The Dutch oven of modern politics

It’s disappointingly easy to convince people that The Outsiders, the They, are responsible for all your troubles and are a threat to your safety. Terrifyingly reliable, century by century. So I watched this week’s election in the Netherlands with massive trepidation.

Chandeliers over the canals of Amsterdam

The Netherlands. The country where so much of the freedom, liberty, and tolerance that form the foundation of Western civilization and success was born and developed. But also the most densely populated country in Europe, struggling with the shifts and currents of the world right now. So it was no surprise that they had their own “blame Islam” villain stirring up the darkest parts. But with such a proud tradition and identity as progressive thinkers, I had hope that the Dutch would resist the sort of self-sabotage that the UK and USA have embraced.

Particularly important, because what the Dutch did, the French and Germans would see. I’m not too worried about the Germans, who I think learned the lessons of the 20th century better than anyone, but a continental crack begun in Holland could spread. So how did it work out?

With impressive turnout, 87% of Dutch voters rejected the willful misunderstanding and moral weakness that have contaminated the White House and sought to spill like an overflowing septic tank into the canals of Amsterdam. I love the Dutch! Ik houd van Holland!

Of course there’s a but. Because Wilders was able to do the same as Trump in bullying the conversation. The voices with the least helpful contributions are doing the most talking, while misguided policies make things worse and a sinister power grows stronger. It’s up to the Dutch to show us how to handle this problem. No party has a majority, so the ruling coalition will include members with vastly different opinions. Which could go at least two ways:

Option 1: differing viewpoints lead to political brinksmanship and absolutism, ensuring that nothing gets done. Increased voter frustration feeds the extremist they just united to defeat and we all go down the tube. Let’s call this the “Republican Congress” technique.

Option 2: differing viewpoints give a voice to more people, and unity in the face of a commonly recognized danger leads to true compromises that no one loves but benefit everyone. Let’s call this approach “Democracy.”

That second one is tough. But if anyone can do it, it’s the Dutch. They’ve given us so much over the centuries, and we need them now more than ever.

P.S. I was delighted at the chance to guide two more of my beloved Best of Europe in 21 Days tours, and highly recommend them if you’d like to go over and see for yourself.

Walking in the world

They spoke Dutch when I got on the train and French when I got off, though the ads were always English.

Brussels North Station is next to the Red Light District and surrounded by neighborhoods of Middle Eastern immigrants, so you quickly go from women showing most of their skin to women showing none.

On the street I heard Turkish, Arabic, and Farsi, though I confess I cannot always tell the difference between the last two.

I started off walking but it was farther than I thought, and I was running by the time I found the embassy I needed, between those of Ghana and Lesotho.

Walking back, I heard Spanish, saw a note posted above a mailbox in Polish, and bought a piece of the tortilla-like flatbread I used to eat in Morocco, which I remember being called msemin, though I can google no confirmation of that.

As I ate, I passed a corner store called “Madina-gsm” (Americans: gsm is European for cell phone), which advertised calling cards to Kenya.

I stopped to take a picture of a blue door, and the names on the mailboxes were Azzaimi, Garcia, Deryckere, Ahmed El Kamoun, Boeckx, Tsuranova, and Baschirov.

Brussels gets a bad rap in my opinion (though I wouldn’t necessarily want to live there) but as I walked back to the train station with my visa for Myanmar in my passport, I was in love with the brazen internationality of it.

That’s a good sign, since I’ll catch a flight to Turkey in three days.

Anticipation, back hair, and falafel in Amsterdam

It was a few degrees below zero in Toronto but I felt fine, and as long as I didn't spend too much time in the shade I enjoyed my walks. It was a few degrees below zero in Reykjavik but I felt warm enough, and as long as I stayed out of the wind, and I enjoyed my walks.

It was a few degrees above zero in Amsterdam and I was frickin' freezing, lingered longer indoors and curtailed my walks, though in that city of canals, living history, and global exchange, I enjoyed every step. Was it the humidity? Had I burned off some burrito-bestowed belly insulation already? Was the enthusiasm of being overseas calming into a rhythm?

I don't know, but I'm glad I had enough traveler enthusiasm to protect me when I walked into my hostel in Amsterdam. Claustrophobic spaces of slowly splintering wood, stale smoke, and a bare florescent bar bulb a high pitch of scream abrading both ear drum and retina.

Welcome back to hostel living.

