• Clothing: It’s a lot cheaper in the US, and also, I’m just too small to fit into a lot of Dutch clothes. (Actually, Ted got his work trousers, shirts, and a couple of suits tailor-made for him when we lived in Taiwan, and he gets more now and then on trips back there. Can’t beat handmade!)
• Electronics: The same stuff is available, but it’s much cheaper in the US.
• Food: I bring back a bag of my favorite pretzels whenever we go, because here all they have is “zoutsticks”, little pretzel sticks. They’re too small to be satisfying and so I eat too many. I also get pretzels whenever we’re in Germany. There’s lots of candy and cookies available here but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. Also, we stock up on Clif Bars and protein bars and Luna bars because they don’t sell them here (except Powerbars at a few specialty stores). They give you a bit of nutrition without upsetting your stomach and we find them extremely useful when you need to eat something before sports, say on a regatta day. Dutch people tend to eat plain bread for this or ‘breakfast breads’ but since the bars have protein in them and are a little denser, I think they relieve hunger and stay with you better, without taking much volume.
• Over-the-counter meds: Here’s where it gets complicated, because there are a bunch of reasons:
  1. Things they don’t have here. They don’t have Nyquil or an equivalent. It’s not that it relieves cold symptoms better than anything else, it’s that it puts you to sleep while doing so and lets you (me, anyway) wake up without being groggy. So helpful when you have a cold!
  2. Things that are cheaper here. They have multivitamins here, including our usual brand, but they cost a lot more.
  3. Things I don’t understand. It’s not you, Dutch products, it’s me – as far as I can tell, things like Claritin (for allergies) and Excedrin (for migraines) aren’t sold here but have close or exact equivalents, but I can’t read the box fluently enough to be sure. Especially when I’m sick!
  4. Things we just like better. We prefer the taste of Crest (not sold outside the US, for some reason) over Colgate or Aquafresh (sold in Europe and Asia). As far as I know, they’re all equally effective, this is just a subjective preference. (Actually, this is no longer true – these days we are getting old and we use a Dutch brand of toothpaste made for sensitive teeth. In fact, we have a tube of Sensadyne at the Oregon hose and I think the Dutch stuff works better. It tastes faintly of licorice, though.) On the other hand, I’ve been using Q-Tip brand (cotton swabs) since I began buying my own consumables; they have more cotton on the tips than any other brand I’ve used in the US or anywhere else. Other brands just feel like you’re inserting a sharp stick in your ear and don’t seem to have enough fluff thee to either clean or dry them.

So the short version is, I buy US stuff when either they don’t have it or I can’t fit it here, or when it’s much cheaper in the US, or when I just like a particular brand better. Or when I’m too stupid to figure out the equivalent Dutch product.

The trip was only marred at the very last minute, when I managed to leave my wallet in a store in the Portland airport and only realized when we got to Amsterdam. I’ve talked to the people in the store, and they have it and will be sending it to me, fortunately – it’s got credit cards, bank cards and drivers licenses from two countries, not so easy to replace. I just hope it gets here before my next trip to the US, which is only a couple weeks away. I am having my bank cards canceled and reissued, so at least the Dutch ones should get here in time.

And here are the pictures to prove it did happen! (Er, the rowing, not the wallet loss.)

Other than rowing, we’ve gotten to sleep late, drink lots of Oregon wine and beer, and check out RVs and big trucks to pull them, in prep for next year. We’ve eaten all the foods we can’t get in the Netherlands – pretzels, of course, and all the foods we can’t get where we live: steaks, grilled salmon (well, they have it there, but this was Pacific Northwest salmon and we got to grill it ourselves), grilled green asparagus, roasted turkey, burritoes, other Mexican food. We got to cook in a big over and with a stove top that has actual flames coming out of it, and Kathy was highly amused when I started talking about how big our oven, washer, dryer and fridge are (all on the large side but still standard US sizes). And we got to sleep in our own bed, which is just so much nicer than the one in our Dutch flat. Now Kathy has elected herself our cruise director for when we throw a big weekend-long Party at the Lake, which apparently we are supposed to do on an annual basis after we return. (If we really ever do, we’ll let all you family and friend types know, of course.)

All this and getting to not be at work, too!

(Pics wil come later; I forgot to bring the card reader to upload them.)

You can see previous Accudock docks of the month here. Ours was not very complicated compared to some, but the permitting process was long and difficult, and the logistics of building it were tricky (e.g. no heavy equipment allowed on Army Corps land). Our architect (and now dock builder) Michael Soraci did great work getting it to reality.

