I woke up in a panic on Saturday. I knew we had plans to visit the beach at some point in the afternoon, and I was sure I had slept far too late to go. Plus, I knew I had ruined everybody else’s day, since I was the only one who knew how to get to the beach. I looked at the clock on my iPod just be be sure. 4:55. Fuck. My alarm must not have been enough to wake me. I bet that I had slept through people banging on my door, trying to wake me up. I guess I still been exhausted from PopTrash, even though I had gone to bed at 1am the night before. Jesus. I checked my iPod again. This time it read: 10:52am. Jesus. I climbed out of bed and checked my phone: 10:52am. What the hell? Where did I get 4:55 from? Who knows. Anyway, I hadn’t slept through our little excursion to the beach.
We left sometime in the early afternoon and made it to the beach after a pretty respectable bike ride. There were far more people there than I had ever seen before, but it wasn’t so crowded that we very overwhelmed by masses of people. There were lots of parents with their little children, and a surprising number of the these kids were frolicking around wearing nothing at all. It was a bit of a shock the first time this young girl walked by us with no clothes, but by the end of the day, my reaction was more Oh, look, another naked kid. Back to my book… each time we were passed by a child in the buff.
I didn’t get any pictures of the beach as we were first walking toward it, which is too bad because the path is flanked by these fantastic Buddha statues and this great 1950’s style sign welcomes all visitors to the establishment, apparently named Blijburg Beach, which I guess translates into Happyville Beach. At least one source claims that it’s the happiest place on Earth. Until I go back and get some pictures of things beside us sitting in the sand, you should content yourself with Sarah’s photos.
We wiled away the afternoon reading and eating delicious soft-serve ice cream, which we received only after a complicated process that involved going into the bar and paying for a red plastic token, then taking said token outside to a window and handing it to guy who says oh, my bad, I could have just helped you right here. It also involved being asked if I was over 16 when I ordered a Corona at the bar. That was unexpected.
Later in the afternoon we left the Buddha-smattered beach and returned to the Funen. Later in the evening we reconvened to watch a double feature of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Baraka. KKBB was great as always, and, wowee, Baraka was nothing if not a trip. I had a pretty hard time concentrating on the movie as it went on, and I’m pretty sure I dozed off a time or two, but what I remember was pretty stunning. I finished the night with a bit of Six Feet Under before climbing very contentedly into bed.
After spending the early afternoon recovering from PopTrash, I once again left to spend a beautiful day meeting with my film group. We were done filming, but our professor wanted to see our footage, so we arranged to meet with her. Unfortunately, all the classrooms were booked, so we had no choice but to show her the footage in Rafael’s flat. That was slightly awkward, hanging out with a professor on a Friday afternoon in the apartment of a classmate. She offered up the occasional critique of a poor framing choice or an inelegant angle, but mostly she reacted positively and marveled at the scope and ambition of our project. Let’s hope it turns out. Thankfully, on Tuesday afternoon the other group members had filmed some exterior shots that I think we really help to even out the flow of the film. It may feel a little sitcom-y, but I’m okay with that at this point.
After showing her the footage, we had to return all of our equipment to the production company that loaned it out to us. We couldn’t carry all the gear while biking, so we walked it back to their offices near Waterlooplein. We returned everything without incident and we got our deposit back, which I had completely forgotten about. Me with fifty extra Euros that I wasn’t expecting is a dangerous proposition, however, as I’ve discovered more ways to blow money on absolutely nothing since coming to Amsterdam than ever before, and I’ve always been pretty good at spending money. I vowed to save the money for groceries next week, but even so I decided to stop by the market after dropping off the equipment. To my surprise, I managed to just spend a couple Euros on incense and a lollipop. Then I went to post office and bought €10 worth of stamps for postcards. Then I bought some fries. Then on the way back to Funen I stopped by the liquor store and dropped €30 on Kahlua and Smirnoff for our eventual Lebowski party (date TBD). Man ‘o man does money ever burn a hole in my pocket.