A scrawny traveler in dingy boxer shorts and back hair was asleep in twisted sheets, 1:30 PM, in a musty room with six metal bunk-beds, four battered lockers, and one window. It was hard to tell if one of the lockers was available, with two bottles of nearly empty hard liquor, an empty plastic bag, and a little plastic box (just the size for drug transport) rattling ominously.

The thought crossed my mind “Am I too old for this?”

I put the bottles, bag, and box next to the overflowing garbage can, slid my backpack in the locker, and went looking for someplace warm to drink a cup of tea.

I had one last night alone before meeting K at the airport and starting/returning to a whole new/familiar world of living, questions and answers, and relationship. And I was hungry for all of it.

But first the more immediate hunger that defines a substantial percentage of backpacker life. A chain I remember from Spain apparently lives in The Netherlands too, where the falafels are cheap, and you can fill the pita with as much veggie topping as you like. I spoke Dutch with an Indian woman, snow like salt crystals on chairs stacked beside useless outdoor cafes, and the bicycle traffic never stops.

It felt good to be there.

Our secret language is almost back.

k

Somehow, inexplicably but terribly predictably, our time in Curacao has flown by.

But we haven't been to that Surinamese restaurant, the aloe plantation, or on an organized snorkeling trip!

But in less than a week we'll be back in Ecuador. Hostels. Almuerzos. Buses, backpacks, and bed bugs.

We'll lose many things, like the ocean (oh lordie, I'll miss this majestically swimmable ocean), but we'll gain a couple things back too. Our secret language, for one.

Worldwide, there's always a good chance the person in front of me at least understands English, and in Latin America Spanish is the overt language, which normally leaves Dutch, but not in Curacao.

But soon Dutch will be safe again, where, for example, a typical evaluation of a hostel might go like this.


T & K enter a cheap hotel.

T: "Buenas tardes, buscamos una habitacion, tiene un doble disponible?"
         (Good afternoon, we are looking for a room, do you have a double?)

Hostal staff (HS): "Si, quiere verla?"
        (Yes, would you like to see it?)

T: "Si, por favor."

 

They go upstairs and enter a plain room. There are a couple blots of crushed mosquitoes on the walls and an overriding odor of dirty laundry, but the bed is made and there is light coming in the window. K goes to check the bathroom while T peels back the sheets to check the mattress for bed bugs.

HS: "No, no, es muy limpio."
        (No, no, it's very clean.)

T: "Si, le creo, solo es algo que hago siempre." There are no overt signs of bed bugs, though the mattress is a tired gray color.
        (I believe you, it's just something I always do.)

K: Coming back from the bathroom, a carefully neutral expression on her face. In an open and airy voice "De badkamer is echt vreselijk. Het ruikt er slecht, de vloer is zwart met schimmel, en ik denk dat er bloed op de muren is."
        (The bathroom is really disgusting. It stinks, the floor is black with mold, and I think that's blood on the walls.)

T: Nodding, with a thoughtful but open expression. To HS "Hay wifi, o una cocina?"
        (Is there wifi or a kitchen?)

HS: "Si si."

K: "Serieus, het ruikt alsof iemand daar gestorven is."
        (Seriously, it smells like someone died in there.)

T: To K "Well, maybe we should go get something to eat and see if we can find our Canadian friends."

HS: Aha! They don't know I understand English! I have broken their codes!

T: "Vamos a almorzar, y buscar unos amigos. Gracias."
        (We're going to go eat lunch and look for our friends. Thanks!")

T & K leave, shuddering and thinking about where they can wash their hands. HS smiles and waves goodbye, feelings unhurt.

Bits and pieces

So I went back to work at the researcher place, and it is going well, though I can clearly see the cloud hanging over the project, since they didn’t schedule enough time to finish it.  (And by the way, what kind of company sends ALL its IT people to the same weeklong training?  Having a tech-dependent company w/no IT?  Genius.) And school has started again, with raindrops of Dutch presumably contributing to the net linguistic content of my language reservoir, hopefully faster than they evaporate.  The long days are familiar friends, and I sleep without waking until the second or third slap on the snooze bar.

This busyness has a haze of footnotes swirling around it, so if you don’t mind, I will jot them on here and hope they feel satisfied.

I feel like the parent of our water heater.  It is one of those tankless ones that heats the water as you need it, which is a way better method, but I think it is an adolescent.  All of a sudden it’s acting out, like it no longer enjoys the activities (i.e. heating water) that it used to, instead it now barely participates, doing only the bare minimum necessary to avoid punishment.

