I’ve been here before, obviously, but not in a few years and it is always such a nice, pleasant thing to sit with a glass straight from the barrel and contemplate the scenery.  It just looks so lovely and right, and I always idly wonder if that’s because generations of my ancestors looked onto the view here and thought the same thing…

Frankly I’m glad I did as it was a museum filled with good modern art that has pieces which take advantage of the modern age to make interesting things.  Yay!  My two favorites there-

An artist who used simple everyday materials (plastic straws, toothpicks, etc) to make giant, fascinating structures.  The poufs in the above were made from folding sheets of shiny mylar…Oh my God, it’s full of stars!!!

Another view of the crazy room of lights and mirrors- the lights would change color every few seconds, and was truly lovely…

All in all, I realized another reason I quite enjoyed this museum was because Europe does a lot of things well, but modern art and architecture is not typically what I think of when I think of what the continent does well (one only needs to walk around the concrete box cities built after the war to see what I mean).  I on the other hand come from a country where we have modern architecture as the standard, and while I love living in a neighborhood older than my home country and all that it’s still really nice to surround yourself with something a little different every once in awhile.

Like, you know, giant mylar poufs or blinking lights as far of the eye can see.  Trust me, it was a great change of pace!

I’d never been to Copenhagen before but everyone likes to tell you just how very similar it is to Amsterdam.  And I must agree, there is some truth to this.  Both cities have canals and are defined by the water…

Lots of bicycles everywhere… though Amsterdam has several times more, and the locks people consider sufficient here wouldn’t last more than a few nights in the Netherlands…

A skyline defined by various spires and towers…

This particular spiral-y tower by the way is the Church of Our Savior, which you can climb up a narrow set of steps which were never planned for tourists and I don’t advise if you are claustrophobic.  And then the best part is when you go up to the top and it’s windy the tower shudders a bit in the wind, which makes you wonder about the old thing’s building code.

But anyway, to continue the similarities, right by the Church of Our Savior is another Amsterdam parallel, which is a place famous in Europe for tolerance and soft drugs!  Which in Copenhagen is the hippie village of Freetown Christiana…

I walked through Christiana and it turns out it’s small enough that if you’re not actually interested in drugs it takes all of ten minutes to wander through.  I would make an awful hippie; I don’t understand people who sit around all day doing nothing with their lives and dedicated pot-smokers usually fall in this category.

Plus hey, the Danish have very good beer, so why not enjoy that?

But anyway, comparisons to Amsterdam only go so far of course.  The most lovely difference between the two is Copenhagen has Tivoli Gardens smack in the center of town, which is the second oldest amusement park in the world (the oldest is 10km north of town)-

An amusement park that is as old as Tivoli is incredibly small compared to a modern one, meaning the few rides are either for small kids or spin around crazily (frequented by tourists and Danish teenagers), and most of Tivoli is more a focus on gardens with nice restaurants and what not.  Seeing as this was a typical Danish weekday there was even a free classical music concert going on, complete with an audience consisting of me and Danish geriatrics, which is a rather enjoyable way to spend a springtime afternoon, really…

All in all, a very nice city!

Dutch holiday season is here, and the lure of a five day weekend this past week was too big for me to ignore so I went to Copenhagen, Denmark.  Where I hung out with perhaps the most famous Danish locals on the planet!

True story: when I was in 3rd grade we had to do “career reports” on what profession we wanted to be when we grew up, and the teacher made us go around the class and say what we wanted to do so she could shoot down our childhood dreams make sure we were doing a report on something realistic.  So when it came to be my turn I told her that when I grew up I wanted to be the person who built the Lego sets for Lego commercials, because that’s what my favorite thing was to do in the world and I reckoned someone had that job.  The teacher gave me a funny look, told me to do my report on “architect,” and so my dream of being a professional Lego builder was shot down.  So it seemed kind of a shame that I didn’t stick with that dream because look, someone’s built a giant Lego city filled with Lego people!  It really is a job!

I will mention more about Copenhagen in a bit but my time is running short, so I will finish this post by mentioning I did not actually get the funniest look on that memorable 3rd grade table round.  You see, my twin brother Patrick was in the same class so when it was his turn he said he wanted to be a gas station attendent- he’d noticed that whenever my mom stopped at the gas station she kept giving the attendent like $20 each time, so that guy must be rich!

