Europe: One Last Day

I was going to be ambitious and write a blog about my day in Amsterdam this very evening. Then I thought, I’m tired and I still need to research what I need to declare in U.S. customs. Then I thought, I’m getting up at 4 tomorrow. Finally I thought, Okay, I’m going to bed now.

You are virtually blogless today, dear readers, but assure you, some enthusiastic posts are coming very soon.

~~~

Where to Go: Openluchtmuseum, Arnhem, Netherlands

A fisherman's cottage. People were shorter back then.

Yesterday, Mary and Elly took me to an open-air museum that has the catchphrase, “Holland in Just One Day.” While most places claim that you could spend all day there, this Openluchtmuseum really lives up to that. With several dozen historic buildings, not to mention all the living history programs, the museum is large enough that you could arrive at opening (10:00) and stay until it closed at five, and you still might not see everything.

Why you should go: If you want to get a sweeping view of the Netherlands’ history from the 1600s to the present, this is the place for you. I enjoyed the sense of time that I felt as I touched the reed-roofed buildings and thought about life in the “olden days.”

How to get there: Arnhem is a city in eastern Netherlands. The museum is accessible by car (4,50 euros for parking) and public transit.

Inside a wealthy farmer's house.

What to bring: The museum costs 14,95 euros. Bring good walking shoes, a backpack with snacks and water, a camera, and some spending money. You can even take along your dog, as long as it’s on a leash.

What to do: Get a map at the front desk and wander from building to building. You’ll encounter several windmills (you can go up in the biggest one), cottages from different eras, a Protestant church, a maze, old tollbooths and weigh-stations, farmhouses, barns, fields full of old crops and goats, and all sorts of miscellaneous structures. While some of the displays are only in Dutch, the plaques outside each building have a section in English. Mary, Elly and I got an olde-time photo taken, and also sat outside to eat traditional poffertjes, pancakes the size of coasters and served with butter and powdered sugar. 

What else you need to know: You probably won’t see everything if you take your time, so look at the map and prioritize. Then take a deep breath and plunge into the world of the Netherlands, past and present!

~~~

Europe: All the Pretty Little Horses

Hush a bye,

Don’t you cry

Go to sleep-y little baby

When you wake

You shall see

All the pretty little horses

Dappled and gray

Black and bay

All the pretty little horses.

Mom sang this lullaby to me often when I was a little girl, because she knew it was my favorite. She sang, I closed my eyes, and I imagined all the horses that I would own someday. Every little girl wants a horse. I was no exception. 

When I was about seven, I began learning everything I could about equines, from the visual clues for breed identification to proper dressage technique in the English saddle. I determined that I would get an Arabian horse and use paper strips instead of straw in its stable. I read The Pony Pals series from beginning to end, in order. When we visited my grandparents in rural Illinois, my favorite activity of the day was taking a walk with Mom to the edge of town to visit the horses who lived there and feed them grass.

Years go by, and I found out that I didn’t really want a horse after all. But still, the sight of horses, their smell, the feeling of their hair when you pet their cheek or flank— these are magical to me, and always will be.

Thanks to Mary and Elly, the past few days have been full of all the pretty little horses. Mary took me out for a cart ride with Yonker, a black Shetland pony who spends his days grazing with several other horses. First she showed me how to groom him (I knew it all in theory from my research 16 years ago, but had never done it before), and then we hitched him up to an elegant cart. For an hour we would our way through the countryside, past cornfields and green pastures and through hallways of trees lining the road. The cart bounced and rattled pleasantly and Yonker trotted along with an absent-minded attitude, glancing around as if he was enjoying the scenery as much as we were.

The next day (yesterday), Mary let me accompany here to a cart-driving lesson. We hopped into the cart again and set off straight across an empty field. I watched hot air balloons floating in the distance, and the wide open sky deepening from blue to pastel purple. A stork flapped his way over the tree-line.

One of Mary’s fellow students, a woman named Mika, allowed me to ride on the back of her horse-cart. I rode along for the entire lesson, sometimes just enjoying the scenery, sometimes grasping the cart with both hands as the horse galloped through the course laid out in cones. It was better than a carnival ride! Then Mika asked, “Would you like to drive?” I gasped, and I felt like putting on a pretty dress and twirling in a circle and clapping my hands for joy. Instead, I practically squealed, “Yes, please!”

I sat in the driver’s place and took the reins. Mika showed me how to hold them so I could “feel the mouth,” and then we were off. The horse, a mare who had been pulling carts for most of her 21 years, knew how to walk between the cones and move at the slightest direction, so I had no trouble driving her. We did one figure-eight through the cones at a walk, and then one at a trot. I couldn’t stop grinning.

