All about Amsterdam

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I fell into my bunk bed at the hostel when I arrived in Amsterdam on July 10. I’d taken the 3:30 a.m. train out of Bollnas to be sure I wouldn’t miss my flight from Stockholm. No worries there. I was so early for my connecting train from Uppsala that I had to wait at the station for three hours. There were no problems from Stockholm to Riga, but my flight from Riga to Amsterdam was delayed. I didn’t make it to the hostel until nearly 9:30 p.m.

Monday morning I felt much better. I bought a ticket to the Van Gogh museum from the front desk at the hostel, which turned out to be a very smart plan. After breakfast, I walked through Vondel Park to the Museumplein. At twenty to ten, the line for the Van Gogh museum was down the block. Since I already had my ticket, I was able to get in a much shorter line and breeze through the entrance when the museum opened at ten.

It didn’t take long for the museum to be a mob scene. There was a couple from Michigan that basically followed me through the entire place in order to stand right in front of me every time I stopped to look at a sketch or a painting. The guy was a giant, at least 6′ 3″, so there was just no getting around him. In spite of them, however, I had a great time. I saw a bunch of Van Gogh’s work that I’d never seen before.

By 12:30 p.m., it was so crowded that people could barely move, so I left and sat outside in the park, watching people hover around this gigantic sculpture that says “I Amsterdam.” It looks like broken English when I write it down, but it actually ties in with Amsterdam’s marketing campaign, the slogan for which is “I am Amsterdam.” I’ll amend this post with a picture when I get back to the States so this makes sense. Meanwhile, just close your eyes and imagine every time you’ve seen gigantic letters somewhere. Kids crawl all over them, school groups mob them for pictures, etc. That’s what I was watching go on.

After lunch, I walked back to the central station, because I don’t have a fancy European bank card, so they wouldn’t let me book my train ticket to Paris online. In fact, when I got to the station, they made me pay in cash because the hi-speed rail company doesn’t take anything other than European bank cards anywhere. They also charged me a 20 Euro “convenience fee” because I had to talk to an actual person and give them cash. Very convenient for me, to be sure.

I spent the rest of the day walking and watching people. When I got back to the hostel, I spoke with an awesome woman named Anna from Brazil. She’s traveling through Europe with her six year old daughter, Louisa. They were some of my roommates for the night. Anna works as a travel agent back home. She was incredibly friendly and easy to talk to. Louisa was super cute and reminded me of when I was a kid. She kept telling her mom that she shouldn’t have to go to bed because it wasn’t dark out. Poor thing. That argument never works.

Regarding Sweden

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I’m having a hard time summing up my time in Sweden. Perhaps it’s due to the sleep deprivation I experienced because it’s light out 20 hours a day and twilight for the other four hours. Maybe it’s because people gaped at me like I was the newest space invader on the streets of Bollnas. Perhaps it was because I was more focused on visiting Hannah than “traveling.” Whatever it is, Sweden eluded me somehow.

There was a Socialist rally in Stockholm on July 4. It was held in the plaza in front of the Nobel museum. As we were passing through, someone handed me an anti-American pamphlet with a really derogatory image of President Obama on it. It sort of bothered me. The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but neither is Sweden. The previous day, we’d walked through a square near Stockholm’s central station and run into a rally of Iraqi asylum seekers. Hannah explained that Sweden has been struggling with an influx of political refugees from Iraq, and that a few have been deported recently.

This is not to say I didn’t have fun in Sweden. I got to swim in a river at midnight. I got to see a huge owl and walk down picturesque country roads. I got to sleep on a boat, just like in “Pirate Radio.” I got to watch “The Simpsons” with Swedish subtitles and eat student food, which is what they call ramen.

Best of all, I got to hang out with Hannah and watch her negotiate life in a place completely different from where we grew up. She speaks Swedish fluently and helped me through some uneasy moments when I didn’t know what was being said to me. She knows the best sushi restaurant in Stockholm. She also turned me on to a couple of great Swedish bands. It was great to see her, and it was sad to say goodbye. I miss having Hannah around at home, but now that I’ve seen what her life is like overseas, I can see why she likes it so much.