One of Ted’s coworkers is a volunteer miller (“vrijwiliger molenaar”), who spends his free time working a 300-year-old windmill in a town nearby. He’d invited us to visit, so we dropped by last Saturday. This region is well above sea level, so mills here are used for grinding grain, not so much for pumping water out of fields. They still mill grain for all the farmers in the area, as well as giving tours to groups of schoolchildren as well as tourists like us, and selling some local products like honey and sunflower seeds. Thanks to knowing the miller, we got to go all the way up the ladders to the top floor, to see how the windmill’s force is used to turn a big wooden wheel, that uses cogs to turn a horizontal wheel that drives the millstone. Despite the enormous force used, almost all of the mill’s workings are of wood, just as they were originally built. They’re lubricated with beeswax or animal tallow (for different parts). Even the giant brake and the bracing for the windvanes are wood, though the vanes do now have a metal leading edge, like an airplane wing.

My favorite part, though, may have been the goats and the tiny shaggy ponies no taller than my hip, feeding on the grass outside the mill.

In the evening, we wwent to a party given by my boss and his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary. The reason this was also very Dutch is that this was their 12 1/2 anniversary – the big anniversaries of a marriage or employment here are not the 10th and 20th, but the 12 1/2 and 25th. It was in a private room in a bar in aanother small village, with a keyboard player who took requests. The other characteristically Dutch thing was that everybody not only sang “Lang Zal Ze Leven” (used like “Happy Birthday”, but for both birthdays and anniversaries) but also a group of their friends sang a song with lyrics of their own, all about my boss and his wife. (I have no idea what they said, other than that their name was cleverly rhymed in, but I could tell it was well done.)

Then on the way home we got thoroughly lost because the highway was closed for construction and for some reason the detour signs guided us in exactly the wrong direction, until we decided to give up on them and rely on the GPS instead. Usually local signs are more accurate than a GPS, but not this time!

Last weekend, we spent my birthday in Lisbon, where we managed to have a nice relaxing long weekend by resigning ourselves to not seeing all there was to see – I think you’d need a week or more just to see all of the major museums, monuments, palaces, beaches and so on. Also, we did so much walking we found ourselves needing to rest before dinner!

The weather cooperated beautifully, with blue, blue skies and temperatures that ranged from sweater-and-jeans in the morning to jeans-and-Tshirt just barely not being too hot in the afternoon. Going in March was great, because not only were the temperatures comfortable but the tourist crowds were much sparser than it looked like they’d be in summer. Ted booked rooms at the International Design Hotel right at the foot of the Rossio square in the Baixa district; I thought the graffiti design on our floor was a bit silly, but the hotel was very comfortable, the staff were helpful and able to give us lots of advice on getting around, and the location was perfect. The Baixa did show signs of recent economic troubles, with a bunch of closed stores, but was still interesting to walk around and full of restaurants.

If we missed a few things, we still saw lots. We also ate some really tasty seafood, drank wine, and enjoyed just being in the sun in a city at the water’s edge. I had salmon one night, shrimp (of course) another, and golden bass the third – I didn’t realize that last was going to be an entire fish complete with head and tail, but then the waiter deboned it for me which made eating it easier (he also took away the head, so it wasn’t staring back at me). Tasty.

On the down side, the public transportation system doesn’t seem too robust; on the way back from the Maritime Museum, for reasons we still don’t understand, our tram and another just ahead stopped and made everybody get off. No other trams or buses seemed to be coming so we started to walk back, a bit over 5km. Finally we saw a few trams/buses go by, but they were so packed they weren’t even stopping. We eventually ended up catching a tram for the last bit, about 1.5 km.

Onour first day, we headed out to Belem, where we daw the Monument to Discoveries and the Belem tower itself, which was built in 1515 as part of the defenses of Lisbon. (You can click on any image in this post to see a larger image).

Near Belem is also the spectacular (and obviously very rich) Monastery of the Jeronimos. Out there is also the Palacio de Belem, the current residence of Portugal’s President, whose former riding school has now been turned into the Museo des Coches, which houses some spectacular royal carriages.

Late that afternoon we ad salmon (me) and an omelet (Ted) at an outdoor restaurant near our hotel, then went out later in the evening for wine and snacks.

On our second day, we started with the Museum of Tiles (Museo do Azulejos). Tiles are a big thing in Lisbon; many houses are completely fronted with elaborate painted tiles, so it was interesting to see how they were made and how they developed. The Museum is set in a forme convent, which has a spectacular chapel that is also on display. Incidentally, most of the tiles are flat and painted, but the Museum had an ingenious adaptation for blind visitors; in several places there were displays set up with Braille explanations and 3-D renderings of the tile patterns to be felt by people who couldn’t see the displays.

After that we headed back to the Belem distric to visit the Maritime Museum, which has sections for military ships, fishing boats, and pleasure boating. Of course, our favorites were the enormous rowing boats – the one in the picture below was last used during England’s Queen Elizabeth’s 1957 visit to Portugal.

