first, I had assumed the messy group was the same one as the group that had made the room smell, ah, all Amsterdammy, but in fact that two people somewhat responsible for the latter were still there.  I chatted with them, and they were absolutely indignant about how messy the room had gotten thanks to the students in the room.  My roommates were British, and the students were French - need I say more?!?  We bonded over shared revulsion for the students; they ended up being pretty good roommates, and I learned a valuable life lesson about making assumptions about people based on their recreational activities (or something :P).