Today I also got to ride bareback for a few minutes. We were cleaning the stables for some horses that Mary and Elly’s friends own, and Mary showed me how to hop on the back of the misnamed horse Fury. He calmly walked around the enclosure with me trying my hardest not to fall off. I succeeded, and dismounted with an easy swing of my leg. Again, I was grinning. 

“You smile so wide I am afraid it will swallow your ears,” Mary said. It’s a legitimate concern. After all, it’s not every day that I get to be around an animal that will always be, at least to me, magical.

~~~

Where to Go: The Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands

“I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.” ~Vincent Van Gogh

Cafe Terrace at Night, one of my absolute favorite Van Goghs.

Take a day trip from Amsterdam, find your way into the heart of the national park Hoge Veluwe, and you will discover one of the art gems of the world. The Kröller-Müller Museum is a treasure trove of art, especially from one of the Netherlands’ most famous artists: Vincent Van Gogh. 

Van Gogh has always fascinated me: not only his work, but his way of seeing the world. His mental instability and his constant search for something new and fulfilling made him unhappy for most of his life, but from that sadness blossoms the fruit of his work: full-bodied figures, landscapes that crackle like fire, and brushstrokes of such skill that they bring tears to my eyes.

Mary and Elly took me to the museum and turned me loose in the galleries, where I wandered in a trance from painting to painting. I saw some of my all-time favorites by Van Gogh. Most impressive to me was Cypresses with Two Women. I can show you a photograph, but it can’t convey the brushstrokes. They jumped off the page, robust and vivid, piled on so thick that it almost looked like a relief. The trees are tangles of olive flames, quivering on the canvas. The trees, like the trees in most of his paintings, are alive.

Zelfportret, 1867

I spent a long time looking at Van Gogh’s Zelfportret, 1867. His eyes stared at me. Not empty, like the eyes of a photograph. He put his heart and soul into his work, and they are still there, still caught up in the brushstrokes, staring out at me. He looks exhausted, a bit wary, trying to decide whether to be intrigued or apathetic. I wish I could talk to him. I wish I could tell him about the millions of people who appreciate his art, and tell him how much his paintings move me. But the canvass is silent, and his body is dust in the grave. So I just give a nod to the painting, wipe the tears from my eyes, and move on.

~~~

Why you should go: Even someone who knows nothing about art will recognize a few of the paintings on display, and art enthusiasts need to bring a jacket because they will get chills every time they turn a corner and see another masterpiece. You’ll find art by Georges Seurat, Auguste Rodin, Paul Gaugin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many others as well.

How to get there: The museum is nestled in the heart of the Hoge Veluwe National Park in the Netherlands. By bus or car it’s only a couple hours outside of Amsterdam. I will let the museum’s website do the talking.

What to bring: The fee for park entrance and museum admission is 16,40 euros for adults (unbelievably worth it). Bring a purse or knapsack instead of a backpack; you’ll have to wear it in front or lug it around with one hand. 

What to do: Not only is there a spacious indoor section, but the museum also features a large sculpture garden. Take advantage of both these features and make an afternoon of it. Also, if you have a few extra euros, check out the local organic food at Monsieur Jacques, located inside the museum. I had the most amazing Brie sandwich in the world there.

What else you need to know: It’s not a huge museum, so feel free to take your time. It features a lot of modern art, so you can skip a big section of the displays if you’re not interested in blank canvasses and blocks of wood. Finally, you should learn how to pronounce the artist’s name in his native language. Say “Vincent,” with a nondescript European accent, then follow it with “von,” and end by saying a throaty “aw” with a huge clearing of your throat before and after the vowel. “Dank u wel, Vincent Van Gogh. Dank u wel.”