At least it’s not getting pimples.  I still have a monopoly on those.  Although the current one (okay, two) is probably a result of the kinda dirty water we went kayaking in this weekend.

Kayaking is awesome!  The Ardennes (in Wallonia, southern Belgium) are beautiful!  I love GREEN.  Growing things, the sound of running water, the absence of car racket.  With a couple friends and their dog, Kadee, we paddled 22 kilometers of the Lesse River.  It was relaxed, still water, the only time we got wet was the two little damns to go over, including below a rather epically European castle/manor house.

Awhile back my friend Chandra asked me whether “fly” was used first for the animal or as the verb.  I love shit like that.  I wish I knew!  My guess would be that it was a verb first, and the noun first described any flying beastie, but eventually got slimmed down to just the most common (like how “meat” used to mean any food).  Though people often still refer to gnats and whatnot as flies, in addition to house-flies (or deer flies, horse flies, tsetse flies…)

After some googling, it looks like the verb derives back to an ancestor language (Indo-European) where it meant any rapid movement, not just airborn.  That makes me think the beastie came second, though apparently that meaning dates back to a prehistoric Germanic word.  But since (I think?) the term “Indo-European” precedes “Germanic” then I am going to posit that it was a verb first.

And the opening in your pants came waaaay later.  (That may come from something like a tent flap being used to keep out the bugs, that then got applied to the smaller scale of one’s pants.

And speaking of word oddities:

The Dutch word for “nail” applies to both the vestigial claw on the end of your finger and the thing you hammer into a wall, just as in English.  I find this odd, since I see no obvious connection between the two nouns, beyond that unfortunate occurrence of aiming with a hammer at the latter and hitting the former.

The Dutch term for peanut butter translates as “peanut cheese.”  While my beloved peanut paste is not really a cheese, neither is it a butter.  What do you think, which comes closer?

The Dutch expression for pubic hair translates as “shame hair.”  That’s messed up.  And I bet you can guess what “shame lips” are.  That reminds me of the extensive post on religion and sexual guilt I am deliberating whether or not to post…

I decided not to post my rambling about the degeneration of hip-hop from a forum for social commentary into a platform for short-sighted bragging, and the insane disservice this is to a socially brutalized demographic.  That’s basically it though.  Plus a dig at McDonalds.

Speaking of music, it’s one of the awesome/bizarre things about Europe.  Most famously, this is the only area in the world that thinks techno is a really good idea, even when one is not 14 and screwed up on ecstasy.  You have pasty Belgian “gangsta’s” cruising around with  NN-ss-NN-ss-NN-ss rattling the windows of their wee Euro-cars, though to be honest I find them no more ridiculous than their US counterparts.

But also, the radio here doesn’t forget songs.  Whereas the US pattern is for a song to come out, be tragically overplayed, and then forgotten, those songs hang on here.  While grocery shopping this weekend, the tinny radio played The GooGoo Dolls, Eagle-Eye Cherry, Hootie and the Blowfish, and, much to my utter astonishment, to the degree that I stood next to the chips and just sort of smiled: Snow.  Remember that guy?  Informer?  Aliki boom boom down?  Yeah, that one.  I couldn’t believe I was the only one who stood stupefied.  Agog and aghast.

But man, that Hootie song is actually pretty awesome.  I scavenged it up from the depths of my burned CDs and put it on my ipod.  Let her cry, if it tears fall down like rain, let her sing, if it eases all her pain, let her go, let her walk right out on me, and if the sun comes up tomorrow, let her be.  Sing it, Hootie baby.

A few months ago I bought a wee Venus Flytrap plant, which I fully acknowledge is only still alive due to K’s maintenance.  The other day it flowered.  I am so proud!  It made up for the embarrassment I think we all felt when it’s little claw head clamped down triumphantly…on itself.  It caught it’s own leaf.  I think that is a new definition for embarrassing.

Dude, you’re like a venus fly-trap that can only catch it’s own leaves.

Harsh butt, bro.

You still have Hootie and the Blowfish stuck in your head, don’t you?  You’re welcome.

And it’s Springtime baby!  Luckily the allergies haven’t really been a problem, just occasional sneezes.  The sky is still visible, cerulean blue, as I ride home from the train station at quarter to ten o’clock at night.  The spider’s egg nest on the hinge of the garage door hasn’t hatched yet, though the mother’s body has long since faded to a thin brown scab of carapace.  I’m simultaneously looking forward to it hatching, and very much NOT.  Man, my bike is going to be a festival of little crawlers.

