Remembrance Day

The Dutch like to squeeze all their holidays in at once. Last Friday was the Queen's birthday (officially, not actually), today was Remembrance Day for people who have died in wars, especially World War II, and tomorrow is Liberation Day to celebrate the anniversary of liberation from the Germans. What a week! I am going to write mostly about Remembrance Day, which is a very special idea in theory that...sometimes comes to mean something else. Let me explain.

Every year on May 4, the Queen comes to the Dam, exits from the Royal Palace (not actually where she lives), walks across Dam Square, and lays a wreath on the National Monument. Here is a not-so-professional photo of the procession walking out a few years ago. You'll be happy to know Queen Beatrix carried the same purse this year!






















Then at 8:00pm, right after the wreath-laying, the entire country observes a two-minute period of silence.

See, I told you this was a neat idea! I like the sense of national unity that it invokes, or simply the thought that everyone (most people) are doing the same thing at the same time. And I like the idea of remembering the sacrifices of those who came before you -- the noble idea that they gave their lives to make the world a better place, blah blah blah. Call me a romantic.

Since we had STNL class tonight right when the ceremony/minutes-of-silence were set to take place, Prof. Aay went to a news website so we could watch everything happen online. After all, this was another opportunity to participate in Dutch culture. Even though it is a solemn event, it is their culture nonetheless. So we spent some class time watching TV -- not a bad deal!

We watched the Royal family walk out onto Dam Square at about 7:50. (Pardon my extreme descriptiveness here, but it is my only time to live somewhere with actually royalty and I'm going to enjoy it). I mentally commended the Queen for walking gracefully across the Dam in such high heels at the age of 72. She's a very cool lady. Finally the group reached the National Monument and Queen Beatrix and her make-a-movie-of-my-life son, Willem-Alexander, together lifted the memorial wreath and put it into place. (I'm glad he helped her, it was pretty big.) Then, in a completely silent Dam Square, they stood looking at the wreath for the two minutes of silence.

And we, in a completely silent classroom, watched too.





We -- the country -- made it about 90 seconds in to the two minutes, and then this:



















That first aerial shot (about 10 seconds in) is quite something, isn't it? That was my first thought. Then I thought -- what in the world did we just watch unfold?

Turns out, nothing horrific. Someone in the crowd began shouting during the two minutes of silence, which cause mass panic and the crowds ran. I don't blame them. First of all, nothing logical ever happens in crowds. You don't think, you just go. And the Dutch have reason to be skittish at these events after last year's Queen's Day attack in Apeldoorn. I must commend the police/security for turning everything back around as quickly as they did. Shortly after the video I posted cuts out, right after the announcer called for everyone to stay in place, the Royal family came back out, the National Anthem was played, and things went on as...normal.

Not quite normal, though. I wish you could also see a video of the "after," because it was something. Queen Beatrix and her family walked hand in hand back into Dam Square to tumultuous applause. Then that fine lady who can walk better than I can in heels retook her place in front of the wreath and, without flinching, without blinking, looked back up at the monument and sang the words to the oldest national anthem in the world.

Now that is a Queen, let me tell you.

And oh, the crowd they showed singing along! Many people were crying. All the children (poor children!) that I saw on the news were crying and looked scared, freaked out, out of their minds. Dam Square was visibly shaken. Singing, but shaken.

How in the world are you supposed to remember veterans and soldiers who made the world a better place to live when it might not really be that much better at all?

Stupid noble idea.

What I mean is...We just can't get stuck in the idea that everything bad -- wars, hunger, Nazis, fear -- that was then. This is now and now is better. History is not progress. People did horrible things then, they do horrible things now, and, yes, they will do horrible things in the future. We are not, not, not getting any better.

But we can hug our kids when they're scared. We can stop the panic two minutes after it started and bring everyone back into the square. We can sing the national anthem without flinching, with heads held high. All this from the country whose motto is Ik zal handhaven: I shall endure.

God with us, we will endure.

Koninginnedag!

Once in a while, an event comes along that does many things, one of them being to improve our spelling. For example, we all learned ten years ago how to spell millennium (double L...double N...). I also became familiar with the correct placement of double letters when writing my blog posts about the Colosseum. And now I have a new word to add to the list of strange-words-I-now-know-how-to-spell: Koninginnedag.

