travel break

I'm back from ten days pillaging across Western Europe. In those days, we hit up London, Dublin and Paris, and it was an insane whirlwind of laughing, walking, and some of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Expect a blog or two in the coming days - I need to prepare to write what I expect to be behemoths of blog posts. 

amsterdam

Amsterdam has a reputation. We all know this. We have all heard of the Dam.

To emphasize, this is what happened when I would tell people I was coming to The Netherlands to study.

Brian: I'm going to The Netherlands.

Stoner Kid from High School at a Party: Where?

Brian: The Netherlands. Like.. Holland.

SKFHSAAP: Where?

Brian: ...Amsterdam.

SKFHSATP: All riiiiiight.

Brian: I'm going to The Netherlands.

A Friend of my Mother's: Where?

Brian: Kind of near Amsterdam.

AFOMM: [eyes widen] Oh. Well, you be careful.

And then when I got back...

Bonnie: So did you go to Amsterdam?

Brian: Yeah, it was great.

Bonnie: So... did you get stoned?

THAT'S MY MOTHER TALKING TO ME. COME ON, GUYS.

But I hit the streets of the Dam this weekend, and let me say it both defied and lived up to my expectations. First of all, when I pictured Amsterdam, I pictured something like New York, large and loud and with noise everywhere - tall buildings and bright lights and, let's face it, sex drugs and more sex.

Well - remember how I said Maastricht was like a blend of modern and antique, separated by a large bridge? Amsterdam was like that - bricks, bricks, bricks everywhere. The streets themselves were paved with warm rust-colored brick, and the buildings were all old and some of them crumbly, stone facades and tiny cramped gray sidewalks. It was surprisingly familiar at this point, speckled and dotted with churches decorated with puffy blue-and-red orbs of concrete, Corinthian pillars framing the windows, and with belltowers rising above us, shining gold gilt highlights on doorframes and corners. Canals criss-crossed the city, deep brown waters churning sluggishly by. 

At the same time, Amsterdam was the first city that really sounded like a city, even if when you looked at it, it didn't quite mesh with the sound. Car horns honked, crowds of people chattered like parrots roosting in trees, talking nonsensically and at an impressively loud volume. Trams of blue and white chug on lines through the streets, such new creations slithering through the brick. At night, the bricks and stones were illuminated by flashing rainbows of neon yellow, green, red. The city was like antiquity gone modern, without losing any of its antique charm.  

Collin said it best when he postulated that "Amsterdam is like Bruges's grandson. You know, it's thirteen and has all the genetics but already has all these tattoos and peircings, and they have to see each other at family reunions but, you know, it's awkward."

We arrived on Friday, and spent the first half of the day with Rob Duckers at a museum containing a replica of the gorgeous Arena Chapel in Padua. The walls are quite literally covered in art, scenes from the life of Mary and Jesus in large blocks, beautiful and tragic stories splayed out in crude but evolving art, bright colors, bordered by overwhelming cobalt blue. 

After the sun went down, a red moon had rose heavily over Amsterdam, the infamously named Red Light District glowing with buzzing crimson bulbs of all shapes and sizes. We went to the Moulin Rouge - a sex show. The front of the building featured neon red outlines of very buxom young ladies in all sorts of poses; we went through the door, black plastic tokens to be exchanged for drinks pressed into our hands. We had to clamber up a tight staircase to make it into the showroom, small stage surrounded by benches that were reminiscent of pews in a church gone horribly degenerate.

Act one: a woman danced around with a candle in certain places. Act two: a woman wrote on a man, a marker clenched in her nether region - impeccable handwriting. Act three: four members of the audience invited on stage - including our own Allie and Rachel - to dance with the performer, and then eat a banana off of her body. ("It was a really good banana," one of them said afterwards.) Act four: a man in a monk's robe gets up on stage - so does the scantily clad performer. One thing leads to another and they have sex for fifteen minutes, and then get up and leave the room to scattered applause. All this amongst bright strobe lights and deep fog. Wow.

The Red Light District, let me tell you. It was such a.. strange experience, because there were the sex workers, separated from me only by a window of glass. Their expressions were of desire, longing, even happiness, but it must have been a mask. They were bathed in the dim red light that hung above their doors. Crowds of onlookers gathered at a safe distance, chattering in languages other than Dutch: English, French, German. It was a bizarre human zoo, and it made me feel mildly uncomfortable, a knot of dehumanization growing and tugging at my insides. 

