Finishing the Weekend

Saturday

If I could go back in time, I would visit my teenage self. I would arrive right as my high school alarm began its morning cacophony, and slap myself upside the head for thinking that Georgia mornings are anything close to cold. Have I mentioned that the Dutch are calling this a “warm” winter? Anyway, my present day alarm went off at 10:00, but my butt didn’t get out of bed until at least 10:30. I didn’t have the willpower to abandon my wonderful down comforter. After giving myself series of inspiring pep talks - “you lazy waste, get out of bed” – I finally found the courage to get myself together. I’ve learned quite quickly about myself that I can handle almost any situation as long as I know my surroundings and my schedule. When those two pieces of information are missing, it sends me into a minor system shut down. So there you go, blog readers, if I have a Luke Skywalker out there, you now know the weak point in my Death Star (wow, that was a little dorky...). Anyway, my point in sharing this, is that I have just started to have a concrete schedule, so the only thing left to do was get my bearings. Bundling up in scarves and jackets, I walked down to the ‘downtown’ part of Renkum – one street of shops. Which really isn’t that different from Auburn. I haven’t gotten a ton of exercise the past week, so my legs were feeling like they needed a good stretching. I didn’t feel like cutting my walk short by actually going in the stores, so I just kept on down the road until it spat me out on I guess what the Dutch would consider their highway (not in the sense of four lanes both ways kind of highway, but two lane road where cars can go faster). As signs pointing toward Wageningen appeared, I started to regret my steady diet of Doritos over Christmas break, and began looking for a bus stop. I found one that I recognized, managed to get on the one going the wrong direction, and spent the rest of my afternoon hours on the bus. Not a particularly wild adventure, but I’m glad I got my bearings by foot, for obvious reasons and especially for my shenanigans later on that evening…

The other American teacher who I’ve mentioned before, Shawna, has kind of taken me under her wing. I’m not one to throw the “you’re such a blessing” phrase around… like really, I never use it unless I’m trying to make fun of someone. But I legitimately don’t know how to describe Shawna with any other terms. Don’t get me wrong, all of the teachers have been the warmest, most friendly people I have ever encountered. But it’s just nice to have someone who knows exactly what I’m going through and what I’m talking about. So, on Friday made plans to go for a drink on Saturday night. She had given me the name of the bar, which I had written down phonetically and thought “how off can I be? I’ll look it up later”. Thank the high heavens I also had her phone number, because what I wrote in my agenda was “Flomm Ceros” and where we were going was called the “Vlaamse Reus.” Again, so. glad. I. clarified. Shawna was particularly excited about showing me this bar because it is home to the “beer bible”, a book with pictures and descriptions of the hundred odd beers that they serve on tap.  In our clarification conversation Saturday afternoon, she invited me over for dinner with her and her husband AND told me that she had found me a bike that I can use. My American friends might not understand the significance of that, but in the Netherlands having a bike is comparable to having a car. All the buses stop running around midnight and if you’re not on that last bus home, you’re just S.O.L.

Late afternoon I hopped on the bus and headed to the city of Rhenen where Shawna was waiting for me at the bus stop. She showed me parts of Rhenen including the original city wall, which is precisely what you think it is – the wall that surrounded the city. For dinner, she cooked an Asian stir fry dish and treated me to all sorts of Dutch junk food and sweets. I might actually not be able to come back to America after eating Dutch truffles, although if I’m going for greasy: bring it on American style. The Dutch have these snacks that look like a Connect Four boards, with the consistency of a packing peanut and with a stroke of 21^st century genetically modified food genius, have made this crunchy snack taste like ham and cheese. It’s repulsive. The other snacks are better. After dinner, she introduced me to my bike and the three of us (Shawna, her husband, and myself) set off toward Wageningen and the Vlaamse Reus.