Of course Patrick didn’t realize that the gas station attendant didn’t get to keep all the money he got from my mom, and now realizes his dream job was probably “oil executive.”  But then he is getting an M.B.A. degree, so I suppose that one could still come true someday…

Now Bluey has been a great bicycle, and it is really not her fault that she got me as an owner as I tend to not be the best caretaker… and I don’t just mean the memorable first few days when I tried to remember how to use a pedal break for the first time since I was ten, or the many rust spots on the frame from hitting her with the heavy bicycle lock during parking (the picture above is a rather old one).  No, so far the following things have happened to me since I’ve been a Dutch bicycle owner, in roughly chronological order:

- The first trial was a few weeks after I’d arrived in the country and after returning to Amsterdam Centraal from a train journey I noticed my bicycle was missing and no longer parked where I had left it.  On the one hand a stolen bicycle is mildly exciting because it’s one of those things everyone must allegedly have happen to them in order to be a real Amsterdammer, on the other hand Bluey and I had only known each other few weeks and it was upsetting to think of our relationship getting cut short.

Luckily it turned out Bluey was not stolen by a crack addict who promptly threw her into the canal but rather the city, who routinely clears out all the bicycles parked illegally in front of the station (the problem is legal parking is often chock-full with abandoned bicycles, so if you’re running late like I was cycling there isn’t a great idea if you want to find a spot).  When this happens they take your bike to the bicycle depot and you have to go retrieve it and pay a 10 Euro fine, but the real punishment is losing a half day of your life going out into the middle of nowhere on a bus that rarely runs to a place presumably many people would want to go.  And the depot itself might as well be renamed “Where Bikes Go To Die,” as they’re required to keep all abandoned and illegally parked bicycles in Amsterdam for six months in case someone comes to fetch theirs, but most are never claimed-Luckily Bluey and I were quickly reunited, and got the hell out of there!

- Moving along, Bluey has also gotten a flat tire twice.  This is a fairly normal thing in this country of course, but the first flat tire was due to a thumb tack that was lying in the middle of a road, and it was mysteriously near a bicycle shop that agreed to quickly fix the flat, so I never quite shook off wondering if there was a sinister motive for there being a thumb tack in the middle of the road in the first place.

- Speaking of sinister motives… last month when I moved I spent the first two weeks parking Bluey in front of my new house along with all the other bikes that were there.  After two weeks Bluey’s back tire had once again gone flat, but not due to a puncture- somehow the air had just been released.  Which would’ve been a weird minor thing, except for the part where the very same thing happened just two days later.

Now the first time you take a bike to the shop with a tire like this they just look at you funny, the second time they ask you if you have a problem with your neighbor.  Turns out someone in my subdivided old canal house started a personal vendetta to have bicycles no longer parked in front of our place, and poor Bluey got caught in the crossfire.  Bluey now gets parked down the street, but my Dutch friends all found the entire affair hilarious because I live in one of the nicest, safest areas of the city (the last time something violent happened it was when some Germans marched through with uniforms and guns), and I still managed to get into a turf war which I promptly lost.

- The final transgression against Bluey happened just last week, when I did something very stupid and lost my spare bicycle key which I kept meaning to make a copy of ever since I lost the first one but never had.  In the walk from down the street to my apartment which is maybe 100 meters of road.  Let’s just say people are not always very attentive on the final stretch home when it’s late at night.

Now the real issue here is what on Earth do you do when facing a formidable Dutch bicycle lock and no way to unlock it, but very much in need of your mechanical stallion? (Fun fact: the Dutch word fiets for bicycle is thought by linguists to come from an abbreviation for a German phrase for “mechanical horse.”) Consultation with a mechanic on duty at a nearby bicycle shop and the fact that I hadn’t actually locked Bluey to a bike rack, just the front weel to the frame, meant I was advised to steal my own bicycle and bring it over (and because he thought I was cute he agreed to cut the lock off for free if I bought a new one there).  I just had to awkwardly bring the thing a few blocks over from the current position to the shop.

By the way, it turns out I now know why bike theft is so common in the Netherlands- even when it’s a beautiful Sunday afternoon and you are stealing your own bicycle by carrying it several blocks, not one person will bother to stop and ask what on Earth it is you’re doing!

So goes the life and times of my experience as a Dutch bicycle owner- I’m not sure if I’m a particularly good one, but Bluey has yet to complain personally about her situation.  I will say though that at each of these stages someone has told me “don’t worry, you’re not a real Amsterdammer until that happens anyway!”, and based on the other bicycle related mishaps two things still need to happen to me.