After getting back I made plans with the usual folks to grab a drink from an outdoor cafe. I suggested one of the places by the river where I often go to write, and before too much time had passed (and after some confusion as to whether we were biking or walking) we were on our way to Kanis en Meiland (walking). We got there and grabbed a couple of tables right by the water. After shooting the breeze for a while, it became clear that there wasn’t a waitress working the tables outdoors, so we headed to the bar inside our brought our drinks back out after ordering. I ordered Wieckse Witte, which was okay but didn’t have much of a taste. After a while we were the only ones sitting outside and we were cold so we decided to move indoors. Inside we were tempted by the food menu, and I ended up ordering tapas de pollo. I then mentioned that the place had board games and we spent some time trying to decide what to play, looking at the shelf of games from across the cafe. We settled on a game called Titanic, as long as it wasn’t a puzzle. I went over to grab it, and lo and behold, it wasn’t a puzzle! However, I soon realized that, as none of us had ever played Titanic before, and the instructions were almost certainly in Dutch, we were probably out of luck. We decided to play something else instead, so I took Titanic back and grabbed Monopoly, which seemed a very safe choice in terms of playability.
[note: it's probably just as well that we didn't play Titanic. Apparently, the first person to reach the lifeboats is the winner and everybody else ostensibly dies a horrid death in the freezing cold water. Seems a little morbid]
The first this we noticed about this particular version of Monopoly was that all the properties were named after different streets in different cities in the Netherlands. I thought that was fairly cute. The second thing we noticed was that the money was in some unknown currency that ranged from ƒ100 to ƒ50,000 (the currency was, perhaps, in Dutch Guilders). Also, the ƒ1,000 bills looked exactly the same as the ƒ10,000 bills (except for an extra “0″ obviously). The third thing we noticed was the the box had no dice, so I raided two Risk boxes before finding a pair. The fourth thing we realized was that we had no idea how much money we were each supposed to receive at the beginning of the game, so we just divided up the money evenly between us, leaving at least in a few bills in every denomination. I think we ended up with far too much money, because running low on money was never a problem for any of us. The fifth thing we noticed is that there were no pewter figurines to act as our avatars, so we improvised. The sixth thing we noticed is that, since all the Chance and Community Chest cards were in Dutch, we often had no idea what they were telling us what to do. So we made it up. All in all it was a pretty dysfunctional game and we gave up and decided to go home long before anybody won.
We walked back and went our separate ways, eager for a low-key night to continue our PopTrash recovery. I downloaded and began to watch Amadeus, but only got about 15 minutes in before giving up and going to bed.
Saturday we were supposed to film more for our movie. We didn’t, which I was more than okay with. I spent the day doing lots of lounging around, probably mostly watching season one episodes Six Feet Under. It’s not a show that really demands lots of rewatching, and I wouldn’t want to rewatch the show in the way I watch episodes of The West Wing, Sports Night, Arrested Development or The Office over and over again, but it’s been a couple of years since I made my way through the series, so I figured it was time. Other people went to go see the tulips at Keukenkof, but since I thought I would be filming, I told them I couldn’t make it. Their pictures look amazing and it seems like they had a great time. My mom will probably kill me if I don’t make it to the tulips at some point, but I don’t know if I can justify spending €18,50 or whatever it costs to go. A man’s gotta eat, y’know?
Later that night we went out dancing at Live at the BBQ at a club called the Bitterzoet. It was pretty kickin’. Afterward I came back to my room and started watching Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones, something I had wanted to do ever since coming back from Star Wars: The Exhibition in Brussels. I made it about ten minutes into the film before falling asleep, which was probably for the best.
Sunday we actually did film. In fact, I made my film acting debut. I played the doctor/surgeon/therapist. My first scene was pretty easy, it went like this:
The doctor leads Mary into the examination room.
DOCTOR
He’s sleeping right now, but I’ll give you a few minutes of privacy.
See? Not too hard. My second scene had a bit more of that poorly written dialogue that I’m known for:
DOCTOR
Are you here with Brian?
MARY
Yes. How is he? What happened?
