Catching Up

So, it's been a while. I guess you could say that I've had a serious case of writer's block. That, and my blog has been in blog-limbo for at least a month. I abandoned my old Wordpress blog (addictedtotheshindig.wordpress.com) and got a blogger account for a few reasons. I never really liked any of the Wordpress themes. Considering that I've never gotten around to learning enough html to do anything (that is, beyond making text bold or underlined), I decided to go with the host that makes it easier for me to have the appearance that I want (that is, a white background and a header). I'll be tinkering with it for a while, but for now my project is to create a big beautiful header up top.

ANYWAYS (courtesy Chuck Klosterman) here's a truncated recount of what I've been up to for the last month or so. I have:

1. Been to Belgium. Brussels and Bruges, to be precise. Our bus left from the south of Amsterdam at around 8 on a Saturday morning and arrived in Brussels around noon. We then took a train to Bruges where we spent the rest of the day walking around, eating chocolate, buying waffels, and drinking Belgian beer. The weather was overcast, and there weren't that many people out. That night we tried to find a place to eat for under 15 Euro, and let me tell you, it's impossible. Unless, of course, you eat at Quick, the premiere French fast-food establish, like we did (Belgium, being between France and the Netherlands, is equally influenced by both). Overall, I wasn't too impressed by Bruges. Other than our hostel, the Bauhaus Inn, which had a lively bar as well as a DJ that played some much-needed American pop music, the city didn't have much going for it. I guess I'm supposed to see the movie In Bruges in order to get the full experience. It's still on my to-do list.* Brussels, on the other hand, was awesome. The weather was perfect, people were walking around the city, and the buildings were covered with enough graffiti to keep my camera working all afternoon. To top off the nearly-perfect day, we ate some pretty cheap Thai food. I missed my spicy chicken Pad Thai.
   Check out Sara and Alex's posts about Belgium as well.
   
2. Started a new blog. After seeing a Mercedes McLaren parked in front of a swanky hotel in Belgium, we lamented about how we wished there was a blog for automobile aesthetics, a Sartorialist for Cars, if you will. We call it The Cartorialist.
3. Written two-and-a-half papers, given three presentations, and taken two midterms.**
4. Been trying to figure out my life for the summer. The Affordable Housing Internship through UEP didn't work out, so now I'm scouring the web for a paying internship. Normally I wouldn't be picky, but with a) the economy and b) the way Amsterdam is pillaging my bank account Viking-style, I need some cash flow come summer-time. Some of the LACAC internships look interesting, especially the one with the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, in which I'd be helping to plan the Eagle Rock Music Festival.
5. Had my dad and my brother come visit me, seperately. It's surprisingly difficult to come up with stuff to do for a week at a time. With one or the other, I went to the Heineken Experience (I was brewed!), the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijkmuseum, a cool little comic book shop near the edge of the City Center, and the Red Light District (kind of a requirement for tourists). I know I'm forgetting a few places.
6. Saw Girl Talk. That was a wacky night.
7. Started reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I'm in to it.
8. Finished Six Feet Under.
9. Been the recipient of a citation by the Amsterdam Police. I was biking on a road between Keizergracht and Herengracht, where apparently, you're only allowed to travel by foot (unless you're a tram, then you can freely barrel through that section of street). Here's how the story goes: Alex, Sara, and I actually start out by walking down the block. After the tram passes by, Mr. Manthei decides to get on his bike, defiantly proclaim "Fuck walking," and proceeds to pedal down the street. Sara and I follow suit. A few seconds later, at the end of the block, I see Alex is pulled over by a cop, and a few feet behind him, so is Sara. Now, at this point, I think that the two cops have pulled them over for a routine identity inspection.*** As soon as I see this, I get off my bike, and walk it over to Sara, thinking that it's no big deal. The male cop walks away from Alex, towards Sara and I, and Alex walks off around a corner. Both cops, male and female, start talking to us about how they are going to give us tickets for 35 Euro each, for not walking. The male cop starts talking to me.
   Cop: Do you live here?
   Me: Yes? [sic] I'm a student and I'm staying here until June.
   Cop: Why are you riding your bike here?
   Me: I didn't see the sign.
   Now, in my defense, the sign technically said that the street was pedestrian-friendly, not that bikes were prohibited. There is definitely a sign for this, but it certainly wasn't posted. If I had been smart enough, I would have told him this.
   Cop: Do you have identification?
   I pull out my University of Amsterdam ID, which we have been told will work in situations like these.
   Cop: I'm sorry, but do you have your passport?
   Me: No.
   For obvious reasons, I don't carry my passport with me. If I was smart I would have told him this as well.
   Me: I have an American driver's license. Will that work?
   It does. I give it to him and he starts taking down my information. Here's where the culture gap starts to show.
   Cop: Your birthday is 11-05-1987?
   He, of course, means May 11th, 1987, because that's how the rest of the world writes dates. My birthday is, of course, November 5th, 1987, because that's how America rolls. I tell him this.
   Cop: Why is your birthday wrong on your identification?
   Me: We write it backwords in the U.S. We're weird.
   The cop and I chuckle about how weird the U.S. is.
   Cop: What's your address here?
   Me: Prins Hendrikkade A-12.
   I, of course, mean A-12 because that's how we pronounce the letter "A" in English. He, of course, thinks I said "E-12" because when he insists on speaking English (not my idea, to my credit), he doesn't think about how the Dutch pronounce the letter "E" as an "A" when they sing the alphabet. So, I'm pretty sure he wrote down my wrong information. Which means I may or may not be recieving a citation in the mail in six to eight weeks. After this whole ordeal, we meet up with Alex, who didn't get a ticket. How, you ask (like I did). "I just told him I was a tourist." If I had been smart enough, I would have told him this too.