Incidentally, we had a sex worker come into one of our classes last week and talk about how it's NOT ALL BAD for sex workers, prostitutes, whatever you call them. Some of them choose it as a line of work. Some of them ENJOY the work, for that matter. 

It was still very strange.

The next day, on an educational note, we hit up the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh museum. The former was... an experience. Small, cramped, with crumbling red and yellow wallpaper. I don't know what I can say about it that hasn't been said a million times before, and more eloquently to boot. Anne Frank has become such a martyr, such a face for the millions, and being there, in the place she lived for two years, was strange, suffocating but relieving.

The Van Gogh Museum was art. Lots of it. My favorite things were the scribbles, immaculate doodles on letters and menus, pencil lines over and over creating things far more beautiful than I could ever possibly do. Such talent. You get close to a painting, and it's small dabs of color, messy little lines that, when you step back and take in the whole canvas, are insane blends of color and texture, portraits and landscapes. I never feel as though I can entirely appreciate art. But here, I came pretty close.

That night was bar-hopping, glowing green shots and sweet yellow drinks, ice clacking against the glasses, big smiles and loud laughter and hot, hot pizza and french fries late at night. It is a thudding in my head, a street populated by sex shops with instruments in the windows I couldn't possibly imagine being used by anyone, and when I try to picture it, I feel phantom pain for the people who stick those things ANYWHERE on their body. It is clamoring down dark alleys and bright streets and phallic monuments and dark canals lit by buzzing fireflies of streetlights.

"Dear Amsterdam," Greg said. "STOP IT."

Nice summary.

(Also, for any of you who may care, the above was said specifically in reference to the large population of attractive women who take to the streets of Amsterdam in comparison to the other towns in the Netherlands. Fun fact.)

This weekend is our first travel break: London, Dublin and Paris. When she went to London and Paris in Baby-Sitter's Club Super Special #15: Baby-Sitters European Vacation, Mallory Pike discovered she was related to Shakespeare. What mysteries await me? Time will tell.

carnival

You all know what Lent is, I assume. The Christian holiday in which those participating give something up - a vice, a habit, a person - for forty days and forty nights. It was the subject of a mediocre movie starring Josh Hartnett. He gave up sex or something. I don't know, it was a pretty terrible movie.

So let's talk about Lent. Let's say you're about to give something up for Lent. This is a big deal. You're going to give up your vices, give up ice cream or beer or sugar or caffeine. And you'll be all penant and everything. Whoa. Big deal. 

So some European guy, hundreds of years ago, decided he wanted to have a little party before Lent. And he invited all of his friends. And they invited all of their friends. And they invited all of their friends. And everyone brought a CD of the loudest music they could. And lots of beer.

Thus, Carnival was born.

Carnival swept its way across Europe last weekend, crashing on the castle like a tidal wave. Beware - this one's a long one.

We went to Maastricht last Friday for an academic excursion with Rob Duckers, assistant director of the castle program and generally The Man. It was another of those cities that looked as though it belonged in a different century - or at least half of it did. You cross a bridge held up by long white pillars; on one side is a quiet town, streets of stone and houses of brick. On the other side is a city evoking an industrial sort of atmosphere - not quiet modern, but more square and neutral, washed out in whites and tans. It was, overall, an interesting excursion - churches built up several stories; clambering up a spiral stone staircase, my hands rubbing against the rough blocks making up the walls, I tried to find myself back in the tenth, eleventh centuries, when these buildings were first erected. How they were built is beyond me - I picture people like ants, scurrying back and forth from stone quarries, clambering over half-built gray structures, and I simply cannot picture these spires and towers emerging from the rubble.

The sun set, and the city exploded into red and yellow and green, bars spilling out into streets, and people, people, people everywhere. We walked out of a bar where we had been having a lovely drink or three with Rob Duckers, and found ourselves awash in a sea of reckless abandon. The Duke left us to our own devices, and we immersed ourselves in Carnival.