The first is at some point I need to get my wheel stuck in the tram tracks and fall over.  If this is the price to pay I refuse to ever become a real citizen of this city, as that just sounds far too painful.

The second is Bluey needs to be stolen for real, and I never see her again.  I hope this never happens either- we’ve just had too many memorable experiences together!

Fun in the Florida sun aside, the real reason I went to the USA last week was for my sister’s bachelorette party in Washington DC.  She’s getting married this summer, and used to live there many years, so 14 ladies enjoying a night on the town was the inevitable idea.

It all went well- a lovely time was had by all, although the cherry trees are slightly late this year we found one to take the above picture under (sis is in middle, one of her friends on the left), and I more than doubled my NPS stamp collection with all the monuments and memorials in town.  However there was one feeling in me that was very strong and always becomes a bit more noticeable each time I return to the US these days: the feeling that you are staring into the face of the lives you could have lived.

I suspect this is not a unique feeling to the average expatriate, and it doesn’t mean I am not proud of the life I forged abroad.  But Washington DC is a wonderful city with a culture that I understand intimately well- baseball! brunch! IPAs!- and it’s one thing to step off the treadmill and reject where you live and another thing to come back to visit and realize everything is still going on at home without you.  And much as I think it must be great to live there and am jealous for my sister that she did, I will never live in Washington DC in my 20s because I am busy working on my doctorate a hair before I turn thirty (the Dutch system dictates I get four years of funding, so my contract states I will finish September 2015).  I know everyone’s reaction is to say you can always live there later, and that’s true, but you always have places affect you differently based on the stage of life for when you’re living there.  Just like how my now-retired parents love Florida but I can’t understand its real appeal at 27, or how I want to return to New Zealand and reflect on what it was like during my first solo adventures there, or a myriad of other places you revisit and realize they might have not changed much but you certainly did.

Once again, I love Amsterdam and I love what I’m doing with my life, but I am a woman forever plagued by the lives I chose not to live.  Usually when I vocalize this people laugh- don’t I realize I’ve done more already than most people ever manage?- which always strikes me as odd because I don’t mind what other people do, I care about what I do.  And my life happens to be ordered in “what would you regret most if you never did it?” priority levels, plus a firm belief in how you cannot waste unique skills and situations when you have them, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have some regrets for the paths you never chose.

(At this point someone will point out I am still 27, so there is time enough to do many interesting things.  While true in many ways at this point I will counter that you lack imagination, as I once worked out the time commitments for all the things I want to do and it was several lifetimes without factoring in any serendipity.)

I’m sure everyone feels pangs like this on occasion as part of the human condition, and the only people who leave life without regrets must have been very dull ones, so I will stop philosophizing now on it.  But I do think such a perspective on the choices you’ve made versus the ones you didn’t are much more acute when you leave your comfort zone for the big world beyond, and return to glimpse into the parallel universe of the lives you left behind.

1) Everglades National Park is just over an hour away from their house in Naples where they have now lived for several years, yet I’ve never been there.  This is because at some point when everyone including some extended members of the family were in town I was not due to a mismatched spring break, so I fell into a vortex of “but we thought you’ve already been that time we all went!”  This also became doubly problematic for me in recent years when my adviser always asked if I’ve been to the Everglades by way of small talk when I was off to visit my parents, and I had to keep admitting I hadn’t.

2) I love the culture and history one gets living in Europe, but it does leave one wishing for wide, open, uncultivated spaces, so these days when visiting the USA I seek them out with increasing fervor.

3) Perhaps most important, I did not have enough geeky hobbies in my life so I recently began collecting National Park cancellation stamps. (Why do just geocaching and dabble in science writing which you can do anywhere on the planet when you can collect locational stamps for a country you no longer reside in?) Not only would the trip provide an Everglades National Park stamp, we would also pass through Big Cypress National Preserve on the drive in so I could obtain two stamps on one trip!  How could we not go?!

New stamps aside, it was actually a thoroughly enjoyable day trip.  We went to a place within Everglades National Park known as Shark Valley where a 15 mile paved loop goes out to an observation tower, which one can either go on a guided tram tour or rent a bicycle for the journey.  We went on the bicycle option, and while going on my single speed cruiser I realized why my adviser kept bringing up the Everglades- when you look out onto the “river of grass” only broken up by clumps of trees in the distance, it looks just like a Dutch national park does.