Country Road in Provence by Night. It was so beautiful that I cried when I saw it.

~~~

Europe: Netherlands Heather

On the evening of Monday, the 3rd of September, I was safely at my next destination: a village named Eerbeek in eastern Netherlands. Mary and Elly are my hosts, connected to me through a complicated chain of people (my fiancée’s grandma’s neighbors friends). They welcomed me into their home with warm smiles and a giant plate of green bean casserole and mashed potatoes. Since then, they haven’t stopped lavishing generosity on me.

Our first big excursion was to a National Park called Hoge Veluwe. First we visited the art museum there— I’ve written an extensive entry about that for tomorrow. Then we left the masterpieces behind and set out in the car to see some real Dutch landscape.

We saw it soon enough: rolling mounds of sandy earth covered in clumps and patches of flowering heather. I had never seen anything like it, and I laughed in delight at the sight of a plant that shows up in practically every fantasy and Victorian novel I’ve ever read. Books speak of lying down in the soft heather and smelling its fragrance, and that was exactly what I did. If you sniff the flowers you don’t notice a strong scent, but the air has a light, sweet smell to it that makes you feel like you could run forever, or go to sleep. 

Mary and Elly also drove me up to one of the highest points in the Netherlands (a mountain by Missouri standards, but not by many other states’), with a view of Germany.  I stood on the little fenced-in area at the top and took in the scenery. Here, heather blanketed the hills, a soft brown-purple color that faded into the distant tree line. Mary pointed out some stout ponies standing nearby, telling me that they live wild on these hills. Still, they are tame for the tourists, and I rubbed their noses as I looked out at the scenery.

See the long tail on the sheep behind me? They were all like that.

The next day, Mary and Elly took me on an excursion Dutch style: on bicycles. As usual, I was pretty wobbly, but I went the whole day without running into anything! We biked out to another National Park called Mooi Gelderland, gliding under conifers and through corridors of broad-leaf trees. We rolled along sandy paths between clumps of heather beneath a moody gray sky, and at last ended up at a little hollow with a pond. I wandered the hills a bit, staring at the birds perching on dead trees, and cows in the distance. Then I returned to my hosts for a picnic on the grass.

On our way home, we found a flock of sheep wandering about. I stopped to pet them, and then I noticed that they all had long tails. It was at this point that Mary informed me that sheep do, in fact, have tails. They are just cut short to make the sheep easier to keep clean. My mind was blown.

The Netherlands landscape is similar to the Midwest in that there’s nothing terribly impressive about it. It is simple beauty. It rests easily on the eyes and rolls out before you like a scroll. Because it’s pretty, because it’s simple, I love it all the more.

~~~

Europe: Two Hours in Paris

It began as a silly, very Lisa-esque idea. “Hey, my train’s going through Paris. I should just get a longer layover and see a sight or two!” It ended as a very silly, Lisa-esque two hours: speed-walk through Paris, glimpse the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and Notre Dame, then hop a bus back to the station long before you have to because you’re paranoid about missing your train.

Yes, this is what I do with my free time. Who wants to spend all that energy trying to figure out the bus schedule, when you can just start walking and get hopelessly lost? Who cares about focusing on what you can reasonably see, when you feel a sense of incredible obligation to at least see the tip of the Eiffel Tower?

Goodness gracious me, what a thrilling experience!

With the way my schedule worked out, I really didn’t have time to see Paris, even at a glance. So I just dove in the middle of it. And I feel that it’s somehow better: weaving through the crowded sidewalks, listening to the orchestra of car horns honking at each other, staring in horror at the pellmell flow of traffic, walking at a breakneck speed and turning at every whim, snapping pictures as I go. The smell of Paris that I whiffed around every corner was urine. It washed up from the subways and the alleyways and every corner of the train station. Not enough to be nauseating, just enough to ground you in a sense of the grime of the city, the constant hustle and bustle with no time to clean up the edges.

Of course, the Louvre Palace is amazing, Notre Dame is iconic, and the Eiffel Tower… well, from the distance I saw it at, it just looked like a tower. But still! I had to see it!

I could spend a month in the Louvre and not see it all, I'm sure.

I took a few photos, to prove I was there. But then it was time to hop back on the train. My brief stay in France was over. It was time to head back to the place where this trip began: the Netherlands.

This was as close as I got before I had to run catch a bus back to the train station. C'est la vie!

Europe: Little Town, It's a Quiet Village…

Tour de France passes through Facougney, which
explains the presence many creepy dolls on bikes.

The nearest town to Jean le Moine is a village called Faucogney. Till described it as “a place with a lot of empty shops and old people. It is almost a ghost town.” However, the first time Till drove through it with me in tow, I was in awe. Yes, it does have a ghostly, uninhabited feel to it. The cobbled streets are empty. But the houses make up for it. I thought that Disney was just making things look extra picturesque for Beauty and the Beast. I was wrong. They are spot-on. From the varying shades of brown, to the artistic lace curtains in every window, to the fountain in the town square, I felt that I had been dropped into the middle of Belle’s “provincial life.” I was fascinated.

Till took me to the house of one of his friends, Gudrun, a woman in her late middle age. She has short bleached-blonde hair that sticks out in an Einstein fro, pasty skin that looks like leather, and a smile that makes her whole person glow. She sat me down on a chair in her garden, which is a labyrinth of plants and flowers reaching above my head. While I petted her crooked-tailed cat, she served me a glass of coffee and spoke in broken English, often switching to French or her native German. “My garden is a mess,” she said. “But I have not time to keep it up.”