DOCTOR
What is your relation to him?
MARY
He’s my boyfriend. I’m Mary
Holloway.
The doctor makes a note of this on his clipboard.
DOCTOR
I’m afraid that Ben has suffered a
stroke. He’s in stable condition
now though.
MARY
Is there going to be any lasting
damage?
DOCTOR
It’s really too early to say. The
MRI has so far come back negative.
MARY
Oh thank God.
DOCTOR
Would you like to see him?
Mary nods her head.
DOCTOR
Right this way please.
Let’s just say they call me “Six Take” Lehman for a reason.
Sunday also happened to be 4/20. We celebrated in our own little humble way. Thank god we finally got Arrested Development to work. We watched Pier Pressure, which seemed appropriate.
Monday was our final day of filming, and for me, the most frustrating. Maybe I was just in a bad mood all day, but I felt like I was pretty short and snippy with my other group members for most of the day. I envisioned myself having a meltdown like David O. Russell on the set of I ♥ Huckabees [please, even if you never click on any of my links, check that one out. It's fantastic] I just felt like screaming at my fellow crew members. It wasn’t a very fun time. I had another scene as the doctor that day, including my big monologue where I explain to the main character that he’s suffering from Mirrored Self-Misidentication. I’ll spare you the script excerpt from that scene. It turned out OK. Mostly I just wanted to have a stiff drink after filming was done, but I lacked the liquor to do so.
I slept through Europe-Hollywood-Europe on Tuesday. Whatever. I registered for classes early in the afternoon (mostly English courses so I can finish the major, but also a Religious Studies class that’ll fulfill my domestic diversity requirement). I spent a while making this delicious vegetable macaroni with ground beef. I don’t make food that takes a lot of effort often because I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense to spend that much time when I’m going to be the only one eating it, but it’s nice to have something other than soup, sandwiches or rice every once in a while. Regulating Religious and Cultural Diversity was a bore as usual. Nothing new there.
Later in the evening people convened in my room to watch a movie. We finally settled on 10 Things I Hate About You. Poor Heath.
Today (Wednesday) I spent most of the day updating the blog that you’re reading right now. That’s four posts in one day, suckas!
On Friday there was an IES field trip to De Hoge Veluwe, a national park in the Netherlands. Only four people signed up, so at 8:30 in the morning, I met up with the motley crew of Christy, Alex and Hallie to bike to Centraal where we were to meet the IES staff person lucky enough to supervise us on our way there.
The train ride took roughly an hour, after which we had to wait for a bus to arrive. The four of us took that opportunity to grab some coffee and hot chocolate from a small shop by the bus stop. After a bus ride that was almost certainly longer than the “about ten minutes” we were told it was going to take, we arrived at the park.
The first thing we did was choose a bike. The park has some 1700 “white bikes” available to use to ride around the park free of charge. There are different spots throughout the park where hundreds of these bikes are parked, and one can simply walk up and take a bike at their leisure. It makes for a very easy and enjoyable way to see the park. After biking for about thirty minutes, the six of us (us fours kids plus IES staffers Margarethe and Annabelle) stopped at the Kröller-Müller Museum located in the middle of the park. After grabbing some lunch courtesy of IES, us four kids did the first thing anybody who appreciates fine art would do: we hit the gift shop. After spending more money than I should have on some postcards and a Moleskine notebook, we ventured an actually looked at some art. The museum has the largest collection of Van Gogh works in the world after only the Van Gogh Museum here in Amsterdam, as well as some pieces by Picasso, Seurat and others. Apart from a very pretentious explanation of an exhibit titled “the place to be” the museum was quite enjoyable.
After enjoying the collections indoors, it was time to venture outside to the Sculpture Garden. A wide variety of sculptures were housed in the garden, from traditional sculptures of people and animals to the more avant-garde. One particularly intriguing piece consisted of a series of very steep steps that led to, well, nowhere, or, perhaps, the sky. Unfortunately, this particular sculpture was “closed,” meaning it could be observed but not climbed. Apparently some dumb high school kid had tried to run down the steps from the top, lost his balance, then fallen most of the way down. From what I understood, he was still in the hospital and the exhibit was going to remain closed until the museum could prove to the insurance companies (or something) that they weren’t at fault. Still, it was neato to see flight of steps that lead absolutely nowhere.