The sun's starting to come out, and I'm ecstatic to say that I can bike around the city without four layers on.

* I don't have a to-do list.
** The papers were on "the role of the gaze in gendering public spaces in Cairo," the usefulness of the "modernizing paradigm" – the idea that the city is the site of the new and the rural is the site of tradition – in analyzing the urban experience, and some 500-word thing on some health program in Thailand. The first two are for my ballin' Urban Anthropology class. The last one is for my Health and Development class. I hate that class.
*** The Dutch don't like foreigners (read: ethnic immigrants), so cops are known to "randomly" check identification in the street. I've never actually seen this happen. I thought I did, though.

Killin' 'Em in the UK

Allow me to "Tarantino" this.

So, I've been in Amsterdam for approximately ten days now. Fate has conspired to prevent my blogging about my new home for the next four months in two ways: (1) I've, naturally, been pretty busy getting settled in; and (2) Sara and I (we haven't decided who yet) pushed my laptop off of my bed, face-down, onto the hard linoleum floor of my (very spacious) room, which obviously messed something up because it took four hours to turn itself on. Once it did turn on, it only showed me the pinwheel of death. It's been in the local "Apple Authorised Service Provider," a place called iCentre on Prins Hendrikkade, for the last week or so, and they have yet to get back to me with the eighty-Euro diagnosis.

Anyways, let me give you a run down of what I did in the days leading up to my arriving in Amsterdam. In case you didn't know, I spent about a week in London.

January 18th –25th

I flew from Portland International Airport (PDX, for those curious) to Heathrow Airport in London, where I would be staying at the home of my friend Alex's mom – one Doris Sisk. Coincidentally, Alex was on the very same flight in to Heathrow. We took American Airlines, which, after comparing with everyone else from my program, was not the most amenable choice. This really means that it only had a few movies to choose from. I watched Eagle Eye, which entertained me for the first few hours, but after that the only thing offered was some movie called Ember, about an underground city in the future. Or something. But what Flight 50 lacked in digital entertainment, it made up for in interesting people. Alex and I were situated in the rear of the plane. It was a relatively empty flight, so many of the passengers (including the two of us) had entire rows free to stretch out in. The few people that were sitting near us, all happened to be in the 21 to 24 year old range. One girl, from Alex's hometown Tucson, was in "international marketing" and, according to every story to she told, loved to party. Another girl was actually from the Netherlands and she went to university in the South (in a town I have yet to remember or pronounce). She had a thing for Alex. Lastly, there was a guy from Dallas, Texas, travelling on his way to Paris to see a dying uncle or something (I was kind of half-asleep for that story). He loved to talk, especially about his favorite bands (MGMT and Vampire Weekend) and he was sure to let us know that he was not like the other people from Texas (i.e. he was wearing an Obama shirt). Also, he loved to sing, and he led us all in a spirited, if off-key, rendition of Heartless (then again, shouldn't it be off-key?), which I'm sure the rest of the plane loved.

