Okay, here we are again. Today, Amsterdam.
So, I, along with about 47 other Rotary exchange students, visited the captital city of the Netherlands. It all started one Friday morning, the morning of February 18, and the first thing I learned was that the Rotary LIES. One fact that they hammered home was that the bus WILL NOT WAIT, so DON'T BE LATE. I showed up, and then the bus waited for like an hour or something. Then, we set off. Actually, our first stop was Delft, not Amsterdam. One of the first things we saw at Delft was this cotton picking windmill. As you can see, it was not operating that day, becasue they didn't have the sails on. You can see the skeleton. The rotarian guide we had was a native Franch speaker, so when he tried to say that they needed to put sheets on the tower to make it turn, the Anglophone students were terribly amused to hear him say that it seeded something else instead. You'll also observe that the sail construction can turn to frace the wind, and the little cabin-type thing on the lower story, where the miller traditionally lived. Also, It was market day at Delft, so we saw the market. I got some fries. Now, I know what you're saying: "Fries are a specialty of Belgium's! Why get in the Netherlands what you can get in droves in Belgium?" It's simple; the mayonnaise. It's different. Dutch mayonaise is slightly sweet; Belgian mayonnaise is slightly sour. That was kind of wierd, but now my palate is slightly expanded. for the reord, the fries are better in Belgium, and I like the lightly sour mayonnaise better. Dutch mayonnaise is slightly more like Miricle whip than Belgian mayonanise. Now, we also saw this church tower, which you may notice is leaning slightly. This is because, as most of the Netherlands is below sea level (hence the name), the ground is naturally very marshy. In order to build anything, you have to drain the marsh and lay down these big wooden piles and put leather on them (as the leather isn't exposed to the air, it doesn't rot) and then build on that, and that's supposed to keep your building from sinking into the marsh like that bit guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail's castles. It tends to work, but is sometimes an imperfect system, as seen with the church. In fact, there are many, many leaning houses in Delft and Amsterdam; if a building ever needs to be demolished, sometimes the houses next to it crumble as a result because the ground has shifted so much. Anyway, Delft was nice; there was one more thing that we saw there, and that was the Vermeer museum. Vermeer was a Duth painter during the Golden Age, the 17th century, and he made a modest reputation for himself as a painter during his life, but he followed the standard artist route of "fame only after death" that many did, only in his case it was much later after his death, like a couple huindred years or something, when people started to notice his name's showing up in some writings here and there, and then going on to promote him, and now people think he's one of the greatest of his ilk. The Vermeer museum is in Delft because Vermeer spent most is not all of his professional life in Delft (I think he was born there, too), and he painted the city a bit. It's odd because they don't actually have any Vermeers; they have a bunch of reproductions, but they don't have any of his originals. Still, that was kind of interesting. Then, back on the bus, we go to Amsterdam. We get there, we take a ltitle walking tour. This includes a stroll through the Red Light Disctrict. That made me kind of unconfortable. The common practice is for the brothels to advertise themselves by putting scantily-clad girls in the showcase windows they have out front and thusly have them pose and otherwise show themselves off. This didn't seem quite right to me. Incidentally, I saw an advertisement that didn't make me feel quite so uneasy because the women on it weren't real, and I don't know Dutch so I can't say what it was an adversitement for, but it had a photoshopesque image of a few naked women in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray the likes of which fish are sold in at the Supermarket. That was a lesson in objectification. Now, we stayed at what is known in english as a "youth hostel." This is kind of like a discout hotel. I'm pretty sure our guides, who weren't exathly "youthes," stayed there as well, so I don't really know where the "youth" figures into it, but besides that it's basically just a discount hotel. The beds and pillows are a bit grungier, but they give you clean sheets to make up for it. The food was fine. Not worse than what you typically get at a hotel. It did me well. At any rate, I don't thin kwe did anyhting else notable that day. Day 2! We walk aroudn a lot. We take the tram some. Taking the tram, I expect, is a more enjoyable experience when you're not fifty, as we were. WE all crowded on, really stuffed ourselves in there, and then the guide with all the tickets had to fight his way to a ticket-monitor. I imagine that Amsterdam's trams are of a high quality, but we were sadly unable to fully appreciate them due to our large number, which made them uncomfortable. Anyway, during our peripatations, we saw the Jordan Quater, which is a neighborhood built by French emigrants, Huguenots, I think, who fled to the Netherlands because it was a Protestant country, as opposed to France, which was Catholic. The Dutch all love the Jordan Quarter. The French emigrants have, over time, become Dutch. I have to say, I liked it a lot, too. The thing is, you know how cities feel different? Especially big cities, they all feel different; just compare Chicago and New York. It's true! Well, I don't really like the way a lot of Amsterdam feels. It seems to me like so much cement and cobblestones. It just felt very paved-over. Just liek a big chunk of stone. They have little islands with some shrubs and pollarded trees, but nothing terribly green or living. Those garden islands were really too organized to count as "nature," really. But the Jordan Quarter felt a little more open to me. I felt like it breathed a bit more, and there were some vines on the wall, and catci in the windows, and little park sections sometimes to break the buildings up after a while, and I liked it better than a lot of the city.