One of the most famous sculptures in the garden is the Jardin d’émail, a completely walkable sculpture that, at least to my knowledge, has yet to send anybody to the hospital. It was kind of cool just to climb around it for a little while, but the loud little kids who were also running around the sculpture dampened my enjoyment a little bit. Margarethe took a picture of the four of us sitting on the sculpture. Apparently I had a “cheesy smile.” Thanks, Margarethe.
The final sculpture to really catch my attention were what I would like to formally dub “The Ghost Boxes.” Walk inside one of the boxes, and you would be treated to ethereal reflections of yourself and those around you. We took a bunch of pictures of our ghost-selves then decided to head on and bike around the park a little more before we had to meet up with Margarethe and Annabelle to head back to the city. We went back to the white bikes (I’m pretty sure I found the same bike I rode earlier) and set off on a big loop of the park.
Now, I’ve never been to the Serengeti, and in all honesty I probably never will, but I have seen The Lion King and I couldn’t help but thinking that, Damn, this is what the Serengeti would would look like if it were located in the Netherlands. I was also reminded of the dual land Scrubland from my days playing Magic: The Gathering.
[quick note: I once was one match away from going to the Magic: The Gathering Junior World Championships. I made it to the semi-finals of a Junior Super Series qualifying match, and both finalists in a JSS were invited to the Championships. My opponent's goddamn Chimeric Idol just destroyed my otherwise very solid Rebel-geddon deck. I'm still bitter about it. Also, have you heard about the time I lost to a seven-year-old at the Virginia State Championships and promptly quit the game and sold all my cards? Ask me about it sometime, it's a good story. I'm still bitter about that, too.]
I guess I don’t have a whole lot to add about the national park except that, well, it was pretty. It was also surprising to see just how different from the rest of the Netherlands that area is. Really, I spent most of the afternoon taking videos with my camera while riding on my bike. I had a great time imaging all the sweet tracking shots I was pulling off and how any one of my clips would look right at home in an Alfonso Cuarón film. Mostly though, I just wanted an excuse to post a real video on Flickr now that they allow clips of up to 90 seconds to be uploaded. This is what I came up with after a bit of editing:
After a fair amount of riding around, we returned our white bikes and walked to a nearby bakery to kill some time while we waited to meet our leaders. I got a delicious chocolate croissant. Then it was back on the bus for a sleepy ride back to the station followed by a sleepy ride back to Amsterdam. After getting back to Funenpark and barely having a chance to change clothes, we reconvened to grab a bite to eat at the cafe by our windmill. It was a much nicer place inside than it looked from the outside, so much so than most of the entrees were quite a bit more expensive than I was willing or able to pay. Therefore, I ordered a grilled chicken salad. Only one complaint about the salad: too many vegetables. All those olives and tomatoes and zucchinis and squash, yech. I did however thoroughly enjoy the chicken, the bacon and most of the lettuce. Too bad there weren’t any carrots, I would have enjoyed those too.
Afterwards, we made a quick trip to AH and I spent the last four Euros in my pocket on a six pack of Amstel Gold. It was a little dark for my tastes; I’ve come to discover since I’ve been in Amsterdam that I’m really a lighter beer kind of guy. Unfortunately for me, all the light beer was over €4. We met back up in Sarah’s room later in the evening for a night of good times. The weather was still nice, so we made a brief trip up to the roof where we hung out until it got too cold, at which point we retreated back to Sarah’s room for the rest of the night.