We eventually landed and joined Doris and a two-hour-delayed Sara, and got in to the taxi. I notice two very striking things about the driving habits of Londoners on the hour-long drive to her townhouse in Croydon. The first and superbly obvious thing is that they're driving on the left side of the road. But the second and much-more terrifying thing is that there appear to be absolutely no traffic laws in the city. Cars are going on sidewalks and into opposing lanes of traffic (with or without signalling), drivers are parking their cars in the middle of the street, no one is moving over for ambulances, and cars are parked in the wrong direction on the opposite side of the street (which is actually the smartest and most-enviable part of the backwards country).

We didn't do too many "touristy" things during the week. A typical day involved waking up at around 10:00am; eating crumpets for breakfast ("crumps," as we called them, are f-ing delicious, by the way); walking down the block to buy a 7 GBP travel card that gave us all-day access to bus, rail, and tube ("mind the gap"); travelling in to London; walking around for a while; getting cold; ducking in to a pub around 5 o'clock (17:00 for the yanks); getting drunk on cider; eating fantastic pub food or fantastic Indian food; getting drunk-er on more cider; travelling home; watching American news; sleeping. It was pretty epic.

We didn't do too many touristy things. We saw Big Ben, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, that giant ferris-wheel thing, the Millenium Bridge, and the Tate Modern. We checked out the neighborhoods of Croydon, Soho, and Notting Hill. We went to the transportation museum, which was showing an exhibit on the history of their iconic posters.

We also took a trip to Brighton, which was by far one of the coolest cities I've ever been to. Apparently, it's a big university town, so it was full of some pretty cool, independent stores as well as one of the best sandwich shops I've ever been to. Most notably, Brighton is the home of Banksy, which is why I wanted to go in the first place. I've been a fan of his work for a while, and I was excited about seeing it in person. The peice I saw was the one featuring two cops making out. The pub whose wall it appears on had taken steps to protect it, by fixing a sheet of clear plexiglass over it. On the one hand, it was cool that they were trying to preserve it as art, but it also sucked that it's impossible to see it without a sheet of plastic in front of it. Oh well.

Some random thoughts on London (mostly about food, really)

1. They have mastered the art of the steak-fry ("chips" to them I suppose).


2. Ford is the most popular American car, hands-down.. The European Focus, the European Fusion (both of which get hella gas mileage and look a hell of a lot sportier than their counterpart in the former colonies), the Fiesta, and the new Ka were everywhere on the streets (I know I'm missing some). I think I saw one Dodge.


3. Their grocery stores make more sense than America's. None of this cleaning-product-aisle-between-the-baking-goods-aisle-and-the-canned-food-aisle business. As Alex put it, "What a rational country."


4. The police look bad-ass, even with the bobby.


5. It's a damn shame that crumpets aren't more popular in the U.S. And no, I don't mean English muffins.


6. Everyone on the street is dressed impeccably.


7. They don't have corn-syrup in any of their foods. Meaning Coke in the UK is slightly less unhealthy than it is in the U.S.


8. Whereas in the U.S., old people dress worse because they don't care, old people in the UK dress to impress.


9. The police force isn't afraid to buy foreign when it comes to cars. What would you be more afraid of in a high speed chase: A Crown Vic or a suped-up 3 Series?


10. Their showers don't make any damn sense.


11. They adore Obama. Every news publication had him on the front page, even on the days before and after the inauguration.


12. I thought it was odd (and really disappointing) that I didn't once hear "American Boy" on the radio.

For your culturally-appropriate listening enjoyment:

"Shut Up, American Boy (Estelle vs. The Ting Tings) – The Hood Internet
(who, I might add, are far superior to the overrated Girl Talk. Find their website here.)

Finally, I heard this gem on the radio while driving through the country on our excursion to Brighton. I thought it was all-too-fitting.