Later in the week, Till, Alejandra, Shanie and I visited town to buy groceries. Shanie and Ale bought vegetables from a woman who sells them right out of her garden. The woman, jabbering in French even though she knew neither of the girls understood her, wrote down a recipe for ratatouille, and put together all the ingredients, throwing in some spices for free. 

Eating french fries… in France. Booyah.

I got to see Faucogney for a longer period of time on Sunday, the 2nd of September. Shanie and Ale were determined to visit the local flea market and set up a table to sell some high-quality soap they had brought from Mexico. Of course I tagged along. For several hours, I sat next to the booth, wandered around the market seeing all the things I would buy if I didn’t have to lug them back to the States, and then exploring the town a bit. Everything is closed on Sunday, so the town felt extra deserted, except for the square where the market was held.

All four of us girls ate some “barquette frites,” that is, French fries. Need I say that they were delicious? Still, all of us were hungry. Near the end of the afternoon, one of Till’s friends, a woman whose name for the life of me I can’t pronounce or remember, invited us all over for supper. We gratefully accepted. 

Her two daughters, who looked to be about six and nine, guided us to the house off one of the main streets. I was able to speak enough French to ask them their names (they sounded completely foreign to my ears and I forgot them immediately) and tell them mine. The younger one gave each of us girls a splash of her toy perfume on our wrists.

I have an imaginary book so I can feel like Belle!

Their house was unassuming. We walked down a narrow corridor painted in bright southwestern colors, emerging into a little courtyard with a swing hanging from the ceiling! The six-year old jumped on the swing to show it off. We proceeded upstairs to a little smoking area, then inside to an open room with stairs built into a column in the wall, and a mess of instruments lying around. Till and the father chatted, the girls ran around showing off their costume dresses, and the mother made the best zucchini curry that I have ever eaten, served with quinoa. After that she showed us around the house, which was a literal maze of rooms, each one a surprise. She is an artist who paints inventive watercolors, silhouettes of creatures playing music and sailing on curly-tipped waves. She showed us her studio as well as several of her paintings. 

I said goodbye to Faucogney when Kristine drove me through there to get to the train station at Lure. It’s a quiet village, every day like the one before, but it’s amazing in its own little way.

~~~

Europe: Party on the Mountain and How I Ended Up in a Ditch Afterwards

1st September, 2012

I love to party, but I don’t like most parties. Either they are boring and awkward (despite being an extrovert, I am often painfully shy), or there is copious amounts of drinking involved, neither of which makes me very happy. When Till told me that some of us were going to a party, and did I want to come, I deliberated a few hours. Finally, with the assurance that at least Kristine wanted to come home at a reasonable hour (relatively speaking), I agreed.

Around 10:30 at night, Kristine, Shanie, Till and I piled into the car, with Thomas following us in his own vehicle. We roared off into the silent night, winding our way up the mountain through ghostly trees. The moon was almost full, so it cast a silver light over everything. I felt that I was staring out the window at a fairyland: dark, sprinkled with crystalline dew, and devoid of human lights. Within ten minutes we reached the farm where the party was being held. We found a crowd of about fifty people, and a band getting ready to play. Their venue was a stable, with an extra veranda extending from the roof, supported by a few one-by-two posts.

The band was all decked out in costume. A few of the guys just wore pseudo steampunk outfits, but there was also a bearded nun, a bearded Marilyn Monroe, a teddy bear, and, uhm, Labyrinth’s Goblin King with a leopard-print shirt and barrettes in his hair… I think.

I stood around trying to look like I fit in. I said hi to a couple of Till’s friends, and noted that most of the people were drunk, but not outrageously so. Soon the music began: some sort of punk/funk/reggae music with a brass quartet (courtesy of the nun, Marilyn Monroe, and two others)! The lead singer looked like someone who would play French bartender #5 in a World War II movie: chubby-faced, pock-skinned, with a mustache that resembled a comb. Judging from his gyrations as he sang, I figured it was good that I don’t speak French well enough to understand what he was saying.

The audience was really into it: soon the entire stable area was crowded with people dancing and laughing and throwing straw into the air. Then one guy began climbing one of the one-by-twos… I still don’t know how it held his weight. He grabbed for a ceiling rafter, not realizing it was unattached, and brought both beams crashing down onto the audience. The band continued as if nothing had happened, and the people cheered while those of us on the sidelines laughed.

Since I didn’t understand the words and didn’t care to look at the band too often, I stood to the side and looked out at the landscape. In the light of the moon I saw rolling mountains stretching out at my feet, marked only by a single point of lamplight far down in a valley. The moon’s whiteness shone on me, but my vision was tinged from the side by the yellow disco-ball lights. I hugged my borrowed coat around myself tighter as I felt a cold breeze creeping up the mountainside.

Within an hour, I was ready to go, and fortunately some people shared that sentiment. Kristine, Shanie and I decided to ride home with Thomas. We piled into his car, and then he carefully tried to turn around in the driveway. He pulled forward onto what he thought was a level shoulder of grass. It was actually a two-foot ditch. His car nosedived into it. We three girls jumped out and pushed on it, freeing it from the ditch, and away we went, zooming down the mountainside under the almost-full moon, giggling and laughing at nothing in particular. 

“That was fun!” Shanie said. “All the people, they are crazy, but that was fun.” She turned to me. “You have lots to blog about now!” I laughed and nodded. Within minutes, we were home safe and sound, and I returned to my bed with my head full of strange costumed men, and white and yellow light, and a blanket of silence over a valley crowned by a wild concert party.