There were six of us that night in Maastricht, bounding from bar to bar, table to table. Round one. We stand, leaning against a soaked table, cardboard coasters blending into mush in front of our eyes. Round two. We dance, pressed up against each other, neon lights flashing and fog steaming, spurting from a machine we can't see. Round three. There are balloons in rows stretching from building to building. The darkness of the city opens up hidden alleys full of revelers, clothes screaming the Carnival colors. Round four. Sticky waffles coated in chocolate. Urinals standing like warped statues in the middle of the streets. Round five. Catchy tunes in Dutch and English echo down the alleyways, the cramped space amplifying the sounds tenfold. Round six. We collapse into warm hostel beds, bright orange decor and sheets in rainbow stripes fading like the music.

"Carnival," I wrote, my handwriting large and loopy, "is perfection."

We traipsed back to Well in time for four days of dancing and parades. The Linden seemed like it exploded too. The back room, hidden like Narnia, opened wide for us, the wardrobe doors turning into a walk-in closet, and we stormed our way through it. The walls back there looked pastel, baby blue and baby pink smeared across the wood. Portraits of past Carnival Princes hung like plaques from the ceiling, in some cases only barely resembling a real human being. It was as loud back there as it was in Maastricht, sometimes louder, the sound bouncing around in the cramped space. We would leave with our ears ringing.

A horde of Emerson students marched in the day parade on Sunday, our costumes a bizarre amalgam of colored facepaint, bright boas and scarves, hats of all sorts and - in Greg's case - a sculpted plastic mask scarier than anything I've ever seen, slightly resembling current President George Bush. It was cold, and most of us weren't aptly dressed. We shivered and shimmied our way through Well, constantly moving to keep warm.

Monday night, a parade of lights trekked down the streets. Floats decked out in the scariest creations you've ever seen - papier mache lions and tigers and people (I'm not making a Wizard of Oz joke; I'm above that) with tongues painted bloodred hanging from their mouths. Each float was also overflowing with lights - some stagnant, some flashing. It was a techno dance party out in the cold, lasting for two hours of cheers and pink and green and blue and yellow and white, each color having its fifteen minutes of lashing our eyeballs. The floats themselves were laden with Dutch adolescents tipping back beers, bored expressions flitting from face to face.

Speaking of drunk Dutch adolescents, Greg and Collin and I stumbled upon a group of them standing on the bridge to the castle on Saturday night. Lights that had been illuminating the arms of the bridge were tipped into the moat like some flourescent Titanic, rear end sticking up into the air. They smelled of too much bad beer, but were all smiles when we came their way.

"We're your new best friends," they told us, trailing behind like wisps as we crossed into the castle courtyard. We didn't let them into the castle, of course, and they fled before RA Kevin Overshiner, beacon of social justice, ran out onto the grounds looking for them. They did manage to ask us for a blowjob before we parted ways - laughter with accents, if that's even possible, rang out through the VB courtyard. Greg and I raised our eyebrows at each other, not bothering to suppress our grins.

Pretty typical.

Carnival has since ended, the only remnants being shattered bits of glass and torn streamers littering the roads on Wednesday morning. It's mostly all been swept away, tumbled into the trash. At least until next year.

"Take your vitamins and have fun," a Dutch woman told me the second day of Carnival as I purchased my brightly colored effects, scarf and gloves to proclaim my Carnival pride. I don't know what vitamins had to do with it, but... fun? Yeah. This was fun.

storm

It is raining. 

No, even more than that, is is a certifiable downpour, rain and hail streak down, bullets pelting us as we stand in the courtyard, eyes squinting, staring up at the sky above. The stars are invisible behind purple clouds, except when lightning streaks across the sky, flying faster than any bird, propelled on wings of crackling purple and blue. It is so clear that it could be a drawing, like a child is slashing the heavens with a thick neon marker. The lightning rends the sky in half, so forceful that you expect the sky to crack like glass and for shards of it to come falling down, pointed bits of sky mingling with the water and ice pooling on the ground.

The thunder that follows the lightning bellows. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand. I count the seconds on numb fingers. Six seconds between lightning and thunder, six miles away, six miles up. It looks so close. 

When it flashes, it flashes, cloaking us all in pearly blue light, making our white skin glow like plums and berries for just a second, not even a second. You breathe in and taste rain. I am soaked, feel water seeping everywhere, drops sliding over my scalp, through my hair. My toes wiggle and slosh through the water gathering in my shoes.

My fingers tingle. 

This is awesome.