PS: it is very expensive to live or visit Sweden. Recently things became so costly in Sweden that they took their smaller coins out of circulation. The smallest change you can receive at the moment is one Krona, which is worth about 16 cents in the U.S.

MSY stands for…

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…Moisant Stockyards. It’s also the airport code for Louis Armstrong International Airport here in New Orleans. John Moisant was an aviator who crashed his plane into the stockyards that sat where the airport currently sits in Kenner. This happened in 1910. he basically fell out of his monoplane during a test flight, landed on his head, and died a day later.

I’m sitting here, waiting to board my flight to Newark. A family with unruly children sat down beside me about twenty minutes ago. One kid want his GameBoy, which is currently being withheld for unknown reasons. The little girl is mad because her parents made her wear the same t-shirt as her brother. Maybe if I get lucky, they’ll sit far away from me on the plane.

Though I just had lunch at the Beach Corner with Scott, I think it’s time for a snack. It’s also time to find a seat away from this family.

The Dreaded Wal-Mart Trip

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I miss the ghetto Target down the street from my house in Minneapolis. It was always loud and crowded. The aisles we’re sticky with spilled Icees and lattes. Usually, at least one little kid would take a header out of a cart while I was in there.

My favorite part of the ghetto Target experience was visiting the pharmacy. You see, their automated system would call me and let me know when my prescriptions were ready to be picked up. However, I would arrive at Target only to find that my prescriptions were not ready. Sometimes they hadn’t been filled. Sometimes they gave me the wrong medication. One time they mixed up my first and last names.

“They both sound like last names to me.”

“That’s because they are. My first name was my mother’s maiden name.”

“I hate when people do that. I guess they think it’s cute or something.”

At that point I had been waiting for 45 minutes. I was not in the mood to discuss my parents’ intentions when naming me. When the clerk rang up my prescription, it was about 25 times more expensive than it should have been. It turns out the computer prompted them to prepare my refill two days early, and my insurance company wouldn’t cover the cost of the medication unless I came back two days later. Ah, efficiency.

Yet I look back on those days and shiver with nostalgia. Why? You see, there are only two Target stores in all of New Orleans. Neither of them are at all convenient to where I live. There is a Wal-Mart just down the street, however. Not just any Wal-Mart, either. Mine is a famous Wal-Mart. In the days after Katrina, an NBC news crew filmed some NOPD officers “shopping” for shoes and other sundry items there.

More recently, the “Wal-Mart Bounce” video was filmed at my Wal-Mart. You can Google it if you somehow missed it when people were forwarding it around a couple months ago. My brother was quick to point out that this is the Wal-Mart I shop at when he forwarded the video to my cousins. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly so cool as the people in the video. My rhymes are lame, and I couldn’t move like one of those girls unless I was having a seizure.

I swear there is a point to this rumination on discount shopping. When I got home tonight, I wrote my packing list for Europe. I thought I’d gathered everything I needed. I was wrong. Since I’m running out of time to do everything, I’m going to have to brave the Wal-Mart. This is what happens when you haven’t worn socks in nearly four months. You don’t realize that in other places, you might need some. Also, I really enjoy the minty, fresh breath part of brushing my teeth, so toothpaste is going to be vital. And I might want to see. I guess some contact solution will be in order as well.

I should have written my list last week. Then I wouldn’t be spending some of my few remaining hours in New Orleans dreading the Wal-Mart excursion that awaits me.

Testing…Testing…1,2,3

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Is this thing on? Oh, wait. It is.

It’s been more than a while. Scanning through my archive, I find to my horror and embarrassment that it’s been nearly a year since I posted anything here. Therefore I see only two options:

1. I can prattle on about how busy I have been, and attempt to justify my absence.
2. I can honestly say that I’ve let my writing slide for way too long and get back to writing.

I choose option #2. A “tabula rasa” moment for me. (Where is Willow when you need her? I like the name Joan.) So I begin again.

Let’s start with this fantastic news: I’m four days and 16 hours away from leaving for Europe! I fly to London Friday night to begin a one-month sojourn through the continent and Great Britain. My first stop is Stockholm, Sweden. I will be traveling further north than I’ve ever been in my life in order to visit my dear friend Hannah. I can hardly wait.

Now is the part in Sprockets when we sleep. I have a ton of things to accomplish between now and Friday afternoon.