Koninginnedag

Koninginnedag

One n, one n, double n. One n, one n, double n. One n...

Enough about how to spell it. Koninginnedag -- Queen's Day -- is a Dutch National Holiday held every year on April 30. I had never heard of Koninginnedag until a few months ago when I was looking up Dutch national holidays on Wikipedia. (I also memorized every member of the royal family, but that is another story). Now, you could jump over to Wikipedia right now and read what they have to say, or you could keep reading my description here. I'd like to think mine is a more thrilling account, but that is for you to judge.

Koninginnedag is celebrated all over the country (the Queen was going to be in Middelburg, remember?), but Amsterdam is the place to be. It's like Mardi Gras in New Orleans, or New Year's Eve in Times Square. That many people, that much excitement, that much garbage. It was quite the event.

What does "quite the event" look like, you ask? "Quite the event" gives me no solid facts, you bemoan. I'm going over to Wikipedia, you declare. Hold your horses. I will tell you everything about Queen's Day that you need to know.

In a nutshell, Queen's Day is this: Central Amsterdam as you know it shuts down. No cars, no bikes. The trams are rerouted around the center. Hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Everyone wears orange. People hold rummage sales on the sidewalk. Open air concerts can be found everywhere, the largest one being in Museumplein where a few hundred thousand of the people have gathered.

Quite the event, huh?

Now for a few more details. First of all, Koninginnedag is an example of oranjegekte (orange craze). Most people wear at least a little bit of orange, and some go for crazy outfits. At least 50% of the orange I saw came from free inflatable crowns.




















I went downtown with Anna and Bonnie, and we were well outfitted to blend in with the crowd. (This was the only day that our outfits would be considered "blending in"!)



















Once you don your orange craze outfit and go into Amsterdam, you realize that many, many other people have had the same idea as you. Basically every street we walked down looked like this:




















or this:



















or this:



















That last picture was in Rembrantplein, probably the most crowded area we went through. That was where I learned to surrender any attachment I still had to the concept of personal space.

Those who are not inching their way through the streets have climbed onto boats:


























































Koninginnedag is also known for being the one day that people can hold a vrijmarkt (garage sale without the garage), so on the outer edges of the center, sidewalk sales are everywhere. I wondered how people kept that much stuff in their homes every day but yesterday? Vondelpark is reserved as the area where kids can come sell their toys.



















But let me tell you -- the kids of Amsterdam are entrepreneurs. They have come up with all sorts of ways to make money in Vondelpark. They sell baked goods, set up carnival games, and perform dance numbers. And (my favorite) many kids have hauled out their band instrument from home and play a little music:



















Mostly very cute, but when you have a saxophone and two violins competing for air space five feet from each other, the result is not so pleasant. Also, no matter how good you are, the recorder will never sound good.

Entry-level band pieces are not the only music filling the Amsterdam air. There are also dozens of concerts happening all over the city, from small stages shoved into alleways to the giant Radio538 concert in Museumplein.



















What was my favorite part about the concert at Museumplein? Hearing Gerard Joling sing Ik Leef Mijn Droom, of course!






















I'll put up a short video too, but it comes with some warnings. First, the visuals are dizzying. Second, one of our crowd neighbors chose THIS song to start talking to us and ruined most of my videos with his talking. This video is the least bad of them all, but you can still hear him in the background speaking in Dutch and me saying I had no idea what he was saying. After this video he switched to English, but I still had no idea what he was saying.

Anyway, see if you can pick up from the video a few of Gerard's dulcet tones. Ik leef mijn droom, oh oh AY oh!



Since most of the excitement of Queen's Day came from the general noisiness of the atmosphere, here is another video of "The Sounds of Koninginnedag." See if you can hear the awesome horns that one too many people got their hands on.



One last thing about yesterday -- the trash collectors of Amsterdam chose a strategic time to go on strike, the one day when the most garbage accumulates on the streets. I got used to the sound of walking on cans/bottles and chose not to ever look down. Actually, in most situations I was too close to other people to see my feet anyway.

Does that give you a better idea of what Koninginnedag is like? It was definitely one of those days for me where I kept mentally pinching myself and going, "Am I really here?" Yesterday was a holiday in every sense of the word -- normal life as we know it stopped in Amsterdam, and a musical, flea market, orange craziness descended on everyone. Anyone want to come back next year? ;)

So, this week

This week I learned some stuff, did some things. It was fun.

