Merry Christmas

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Just in time for the holidays, The Netherlands got hit with a nice blanket of snow. I know that it won't seem like much to our friends and family back on the east coast of America where they got hammered with a famous Nor'easter, but it was still pretty exciting for us over here in Holland. Kids filled the streets for snowball fights...

...and frolicking dogs filled up the parks. Sage goes completely mad in the snow. Her love of the white stuff must be due to her first year with us back in Maryland when we got over 20 feet in Garrett County. She saw only snow for the first 4 months of her life.



Having snow on the ground also seemed to brighten everyone's mood for Christmas shopping on our little neighborhood winkelstraatje, the Cronje.

Warming up inside the pub is always gezellig. We met our friends Leon and Miranda for a drink at the Rusthoek only to be surprised with Miranda singing when we got there. If she wasn't a busy, working, mother of two great girls under seven, Miranda should have been a professional jazz singer. She has one hell of voice. Unbelievable! We're looking forward to the next gig.

No, this is not a(nother) war entry. We also attended Eva's sweet 16 birthday party at "The Bunker" in Spaarnwoude last weekend. This converted WWII bunker made for a perfect party venue.

She even hung an American flag in the bunker as part of the party decorations in honor of these two old farts. Here in Holland, kids can drink alcohol at 16 (they don't get a driver's license until 18). It was great fun watching them swagger up to the bar to order a drink and I couldn't help but remember all of those field parties back in Ligonier when I was 16 (or younger) and how we were always looking over our shoulders for the cops to arrive. I like the system here much better. It gives the parents an opportunity to teach the kids to drink responsibly rather than just turning them loose to go wild and figure it out for themselves at 21.

Berlin

Because it is the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German capital city has been in the news a lot this year. So we decided to see what all the fuss was about and hop a train over for our annual pilgrimage to the German Christmas markets.


The Germans LOVE Christmas! They even painted a Santa hat on the engine.


We booked a 1st class carriage and kicked back to relax for the ride over.


There were dozens of Christmas markets setup throughout the city. This is our second “Flat Stanley” trip - this one is for the daughter of one of Beth’s cousins (read story here). It’s funny how other American’s always spot us when we’re taking a photo with a Flat Stanley, or in this case “Flat Halle”. “Watch out! You’ll poke her eye out!”


Christmas Creep! We weren’t sure what German story this guy was from, but he sure was having fun throwing confetti on everyone.


Getting into the spirit with snow tubing on Potsdamer Plaza.


Oddly enough, we always manage to get good sushi in Germany. We DESTROYED an all-you-can-eat early bird special. I don’t think that they knew we were Americans when they invited us in. :-)


We’ve visited eleven different country capitals so far and compared with all the others that we’ve been to, the monument area of Berlin was pretty standard for the course. It had big, broad avenues like Washington or Paris lined with museums and monuments. But once you got outside of that area, especially into the heart of West Berlin, we found a fantastic patchwork of vibrant neighborhoods that each had their own character. I know that our French friends will be very disappointed in us, but Berlin tops the list so far!


One major difference with Berlin is that it was essentially obliterated during the war (oh no, he’s going to talk about the war!). This wasteland right in the heart of the city is the old royal palace. They are still excavating for artifacts before they begin to rebuild it.


The required photo of the Brandenburg Gate.


I have to apologize to our German friends about inserting this old photograph (I’m pissing everyone off today). I know that it is an emotional image, but it is so ingrained in my own mind as the defining moment when Berlin laid in smoldering, defeated ruins that it is the primary reason that I wanted to see the Reichstag at all -- parliament buildings aren’t usually high on my ‘must see’ list.


Now, the Reichstag has been rebuilt with an amazing new glass dome and is again proudly sporting the German flag.


This last remaining section of the wall was a highlight of the trip for both of us. I was just becoming politically aware when the wall finally fell, but it still holds powerful imagery for me. I could almost see and hear the old news clips of the night that people were allowed to cross and you can still see on this section where people hammered on it, trying to break it down. It’s now hard to imagine this city divided by the wall, especially when you see how arbitrary the barrier was. Standing there was very similar to the Lincoln memorial. If you take the time to read and reflect, it is very powerful stuff.


It’s no accident that they decided to preserve this section of the wall. It stands less than 50 meters from the headquarters of the Nazi political apparatus – Gestapo and SS. They are still excavating here as well, uncovering old torture chambers. It will all be a museum at some point in the future.