~~~

Europe: Ant Invasion and a Peacock Palace

The work on the farm is mostly routine: milk the goats, process the milk, make cheese, pick berries, lead the goats down to pasture, do dishes, help with supper. However, every once in a while, things get exciting. 

Pictured: the ant's new home (I'm wearing my mask from today)

The first exciting thing happened two days ago. It began as a simple project: moving wood from a pile by the forest to the back porch. We had a nice assembly line going and everything was fine… until we found the ants. They were massive, black, spindly-legged creatures, crawling over the wood, swarming up the wheelbarrow, wondering who in the world was disturbing their (freakishly immense) nest. They weren’t aggressive, but they did bite, and it hurt when they did. 

Till, seeing that there was no way we were going to exterminate a nest this big, suggested that we move the rotted wood a few yards away, and try to get the ants to move with it. Simple enough. I wisely remembered to tuck my pants into my socks before we began the project.

This was after I brushed off well over half the ants.

Within minutes, there were so many ants swarming on my feet that I could barely see my shoes. They raced up my pants legs, onto my shirt, heading for my jugular vein to put an end to me… okay, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. But it’s no exaggeration. Every three or four seconds I had to pause to swipe my hands over my thighs, knocking the encroaching horde back to the ground. I couldn’t look at my feet because I would freak out too much. Alejandra and Shanie approached at separate times, but had the same reaction at seeing my feet: a horrified gasp, followed by, “You are covered in ants!”

I wish I had a picture of that flood of insects, but I certainly wasn’t going to strip off my socks and shoes, get my camera, try to put the ant-infested items back on, and then take a photo. I love you, readers, but not that much.

At last we moved all the rotted wood, and I tore off my shoes with several involuntary shivers. I wanted to save my socks, but there are so many dead ants still clinging to the cloth with their rigor mortis mandibles, I think my stockings are beyond hope. Rest in peace, penguin socks.

Today, our unusual project was much more pleasant, even though we had to put on masks because of the dust. It involved cleaning out a stone outbuilding, putting in fresh straw, and then herding the resident peahen (female peacock) into it. The reason? She has babies! Five little peacock babies! Now she has a safe place to raise them. I thought I was going to die of girly cuteness today, even though the chicks aren’t any cuter than a baby hen. I managed to snap a few photos of them.

I enjoy milking and herding and cheese-making, but it’s nice to have a change in activity every once in a while. Even though I was lucky to escape the Ant Incident alive.

You can only see three here… the other two were straggling.

The fifth baby is hiding beside her breast.

~~~

Europe: 10 Photos of France So Far

My experience here at Le Jean de Moine Farm has been patchwork. Much of it has been uneventful, hardly worth writing a blog about. My days have been full of sunlight and rain spattering through the forest, the warm pungent odor of goats, the burn of stinging nettles, the satisfying squelch of muddy wet shoes, the frosty beauty of stars through a steamed-up window pane, and the hearty flavor of homemade sourdough bread. Here are some photos from the past few days.

The festive streets of Luxeuil-les-Bains, complete with random picturesque castle in the distance.

Shanie and Till breaking out the six-strings.

Alejandra being "ethnic." (The quesadillas she made were amazing.)

More Luxeuil-les-Bains.

The pastry shop in town looks delightful… so I bought a chocolate-creme-braid-pastry thingy.

My hippie friends: Till, Shanie, Christine, and Alejandra.

Dramatic statue of St. Colomban, founder of the monastery in Luxeuil-les-Bains.

The "Total Recall" tagline is unreasonably funny to me in French. Something got lost in the translation....

A picnic by the lake! Notice the homemade bread and cheese.

I forget to take photos of myself… Shanie snapped this one to help me remember the beauty of France!