What, that's not enough information? Okay, I AM sort of procrastinating until it's time to go do homework (on a Friday? what?), so I will go into more detail...

Sunday:
Happy Easter, everyone! I hope the day was wonderful for all of you. I had a great, relaxing day. A few of us went downtown to the English Reformed Church in the Begijnhof. We went there on Good Friday and it felt appropriate to complete the circle in the same place on Sunday. We got there early, as the pastor advised on Friday, and it was a good thing because he was right -- the place filled up. The service was great, but the weirdest part was walking out of the church to a courtyard filled with tourists talking pictures of the outside (I guess since they couldn't go in since the church was "in use"?). Anna and I also had quite a vocal tourist couple behind us on the way into the church ("Is this the church? Oh, it's so cute!"). Now, I have been to this church a grand total of four or five times, and I can't say that I even know anyone who goes there regularly, but...urg, the tourists got to me. Maybe because I never expected church to be a touristy place. I guess that's what you get when you go to a church built in 1607.

Am I turning into an Amsterdam snob? Maybe. But like to think I have a little bit of a reason to be.

Tourists aside, the service was great. Then that afternoon, the Aays graciously had all of us who could come over to their apartment for a delicious brunch. Easter was great!

Monday:
I honestly don't remember anything special from Monday. So sorry.

Tuesday:
Ahh, Tuesday. This was the day I got to spend quality time with some of my fossil friends:

























































Oh, and one (very sticky, nasty) foot:



















Yes, my Human Evolution biology class had a lab that met for EIGHT HOURS on Tuesday. To be fair, we did get a breaks for lunch and such, but we were in the same room from roughly 9am to 5pm. I came to the conclusion that, no matter how interesting something is, it begins to become uninteresting after eight hours. I remember sitting at the last of the twelve lab stations that we had to do, almost visually observing Chris and Adam's words bouncing off my head. Knowledge absorption at that stage is minimal.

But, hey, I got some pictures! (Nevermind the fact that they are for our lab report that we still need to type up...) I now could tell you the difference between a male and a female skull, or give a jaw an age based on what teeth it had come in. And I've seen enough "brow ridges" to last a lifetime.

What I'm saying is, this class is extremely interesting, but I'm coming off of two months of a history class that met for four hours a week. Now I go to lectures for sometimes five hours a day, and the lab...sigh. Not complaining! Just pointing out a difference for, you know, posterity.

Wednesday:
Something you should know -- the concert hall in Amsterdam, the Concertgebouw, holds free concerts at 12:30 every Wednesday. Something else you should know -- if you are ever in Amsterdam on a Wednesday, get to the concert hall at noon at least, because every retired person in Amsterdam will already be in line to beat you to a seat.

But Deborah, Anna, Bonnie, and I made it there early enough, and we got seats!





































The concert was short (30 minutes), FREE, and much, much different than I expected. Well, I expected Mozart, or something. The Nieuw Ensemble played three new pieces written by...university students? (It was hard to tell, the program was in Dutch). The pieces can best be described as experimental, and described worst as strictly melodic. Some of the new things were kind of cool! For example, in the piece called "Mice," the instrumentalists scratched on boxes with pencils at one point to make the sound of scurrying mice. Then they all sang "Three Blind Mice." But other times, I would kind of zone out. Experimental music doesn't always hold one's attention well.

I experienced a bit of "culture," though, instead of just spending my time reading TV recaps on Entertainment Weekly.com like I sometimes do. And - bonus! - we emerged from the concert to find that it was a beautiful sunny day in Amsterdam.

We had to photographically take advantage of the sun, the blue sky, and the fact that they finally took down the tent in front of the Rijksmuseum, meaning you don't have to stand three feet away from the I amsterdam letters to get a picture with them.



















Now if only they would finish up with that scaffolding...

We also took a walk through the Albert Cuyp market, rumored (whisper, whisper) to be the largest daytime market in Europe. But don't tell the other countries, they'd be jealous.




















We found things there both good and bad.

Good: the fresh stroopwafel that I had.

Bad: these harem pant-jeans.




















Thursday:
We experienced a classroom landmark, namely an AMAZING guest lecturer. Meet Jan van Hooff.
