Let ‘em hatch, let the bugs fall down like rain…

Springtime is here, and now I know what I’m going to do with my summer…but that is another post…

Man, being a productive member of society sure cuts into my reading time.

That was the realization I had as I put my immensely engaging book back into my bag on the train after having read about 2 pages.  The book is 1139 pages long.  I sneak a few minutes in to see what happened after they crashed on the shores of Nazi-occupied Norway during the 3 stops between where I take Dutch classes and where I work.

I am enjoying these days though, each step of the day taken individually and enjoyed for itself, without thinking about all the other things I am not doing with my time.  One of those not-done things is blogging, so before I warm up the rice and beans from last night’s burrito-themed dinner party (God I love guacamole) I’m going to throw some crud up here I’ve encountered lately.

I’ll pick…class.  I am studying Dutch, and one of my favourite things about it is how much the language makes sense.  I love English, and am tremendously glad that birth circumstance made me a native speaker (did you know there are roughly as many words in English as in the next three largest language combined?  [according to my TESOL course, at least]).  It is beautifully flexible, and richly textured…and makes no sense.

The pure quantity of inexplicable exceptions and random bits and pieces would frustrate the hell out of me if I was learning it.  Like the word “up” which shows up(1) in a ridiculous number of places.  You can look me up(2) in the phone book, though I might hang up(3) on you afterwards, if you can put up(4) with that.  Be written up(5) for a rules violation.  Hook up(6,7) a stereo or with that cutie in math class.  Things are looking up(8) and throwing up(9) and calling up(10), hurrying up(11) and beefing up(12) then easing up(13) before backing up(14) and getting up(15) and blowing up(16) and waking up(17) and standing up(18) and showing up(19) and breaking up(20) being brought up(21) dressing up(22) and ending up(23) filled up(24) before giving up(25) and growing up(26).  All before your computer can boot up(27).

Dutch has some of that, with bits of words kind of flitting around, but generally far more logically and consistently.  And there is no chance for accidentally saying something is logicaler or consitenter.  In English you are big or bigger, cold or colder, fat or fatter, but more excited, more enthusiastic, and more irritated.  One might guess that short words take “-er” and long ones “more” but that explanation would be more fun if it was more fit to explain the phenomenon.

In linguistics classes in college I remembers studying something called the “Maximal Onset Principle” which basically says that a consonant in a word prefers to go at the beginning of a syllable, instead of the end.  This explains why a popular word breaks into syllables the way it does.  It is “po-pu-lar” and not “pop-ul-ar” like one might think.  That second p wants to be in front of a vowel if it can.

This phenomenon is cute and fun and cross-linguistic and basically irrelevant.

But not in Dutch!  In Dutch, they have long vowels and short vowels.  So “bos” is a forest, and “boos” is angry.  In order to not tell everyone that you are a forest today because way too many politicians in your homeland are soulless bastards (there are some benefits to being so busy, such as missing out on some of the actions of the Republican congress) you have to pay attention to the vowel length.

I don’t want to make this waaaay too long (English has long vowels sometimes too?) and it is all I can do to not go on a sizeable rant about defunding Planned Parenthood (seriously guys, what the fuck?!), but basically that Maximal Onset Principle comes into play in Dutch with the long vowels by grabbing consonants, particularly in plural forms.

(Note: a syllable that ends in a vowel is considered “open” which makes the vowel “long.”  Ending with a consonant conversely, is “closed” and makes the vowel “short.”)

For example, “zon” is the sun, “zoon” is a son.  You generally pluralize a noun by adding “-en” but if you have two sons you have twee “zonen” not twee “*zoonen” because the Maximal Onset Principle takes that “n” and pulls it into the second syllable, leaving the first syllable open, and thus long, so the second “o” would be redundant.

So then if you have two suns in the sky it would be twee “zonnen” because that second “n” is necessary to keep the vowel closed, and therefore short.

(I wish I knew how to make "two suns" a hyperlink, but since I'm html incompetent, here's what I would have linked it to: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/20/two-suns-twin-stars_n_811864.html?ref=fb&src=sp)

The point is that Dutch understands itself better than English.  To have a linguistic theorem like the Maximal Onset Principle overtly reflected in the orthography of the language is impressive.  We don’t need to go into English spelling, right?  (Ask me about “ghoti”some other time.)

Did any of that make any sense?  I would love to clarify it…but I gotta go to bed, got class and work and whatnot tomorrow.

Oh, and if you live in the US, go get screened for cervical cancer before the Senate has a chance to be as asinine as the House.