Now, I learned to ride a bike as a child and have done it fairly frequently during Hilton Head summers, but I swear I must have looked like a one-legged toddler with vertigo during that bike ride. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But Shawna and Hans took us racing down the Rhine river banks and through back wooded area, mind you, this is 8pm so not only is it freezing, but pitch black. There were lights on our bikes, but those only sufficed enough to reveal potholes immediately in front of you. Meanwhile, my native bike riders are chatting the whole way as if conversing on two wheels is the most natural thing to do. After thirty minutes of woodland trails and sidewalks, we finally made it to Wageningen in one piece. The “downtown” area is shaped in a circle around an old church, with lots of little hole-in-the-wall bars and restaurants. A few minutes after we arrived, we were met by another Marnix teacher, Saskia, who joined us for a few hours of swapping stories, planning future adventures, and laughing at my unrefined taste for beer. Apparently in a country with such easy access to the “best beer in the world” (Belgian beer), my taste for Bud Light in a can doesn’t quite meet their standards. Go figure.

Caitlin meets the Beer Bible

 After a few hours, Saskia decided to head home and Shawna wanted to know if we should go elsewhere. Now, admittedly, I was a little tired and a little wary of the fact that I was biking home, but when in a new place I have a fairly strict policy of saying “yes” to everything, unless it seems potentially life threatening, of course. So off we went to the pub across the circle. Threading through the crowd we started to notice that most of the patrons were considerably older and threaded our way back out. On to the next bar. There was quite a good band there and as we were listening, Shawna noticed a sign advertising that we had somehow stumbled upon a jazz festival at all of these local pubs. Tickled at our luck, we pressed on to the next location to listen to a band who takes the genre “jazz” very lightly – more of what I would call 90’s rock, but who am I to split hairs? At our final stop on the tour we found two older gentlemen playing some old school folk music. With a banjo and a harmonica narrating the scene, I could’ve been at any Alabama bar. You know, except for the scattered conversations in Dutch. Around 1:30 in the morning, we opted for some late night snacking and went to the equivalent of a McDonalds/Taco Bell, but instead of gorging ourselves on Dorito Taco Locos (man, I really have a thing for Doritos, don't I?), we enjoyed foods whose names I can’t even begin to tell you, but will describe:

a fried cheese pouch – like fried pastry dough with cheese inside it

something whose meat resembled a hot dog but spicier, with Indian ketchup (it kind of tasted like spicy barbeque sauce)

a rice nugget thing – like a chicken nugget the size of my fist, but instead of spare parts chicken inside it had flavored rice

Overall, greasy and delicious.

We decided to call it a night after that, and headed back to the bicycles. Shawna and Hans guided me back to the main road, where I put on my big girl pants, despite the voice in my head that said – what the what am I doing cycling home at 2 in the morning in a foreign country – and assured them I knew the way home. I had been told over and over throughout the week that cycling at any time of the day is completely safe and normal in Holland and figured, when in Rome…

I had seen the road from the bus window on my morning commute and knew I was going in the right direction but was soooo very glad that I had made most of that trek by foot earlier that day because there were definitely parts of the ride that if I hadn’t seen in person, I would’ve convinced myself that I was lost. As you may have guessed, I made it home in one piece.

Sunday

The morning after my midnight bike ride, I got up fairly early and went to church with my host family (just the mother and daughter). Their church services are very casual, and I was very taken aback when one woman approached the pulpit at a random part of the service to whisper something in the minister’s ear like it was no big thing. The service was in Dutch, so I didn’t get much, except for the Lord’s Prayer – but that was less because of understanding the words and more recognizing the pattern. It wasn’t until the benediction that I realized that I could understand what she was saying, for a second I thought that some miracle Pentecost-like miracle had occurred, and then realized that she was speaking in English for my benefit. Literally, just for me, she said the benediction first in English then Dutch. Naturally, I spent the remaining minutes wondering if I stick out that obviously. Turns out, the woman who had approached the pulpit during the service, was letting the minister know I was there. It was a fairly small congregation, so it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I still don’t know how I feel about that attention.

Regardless of whether or not I understood the majority of the sermon, it was still a nice service and it was nice to be with my host family for that time.

The remainder of the afternoon was dedicated to Skyping my parents and working on lesson plans for the upcoming week, until that evening when my host mother came in to offer me an apple pastry thing that she was making for the rest of the family. I accepted, and spent the rest of the evening talking to her and Janne, telling Janne about American high school – how I was afraid to admit it was not just like Glee. I’ll leave you with the following thought: throughout the world, people think that the average American high school is like Glee/what they see in the movies. Yikes.