The evening before we’d seen a tempting menu for the hotel on top of a hotel nearby, so we tried that this evening, and had a tasty dinner with a spectacular view up the Avendia de Liberdades. The food was excellent (I had shrimp with asparagus) but the evening was most memorable for the long discussion with the Belgian woman at the next table who didn’t quite seem to be able to grasp that I don’t speak French. (In her defense, after she’d repeated “puree de pomme de terres” about five times at the waiter, who spoke Portuguese, English and some French but apparently not that particular phrase, I did turn around nad say “I think she wants mashed potatoes!”)

On our last full day in Lisbon, we headed up the hill to the Castelo de Sao Jorge – this is a very obvious site for defense, so ruins there go back to the 6th century BC, though the main castle does back to the 14th century. The castle has spectacular views over the city. One relatively recent addition was fascinating, though we didn’t take any pictures of it; the Ulysses Tower boasts a camera oscura which provides a 360-degree view of Lisbon. There was a royal palace adjoining the castle which is gone now, but the peacocks still remain to lend majesty. After seeing the castle, we walked down toward the water to check out the Se (Lisbon’s Cathedral) whose oldest facade dates to the 12th century.

From the Se, we walked back to our hotel, but it was still fairly eary, so we decided to pay a visit to the Oceanarium, which occupies a building in the Parc das Nocoes that was part of Lisbon’s ’98 exposition, held to mark the 500ths anniversary of Vasco de Gama’s voyages. This trip didn’t imporove our opinion of Lisbon’s public transit; the bus was packed full, tended to stopp unexpectedly for long periods, and took most of an hour to get out there. (We took a taxi back, which took about 15 minutes.) The aquarium itself was nice, though – they say it’s the world’s second-largest.

We had dinner that night in the heart of the tourist second of Baixa at a seafood restaurant, where I had the aforementioend golden bass, while Ted tried the cod (historically very important to Portuguese maritime history!)

On our final day, our flight out was early – it was painful to wake up before 5AM to catch our 5:30 taxi to the airport. However, in all the times we’ve left hotels early to get to regattas or airports, this was probably the best take-away breakfast we’ve ever been given: a bag with two cups of coffee, two orange juices, four small sandwiches (cheese and ham-and-cheese) and a whole plastic container of small cakes and cookies.

II. Laten we gaan schaatsen, schat.
We’ve now crossed off one more item on the list of Things To De Before Leaving the Netherlands: on Sunday we went ice skating. I think it’s just coincidental that the Dutch for “skating” is so similar to a common endearment (the title of this section means “Let’s go skating, dear”) but it is true that they take their skating seriously around these parts. Unfortunately we weren’t able to go skating on the canals while they were frozen, due to my trip to Japan, Ted’s trip to Taiwan, and the fact that we had no idea where to rent skates. But this week, some other expats invited us to go skating at the local ice rink before it closes for the year in a week or two.

You know what, it’s been a loooooooong time since we were on skates. I used to go now and then as a kid before the Ice Palace became a roller disco (remember those?) and Ted didn’t get to go too often, because his nearest rink was in Portland. But we let go of the walls after only a few minutes, and after a couple of hours we were achieving some speed, though no grace.

III. News from Home
Our dock is up! There are still a few finishing touches, the already-existing bulkhead needs to be shored up, and the dock needs to be inspected and approved by the Army Corps of Engineers. But after two years work with our architect and struggle with the ACE, we have a dock!

(The two years weren’t all spent on this; we were also forced to remove stairs to our upper deck and parts of the lower patio due to infringement on Army Corp land and a cracked gas pipe to the fire pit that was there, and we’ve also put in some landscaping. Still, a really surprising amount of the time was spent on designing and ordering a dock that would both work for rowers and meet the Army Corp’s rules.)

I’ve known all of that for years, and traveling in steerage with three tiny children and a teenager on the North Atlantic in winter has always sounded like a special king of hell to me. I’m beginning to see why it might have sounded like a good idea.

I’m reading The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm, by Juliet Nicholson (the grand-daughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson, who were there in the thick of it. The title is not meant to be taken with complete seriousness. For one thing it was hellishly hot. None of that “Britain Sizzles in the 70s!” headline nonsense; the temperature actually got up to 100. TO quote the book, “With one feebly flowing standpipe and a barely usable lavatory between 25 houses, one-third of the 900,000 people in East London were described in a report published in 1909 by the Poor Law Commission as living in conditions of ‘extreme poverty’ “. That was the year my grandfather was born. In 1911, when his younger sister was born, Nicholson writes “the East End had become intolerable int he hot August weather. In filthy six-story tenement buildings with narrow stone staircases, four or five people might share not just one room but one bed.”

Working conditions were likewise intolerable; that was the year of labor strikes among both men and women workers that threatened to starve London and did nearly starve the strikers and their families. With the dockworkers striking, no food could be unloaded and even then a lot of London’s food came from abroad; when the railway workers went on strike too, it became harder to bring in English food as well. With no wages coming in and never having had wages enough to save any money, the strikers had to depend on the strike funds (which couldn’t have been that large) and on donations for food.