Except for the part that it’s really hot, sunny, there are no windmills, and oh yeah there are animals here who can kill you-

During the course of the bicycle ride we saw four dozen and 10 alligators- cited as such because it was easier to keep track of them all- and this does not count several dozen spied from the car while driving there!  There really are so very many of them (especially in dry season where most animals are drawn to the few existing water holes), ranging from little baby alligators to great big ones longer than a person… all complete with a glimmer in their eye confirming how very evil they really are.  I know I’m personifying, but I don’t think anyone looked at one of these and felt they were cute and cuddly…

Should you find yourself at some point in southern Florida, I encourage you to head out to the Everglades and confirm this for yourself.  Thanks to my dad for letting me use some of his pictures!

So imagine this.  I was in the lovely American Book Center in the heart of Amsterdam (our flagship English language bookstore) about to buy an arguably trashy read I found in the bargain section.  The counter is right next to the giant news stand and while the clerk was ringing up my purchase I did a sudden double take when I saw what you see on the left.

I pulled the magazine out to confirm, with my heart beating rapidly- yes, this was the Astronomy magazine for which I wrote the cover article, sitting innocuously on the news stand with all the other magazines!

By this point the clerk wants the four Euro for the book and is giving me an odd look, so I feel obliged to explain.  “Sorry, but I wrote this cover article!” I say proudly.

“You wrote the cover.” He says this with a Dutch accent and a tone I’m not entirely certain of, but is very similar to one I hear if my native English pace of speech gets too fast and excited about something (which, let’s be honest, happens a decent amount).  So I explain.

“Yes, I’m an astronomer and I write, and I wrote this cover article.”  And I put the Astronomy magazine back on the newsstand- fun as it would be to purchase I have copies of the magazine already, and this is encouragingly the last one they have.

“I’m sure you did,” he says, with a funny look on his face.  It’s then I realize that the clerk’s tone is not the “I don’t understand” tone I assumed but rather one far more impossible to deal with- a tone that doesn’t just say “I don’t believe you” tone but downright “this girl is nuts!”

“The door is that way,” he says with the same tone and look as he points helpfully two meters behind us at a doorway that any sane, rational person can spot seeing as you have to walk past it to get to the counter.  And I realize at that moment you can’t actually tell someone you’re not crazy when they already think you’re making up being a scientist and writer for your own odd, perverted reasons.  So I go.

The funny thing though?  Though my pride took a hit the writer in me doesn’t really mind, as for the rest of my life I have a good story from it.

I’m normally not an architecture person when I travel.  What I mean by this is when I think of places I want to go I do like picturesque places or buildings loaded with history, but I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately traveled somewhere because someone told me the architecture was stunning or spent much time at all considering it.

So when I tell you Patrick and I decided to go on a tour of the Palace of Catalan Music and it was stunning you know it must have made quite an impression!  Built just over a hundred years ago, the entire style is supposed to invoke a garden.  Stained glass windows flood the place with light during the day and there are little details everywhere your eye looks from little flowers to statues showing the Flight of the Valkyries to musicians on the walls, each different and there to inspire the musicians-

Patrick: Why don’t you put me in your blog?  You know I’m a ratings bonanza!
Me: Ok, go stand by that statue and give everyone a sense of scale.

So he did.

There were tons of details all over the place, but my favorite was definitely the stained glass skylight in the center of the concert hall.  It’s supposed to look like a drop of sunlight in the middle of the blue sky, but as you can see here there are so many details that you can’t help but stare trying to take them all in.

So hey, this was architecturally a very lovely building!  I’m not saying this is a sort of style that you’d want in your living room, but in the middle of a concert hall where your mind and eyes tend to wander it is quite remarkable.

While everyone in Amsterdam was busy shivering to death this past weekend, my brother and I went to sunny Barcelona.  Where, dear reader, it was warm- skirt and t-shirt during the day warm!- so just the right thing for folks getting impatient for the end of a long European winter.

Barcelona is a very lovely city with lots to see, so to kick things off here’s a view from Güell Park overlooking the city, designed about a century ago by Antoni Gaudi.  More on him later as it’s impossible to show off a bunch of Barcelona photographs and not have a bunch of his buildings in them, but the park has the added bonus of the view out towards the sea…