Sunday and Wednesday I took more long bike trips. I never did make it to Muiden, a small town with a castle outside of Amsterdam, after discovering that the bike trail leading me there promptly ended by dumping me onto the interstate, which I didn’t particularly feel like biking along. Monday I got my residence permit. Tuesday I was unfairly shot down during a class lecture when I asked a question about John Quincy Adams. Listen, Bucko, I’ve watched John Adams on HBO and I know my shit about John Q. so please, kindly back off my grill when I tell you that he was an ambassador to the Netherlands. Later in the evening was the latest installment of Squiggling Ocean, which was surprisingly concise. I offered my adaptation of the beginning of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian for critique, which seemed to generally go over well. Afterwards we invited in some non-members and just generally hung out.
Wednesday evening we had a party devoted to learning how to roll a jay. It was generally unsuccessful, I think I wasted more than I ever actually rolled into a joint, and when I was finally successful, passing the joint became an activity similar to hot potato. Luckily, we had some extras on hand from a coffee shop, which did the trick with aplomb. Too bad we couldn’t ever get Arrested Development to work.
Thursday marked the first day of filming my group’s movie for Film Theory in Practice. Much as I suspected, it became an exercise in frustration for me. As the group’s editor, I have no official say in what happens on set, so all responsibility for actually filming the thing falls on the director and cinematographer, both of whom are great people, but not really suited for the task at hand. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that there was no way in hell I was going to keep the entire minutes-long scene of one of the characters preparing breakfast. That’s a ten, fifteen second scene, tops. Also, when almost no shot in a studio picture lasts for more than ten seconds, and even that is really pushing it, and you film an entire scene in a single, two or three minute take from only one angle, you’re probably doing something wrong. Alfonso Cuarón can pull of virtuosic long takes of war and strife, untrained amateur filmmakers cannot do the same with a take of a character making toast. I tried to offer advice whenever possible about shooting scenes from multiple angles to give me more choices in editing, but they only did that when I actively told them to, it’s not something that really seemed to sink on a scene by scene basis. Editing this piece is going to be a nightmare.
When I last left you, I had just emerged from the the glorious dark of Star Wars: The Exhibition. Standing in the parking lot of the exhibition hall, I spotted the elusive chrome sphere far off in the distance. Without much deliberation, Nick and I decided that Hell yes, of course we’re going to walk to the giant silver marbles that crest the distant horizon. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t spend much time on deliberation, because if we had, we might have realized just how fucking far away the thing was.
We set off much the same way we did for the Star Wars exhibit: with only a rough idea where we were going, though unlike the exhibit, we could see our destination far off in the distance. On our way, we passed an abandoned car with flowers growing out of the hood and some cool typeface that Nick decided to take a picture of. Crucially, off the top of my head, it occurred to me that I had previously been miscalculating when the last train for Amsterdam out of Brussels was going to leave. When I bought our tickets, the clerk at the ticket desk informed me the last train left at 20:15, and I incorrectly took this to mean 10:15pm. It wasn’t until we were walking toward the marbles that this struck me as wrong, and we realized we were going to have two less hours in Brussels than we thought.
As we walked, our destination continued to remain illusive. Several times we said to each other, It’s gotta be just over this next hill, and each time we were proved wrong. At the same time, we became increasingly aware of how far away from the train station we were venturing. After much toil, however, our perseverance was rewarded and we arrived at the bottom of what I will call Atomium Hill. We stood at the bottom of a gentle slope, the top of which loomed our silver marbles, christened Atomium by various signs pointing to the attraction. Roads lined with cars led up the bizarre monstrosity. A wide median of well-tended grass divided the roads. An inexplicable yellow edifice sat in the middle of the median, and as we walked closer, we discovered that the oddity was created entirely of Jupiler beer crates. Its purpose never revealed itself to us. Beyond the beer-crate building a wedding was being held. Why anyone would choose to be married in the shadow of Atomium is beyond me.