Not all the poor were that desperate; even some lower-class people were able to save enough to take seaside holidays. Still, the numbers of the poorest are huge, as of the numbers of the strikers. (I wonder if my brother the union organizer might actually be working in the family tradition?)

I am beginning to understand just why the stench of steerage might have smelled like opportunity.

It was a bit tricky to figure out what to do; we’ve been to most of the best-known attractions there, the Rijksmuseum is still undergoing renovation (their ‘greatest hits’ are on display, but we’ve seen them) and the Stedelijk and several other museums are closed either for renovation or for the month of January. The Royal Palace wasn’t open this week either (I’ve seen it but Ted hasn’t.) Luckily, we found all this out the day before, when we did a little research.

After dropping off the passport, we hopped back on the tram, this time to the vicinity of the Rembrandtplein. We actually got off near the floating flower market, and walked from there toward the Rembrandtplein. There are a couple of canal house museums we were aiming for, but on the way there, we came upon one we didn’t know about: the Tassenmuseum, or Museum of Bags. They have handbags, reticules, purses, workbaskets and such dating from te Renaissance – the oldest item we saw is a silver bag frame dating from the latest 1400s. They have everything from petit point bags to Lucite and plastic ones – homemade, designer, you name it. There are also a couple of period rooms. We went from there to the Museum Willet-Holthuysen, a canal house that was owned by a wealthy couple of art collectors. (I find it interesting that the museum hyphenates their names, referring to him as Abraham WIllet, her as Willet-Holthuysen, and the pair of them as Mr. and Mrs. Willet-Holthuysen. It isn’t clear if this is just a modern usage or if that’s what they actually called themselves. The house originally belonged to her and she was an heiress, so it’s possible.) There are four floors to see, and the rooms are beautifully furnished in the late 1880s style, but I think it will be better in a couple of years because the museum is renovating to better match the Willet-Holthuysens’ own decor. (Apparently the last several years have been renovation time for Amsterdam museums in general. It may be because next year is the 400th anniversary of the Amsterdam canal ring.) The oddest thing there was not an historical exhibit; the W-Hs never had children, but had a number of pets. In one room there was a “cat” curled up on a pillow in front of a fireplace; it was both breathing and purring (at least, we think it was supposed to be purring).

We over to the Rembrandtplein and grabbed some lunch, then walked back toward the Museumplein, stopping near the Leidseplein at Penelope Craft, a yarn store I wanted to check out. (Yes, yarn was purchased. Lots of yarn.) We got to the Museumplain and still had some time before we could pick up the augmented passport, so we peeked into the Diamond Museum there and saw a diamond cutter, then went to the House of Bols, which has been making genever (a Dutch alcoholic drink that is the ancestor of gin) since the 1600s. It was well done; they discussed their history and different products, including the Delft houses (containing genever) handed out to people in business class on KLM flights. We have 18 of those, from various flights when we’ve gotten upgraded; there are 92 different ones. Then you go through the World of Flavour, where you taste different strips to see how the sense of taste works and try to identify the smells of all of their liqueurs, everything from banana to Curacao to peppermint to ‘Parfait Amour’. Finally, you get to choose a cocktail to try, as well as shots of some of their liqueurs. Ted had a Buttercup, while I had an Original Collins, which is basically genever, lemon juice, sugar syrup and soda. I’d definitely have that again; it would be a good drink to sip on our balcony on a hot summer afternoon. We also tried their yogurt liqueur (better than it sounds, but I’m not rushing out to buy a bottle) and a few others, though we tried not to get too, er, elevated before heading back to the Consulate. Picking up the passport was again surprisingly fast. After that we took the tram to the main station and the train home, stopped for a steak dinner once we got back to Eindhoven, and arrived home to get some good health-related news from my parents. All in all, a good day.

Beats workin’.

River trekking is basically hiking/swimming/climbing up a rugged stream, and some sliding back downstream – see photos. This is a great way to get out and see the rugged Taiwan terrain, especially when it is hot. Not only do you work your way up the stream experiencing the beauty of the jungle, but you can also jump off rocks into deep pools, slide down natural chutes, and swim in the stream.

River trekking is very hard on your ankles, shins, and knees. You’re either walking/climbing on very slippery rocks or wading through the stream with surprises that you can’t see waiting to trip you up. This means you are always on the edge of twisting your ankle, banging your shins on hidden rocks under the water, or tweaking your knee as your feet slip around. While trekking you don’t think of the danger since you’re so focused on moving forward, all the obstacles just adding to the challenge.

I highly recommend river trekking as a fun outdoor activity. However, guided trips may only be possible in countries where lawsuits are uncommon.

Note: These photos were taken by the trekking guide, not by me.