I admit, the picture is not mine. I took it from a website I found a link to on his WIKIPEDIA PAGE! And one of his former students, Frans de Waal, is now slightly famous among some biology circles. You could say I was starstruck in a biological-academia sense.

Like all good professors I've known, he was a great lecturer mainly because he was slightly crazy. He talked about the social groups that primates live in, which naturally includes acting like a chimpanzee from time to time. He would also start speaking in Dutch whenever he got very excited/distracted. Most of the time he would notice. But once:

Prof. van Hooff: Dutch, dutch, dutch

Student: Professor? You're speaking in Dutch again.

Prof. van Hooff: I can switch to German, too, if you'd like.

(hehe)

Overall, one of the best lectures I've had at the VU!

Friday:
That is today, which means I can't write about it yet since it isn't over! I can tell you, though, that writing a lab report is in my near future.

And Saturday/Sunday bring another round of our group excursions with Prof. Aay. Let's hope for no stomach flu/traffic jams on this one! Honestly, though, I think this weekend will be pretty fun. We are going on a biking trip on Sunday around Amsterdam's largest park, the Amsterdamse Bos, and the trip may or may not include goat's milk ice cream and Scottish Highlander cows. Saturday -- I still don't know exactly where we're going. You and I will just have to find out, won't we?

Until next time, thanks for reading!

And now for...

First of all, happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! Here are a few pictures of fun and greenery to start things off:



























































And this one's for my crazy relatives in Iowa City:
























Now to last Sunday's excursion, which by U.S. standards was quite "green" (haha, a St. Patty's day pun! Right? Get it? Yeah, ok...)


Weekend Excursions Part II

Or: the City of the Sun is somewhat awesome

On Sunday we traveled to the city of Heerhugowaard, which is right here:






















We went there to see the Stad van de Zon, or City of the Sun. Here's my picture of it:



















But that doesn't do justice to the layout of the city, so here's a cooler picture:


















Awesome possum, right?

Now for a wee bit of background: Stad van de Zon is a building/housing project in Heerhugowaard, not its own city as the title claims. The neighborhood is carbon neutral and also the largest photovoltaic community in the world. Translation: lots of solar panels and no net carbon going into the atmosphere.

Our group first went to the Gemeentehuis, which is the Heerhugowaard city hall, library, and basically everything else. It was a stylish, new building that we had all to ourselves.
























Bonnie demonstrates how the library is currently closed because the hydraulic staircase entrance is closed:
























Our host/guide, a city planner whose name now escapes me, even showed us the wedding chapel:





















Side note on our host: this guy was SMART. He was a city planning genius, had executed a lot of the vision for Stad van de Zon, and, on our walk later, upon seeing some daffodils coming up along the sidewalk, he began spouting off Wordsworth ("I wandered lonely as a cloud..."). THEN he started quoting something by Voltaire. Then his wife made him stop.

Where was I? Oh, yes, so our host led us then to a wonderful sight: a conference room with stroopwafels and hot coffee waiting for us at the tables. He then filled our heads with Stad van de Zon knowledge as we sipped and snacked. I think every class/meeting/anything should come along with coffee and stroopwafels, don't you?





































Then it was time to go to the actual Stad van de Zon! We walked around most of the main development for, I don't know, at least an hour, probably more. What follows will be somewhat of a montage of pictures without individual explanations. Keep in mind these general ideas:
1) It was very windy
2) Keep your eyes open for solar panels
3) The road with the trees is the Middelweg, and it is an original old road leading to the city.





























































































































































All in all, the Stad van de Zon was a very cool place. It had a lot of cool features that came about because the whole development had been designed all at once. For example, most houses/apartments had parking primarily in the back so that the fronts of the houses would be less cluttered with cars. The development also had a lot of variety in both building design and the types of residences -- single houses, duplexes, apartments, rental houses. There was even an assisted living facility! And a daycare, a school, a grocery store...on and on. The neighborhood also had a TON of kids running around outside playing (we had a few roller blading girls following our group for a while).

I must say, if I lived in Heerhugowaard, I would want to live in Stad van de Zon.

Finally, because this is my blog and I can do what I want, here's a tribute to my latest batch of tulips from the friendly florist man down the street. Spring is great :)