davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

Much to my delight, the Dutch love apple pie perhaps even more than the Americans do. Of course, they would never bake an apple pie from scratch at home. Heavens no, baking isn’t for doing at home, it’s for buying in a store. Check out the length our friend Beth had to go through to locate staple baking supplies in this city.

Fortunately, apple pie is on every cafe menu in the city so naturally it was our responsibilty to devote our seven months here to tasting every variety, rating them against each other and then proclaiming a ‘Best Apple Pie in Amsterdam’ winner. It would be rude not to. We weren’t so outrageous as to literally try every piece of pie in the city but we did try six, so roughly one per month considering time spent out of Amsterdam for the holidays and weekend trips.

Here are our results out of five bicycle bell dings: (more…)

Dave Says: 

Our apartment is situated on a piece of tourist trivia. It’s not that tourists flock to it but should they find themselves at our canal they can be heard letting out sighs of “ah” and “oh yeah” and muttering numbers under their breath. Thirty meters to the left of our front door is unofficially named the Seven Bridges, it being the only place in Amsterdam where seven bridges bridge several canals and all the spans can be seen at once. So, in homage to the tourists and the bridges, my final entry from this most agreeable city will be seven things beginning with “B” that have made our life here quite sublime. (more…)

Dave says:
As our time here in Amsterdam draws to its inevitable conclusion, we find our lives filled with the abstract and the detailed. They interchange, interact and generally serve to confuse as we prepare to pack our bags and hit the road. Here for your reading pleasure is a brief synopsis of our combined psyches:

Details
Even after only seven months of residency, it has become necessary for us to make the kind of detailed to-do-before-we-leave lists that serve to remind us our extra-ordinary¹ lives are still buttressed by the everyday and ordinary. The paper must be canceled, as must our poor Dutch imitation of Netflix, the bank must be informed, health insurance suspended and so on and so forth. At some point in the not to distant past, one could work, be paid in cash and then use that to buy bread, milk and DVD’s. Now I can’t even sneeze without it involving an internet connection, a dimly recalled username/password combination and translation confusion whist I attempt to manage ‘mijn account’ or contact ‘klantenservice’. For nomads we have a lot of business to cancel. (more…)

Dave says:

I have a hole in my thumb – almost. It started as a mild welt, then became a slight abrasion and now it’s almost a complete breach of my haberdashery. A few desperate and disparate threads of my cheap Dutch gloves separate my thumb from the world at large. Once they give up, the thumb will make a break for it and my body, being firmly attached, will have no choice but to follow. I estimate another six weeks – give or take.

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Sarah says:

We humans are such creatures of habit. Dare I say, immediately after dropping those dusty, dirty, too-heavy and not yet retired rucksacks down on our temporary Dutch floor, David and I subconsciously set about creating a life extremely familiar. Even our choice of winter home could be considered a habit. Amsterdam is a large enough city to have culture, art, music and shopping while small enough to navigate entirely on foot or bicycle. It’s charming, has great coffee, good beer, there is water everywhere you look and it rains. Sound familiar?

This part of humanity makes me laugh and leaves me curious: why are humans so inclined towards their familiar? Why did we wrap ourselves up in a comfy security blanket of routine in the blink of an eye? These aren’t hard questions. They are screaming with easy answers. After nine months of sensory overload, overwhelming stimulus of the unfamiliar, smells, sounds, foods, animals, and the wide assortment of non-regulated public transportation in two-thirds of the world’s 3rd world countries, we craved cereal.

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Sarah says:

I wonder how many times I’ve flown in and out of Sea-Tac airport. Over the past 10 years, hopping on a plane for everything from same-day business trips to our three-month life break in New Zealand, I’m gonna go ahead and average maybe 5 round-trips a year which has my tally roughly at 50 take-offs and landings in and out of Seattle. And each and every time I see those gorgeous mountains, those amazing lakes and that beautiful city skyline, it takes my breath away. It doesn’t matter what kind of excitement I’m flying off to, I’m always sad to be saying goodbye and it’s the view that is the first to welcome me back home. No matter how many times I see it, the awe never wanes. It is simply stunning and it means home.

Of course my last take-off out of Seattle was January 8, 2007 and I have since had 33 take-offs and landings. THIRTY-THREE! Our carbon footprint this year is absolutely enormous and this number is really nothing to be proud of but my point is this – not a single one of those take-offs or landings had the spectacular view out of the window that you can have from Seattle and certainly none had the same feeling as flying home but that’s OK because not one of those flights was actually returning me home. That is until my flight on September 25th and my eight flights since then.

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Dave Says:

Keys
I have decided to title the paragraphs. The last literary affair rambled, so by now titling the paragraphs I’m hoping to give the reader a clue to the general thrust of the upcoming diatribe so easing the demands on my long, comma ridden sentences. In the long run, this will save us all time although it may be a while before that investment is realized. So, keys. I have them. They serve as a metaphor. They lock things up whilst reminding me I have things that need locking up. Locking my things up protects them from people who would like them for some nefarious gain of their own and so depriving me of my ever so important things. I have seven keys: bike front, bike rear, door up, door down, card key for work, key for the locker at work where my laptop lives and the ubiquitous mystery key. I’ve always had a mystery key. I don’t look for it, it just appears on the key-ring one day. Instantly I cannot remember quite what it (un)locks but I’m scared to dispose of it in case I can no longer (un)lock something I think is important. This too is a metaphor but of what I have yet to deduce.
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