Atomium itself is comprised of nine massive, stainless steel spheres ostensibly arranged in the shape of a unit cell in an iron crystal. As Nick and I had walked toward it earlier, I had mentioned that it appeared to be just the kind of useless, batshit insane construction that cities would build during World’s Fairs. It reminded me oddly of the giant gold sphere (apparently known as the Sunsphere) that loomed over the Holiday Inn that my Odyssey of the Mind team stayed in when we attended the 2000 World Championships in Knoxville, Tennessee, which I imagine has lost much of its former glory. Why Knoxville was ever chosen for a World’s Fair I will never understand. Also, why don’t we have World’s Fairs anymore? They seem awesome! Though to be fair, I guess the public can only see so many exhibits about the flying cars we’ll all be driving JUST FIFTEEN YEARS IN THE FUTURE before they begin to understand that it’s never going to fucking happen. Tangent aside, it turns out I was exactly right about Atomium: it was created for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.
[note: Apparently World's Fairs still happen. Who knew?]
Nick and I stood in awe beneath Atomium, snapping pictures of the oddity. We contemplated taking a tour up to the top sphere which would have undoubtedly offered an unrivaled view of the entire city, but when we discovered the wait was about an hour, we decided against it with the knowledge of our dwindling time in the forefront of our minds. We began to wander away from Atomium, sure that we didn’t want to walk all the way back to the train station, but unsure of any other way to get back. We passed a small amusement park located right next to Atomium, a park that boasted both a water slide and an attraction they called Mini-Europe. Apparently the park’s many guests were unaware of the irony of visiting Mini-Europe while they were standing in the middle of life-sized Europe. Past Mini-Europe were a number of sports complexes of various sorts all adorned with the Olympic Rings, and it occurred to me that we might be in the middle of Brussel’s Olympic Village. In any case, we passed the main stadium which had clearly seen better days. Soon we arrived at a metro station and after much deliberation and hemming and hawing, we decided on the appropriate mode of transportation to take us to Brussel’s Central Station. We had taken the train into Brussels North, but we could depart from any of Brussel’s three train stations, and since the metro went to Central, we decided just to depart from there.
[note: Apparently Brussels never hosted the Olympics, though Antwerp did in 1920. I can't explain all the Olympic logos]
After some excitement on the metro when it departed the station in the opposite direction of what we expected, along with a women who spoke only French, yet continued to attempt to offer us advice on what stop to get off on, we arrived at Central Station, only to discover it was only a metro stop and no trains left from there. Confused and a little lost, we wandered around a square outside of a cathedral as though we were in a daze. We needed to regroup. We found a map and discovered that we weren’t really all that far from our original train station at that point, so we set off walking back.
Back at the train station, we checked over the departure schedule and realized we had more time than we had originally thought, so we ventured out to grab some dinner. After lots of walking and not much luck finding a place, we settled on an Italian-style pizza joint where we were the only customers. Enjoying a welcome beer and pretty decent pizza, we finally rested our weary legs. After dinner, we decided to find some of Brussels’ famous chocolate. Friends who had visited previously had raved about the chocolate shops on every street corner, about how they bought more chocolate than they could carry, about how delicious and enticing every delectable morsel appeared. Surprised that we had yet to see an single chocolate shop in our extended tour of the city, we decided to specifically seek chocolate out. This venture proved fruitless, as even after walking through what appeared to be Brussels’ main shopping street, we were greeted with a noticeable dearth of chocolate. We eventually gave up and returned to the train station where I bought a chocolate shake from the Quick Quality Burger.
We left sometime in the early afternoon and made it to the beach after a pretty respectable bike ride. There were far more people there than I had ever seen before, but it wasn’t so crowded that we very overwhelmed by masses of people. There were lots of parents with their little children, and a surprising number of the these kids were frolicking around wearing nothing at all. It was a bit of a shock the first time this young girl walked by us with no clothes, but by the end of the day, my reaction was more Oh, look, another naked kid. Back to my book… each time we were passed by a child in the buff. 
I didn’t get any pictures of the beach as we were first walking toward it, which is too bad because the path is flanked by these fantastic Buddha statues and this great 1950’s style sign welcomes all visitors to the establishment, apparently named Blijburg Beach, which I guess translates into Happyville Beach. At least one source claims that it’s the happiest place on Earth. Until I go back and get some pictures of things beside us sitting in the sand, you should content yourself with Sarah’s photos. 