The Holocaust memorial was extremely well done. Like the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C., this was created by an artist/architect. When you approach the memorial, the columns look to be similar height. There is some variation, but the small differences cause more of a curiosity, drawing you to look closer to see what it is all about. But as you walk into the field of monoliths, you realize that the ground is not even. You start with the monoliths only reaching the height of your knees, but then before you know it, they are towering over your head. The whole site rolls across you like the swell of a giant wave and you are allowed to interpret the meaning for yourself as you wander through. These types of memorials are so much better than the old statues that they used to build.



This last photo is classic Berlin at Christmas. The decorations were spectacular even as the reinvention and rebuilding continues. The results so far are a fantastic city, grounded in a checkered past, but with the sights set firmly on the future.

Choose wisely - your sanity depends on it

Randstad - a tiny area home to more than 7 million folks

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After living in the Netherlands for more than five years now, we’ve come to appreciate the many amenities of city life. Of course there are the obvious benefits, like festivals, theaters, live music, pubs, and restaurants. Our own little burg of Haarlem has two major concert venues, an opera house, dozens of pubs and cafes, and more than forty restaurants-- all within an easy stroll of the central market square. (We even have our own red light district, but some of you may not consider that an amenity. ;-)

There are also the more subtle undercurrents of social energy that we now recognize as an integral part of the urban experience. It’s the buzz of activity, the ever changing sights and sounds, the interaction with other human beings. Of course sometimes the volume of people and activity can be exasperating. Sometimes you just want a little privacy…a little quiet. We’re lucky that The Netherlands has set aside so much open space within the Randstad to get away from it all-- locally. For me, it works nicely and I couldn’t imagine a better environment to live in….except for the $%&^* traffic.

I think only Beth knows the special attitude that I’ve developed against the automobile over the years. It started way back in Boise, Idaho when we bought our first house on 9th street. We didn’t know it at the time, but the city was aggressively developing the hills above our neighborhood and they were opening 9th street to thru-traffic. We fought it for months, but eventually lost. We watched helplessly as more and more traffic began racing down our street, completely disregarding the people who lived there. The people behind the wheel only wanted to get from point A (home) to point B (town) and nothing in between those two points was of consequence to them. I began to notice, even in myself, how the car becomes an insular environment for the driver. When driving a car, interaction is based upon a defined set of rules, not with other humans, but with other cars and all obstacles hindering your progress from point A and point B. It removes your requirement to be considerate, sucking a little humanity out of you. There are some interesting experiments taking place in Europe where cities are going ‘traffic-sign free’ in an atempt to correct this imbalance – read the wiki entry on Shared Space here.

However, the depths of my bad attitude toward cars didn’t fully develop until a few years after Boise when we relocated to Washington, DC. Our preference was to live in the city, but the rampant, violent, and totally random crime kept us looking further out. We settled in suburban Northern Virginia. I’m not much of a religious guy, but if there is a hell, then for me it can’t be as bad as living in a post-war, American style, suburban development. I never felt so isolated in my life, even when we lived in a house built in the middle of 400 acres in the country two years later. Literally anything that you wanted to do outside of the four walls of your house, you had to get in the car to do. And every day, there were thousands of other people living in the same sprawling development (who you had never met and had virtually a 0% chance of meeting) driving around on the same suburban roads thinking how convenient everything was. A day of shopping was getting in your car and driving from plaza X to mall Y to strip development Z as you went from destination store to destination store. No meandering. No interaction. No sense of community. And then when you were tired from all that driving, you looked for a nice café to sit and relax with a cup of coffee. How convienient! Just pull on up to the next shopping plaza and grab a window seat overlooking the sea of concrete and parked cars to watch the suburban world drive by. Wat gezellig!

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But I have seriously digressed into a rabid, and somewhat unreasonably fanatical, diatribe against the suburban automobile lifestyle. Sorry about that. Let me wipe the foam from my mouth and get back on track with the original intent of this post…hmmm, I had a point? Ah yes, now I remember.

Even in the massive conurbation that we now call home – The Randstad, which has a great network of trains and subways and trams and parks and bike paths, people get sucked into this auto-centric mentality. We’ve never driven into Amsterdam and we rarely use the car except to get Sage out to some of the more remote parks. It’s a safe, exciting urban lifestyle and a great place to call home…as long as you live where you can take advantage of that wonderful public transportation network. One only need look at this Randstad traffic report to understand why.

Real time traffic report

Red means traffic jams. The entire 60 square mile Randstad is locked up like this twice a day, every day. Location, location, location – save a few bucks on that place further out, and spend your days in your car. Not for me. I’ve learned my lesson. I'll always choose vibrant urban core or fresh country air over an auto-centric, tweener lifestyle.