We also went to the Portugese Synagogue, which was built by Spaniards. The Spanish Jews were fleeing the Jewish expulsion that Spain was doing back in the day; they ended up in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands was at war or something with Spain, so the Spaniards told the Dutch immigration authorities that they were Portugese. IT was nice and all, but there honestly wan't much to see. You can see more or less everything I saw in the photos. We went, however, to the Jewish History Museum, and there was lots more to see there. I spend a lot of time looking at stuff, so I didn;t have nearly enough time to see all the Jewish miscellany and exhibitions they had. There was a metool on a wall opposite the museum, so that was pretty cool. We also saw the Anne Frank House, which is not actually Anne Frank's house, but her father's office, which the family used as a hiding place for two years. That would have meant a lot more if I was familliar with Anne Frank's Diary. Still, I saw it. They had a door hidden begind a moving bookcase, and I thought that was pretty cool. Oh, man, we also saw this, the Tuschinski Theater. It's a movie theater. It was built by one of the Tuschinski brothers, two Poles who were on there way to the US, but, following the footsteps of the Pilgrims, went to Holland first. This Tuschinski brother really loved movies, was already operating a few theaters in Amsterdam, and had some artist buddies, so he decided to make the BEST MOVIE THEATER EVER. The whole building is amazing, you can't even se ethe interior. Everything, and I mean everything is designed. There's always some element of sculpture or something to it. Nothing went undecorated. It is my dream house, if it was a house and not a movie theater. It's covered with paintings, too, and many of them are very nice. And it has this style about it, everything is done in bold outlines and bright orang-red-yellow colors, and I was just very impressed by how it all worked together. It is my dream house, if it were a house and not a movie theater. Dang. I wish I coulda seen a movie there. That way, I would have gotetn to see a projection room, not just the entrance lobby. Yeah, I remember that. It was great. Last thing on Day 2: the best thing. The Van Gogh Museum.
I have a hard time trying to describe how it was because I was simply so blown away by what I saw there. I spent my time staring, mezmerized, at one painting, moving around it and stepping closer and father away, to the left and to the right, murmuring to my self "amazing," or "that's amazing," or "holy cow," or "that's amazing," until I looked over at the next painting, and then wandered over to stare, mesmerized, at it. It all boils down to this: there's so much soul in Van Gogh's stuff. It just has an amazing emotional content. It just leaps out and grabs you! It's so fulla SOUL! Dang, that was so great. You know, they gave me only two hours in there? What the crap! It's Van Gogh, there was even a full-fledged Gaugin exhibit in the annex, and they give you only tow hours‽ That ain't right. That ain't right. I still managed to enjoy myself, though. Aw, man, that was great.
Well, I think that't it. The next morning, we woke up, took a boat tour, then went home. If there are other things, I've forgotten them. And if I have forgotten them, it is because they are not important. I'm not forgetting either the Dam, an important monument featuring scenes from slave ships (remember that the slave trade was an important part of the Dutch economy at one point and that it was Dutch traders who originally introduced slaves into Engliand's American colonies), and that bikes are a very popular medium of transportation in Amsterdam. That's another thing; people were always shouting "velo! velo!" to warn other parts of the group that there was a bicycle approaching, and that got pretty annoying. Having a huge group like we did isn't the best. Anyway, peace out until next time. I hope I haven't bored you to excess. See ya.
Okay, so a bunch of stuff has happened to me in the past twenty days, and I need to spill some of it before I go gallivanting across Europe, first to Hungary, with my school, then to Greece with the Rotary. I get the distinct impression that I've forgotten something, but I can't remember what. Okay, I just remembered. We're all set.
First, let me let you about Luxembourg. On the thirteenth, my sponsoring Rotary disctrict, 1630, offerede a tour (just remembered something else) of Luxembourg to its students; I attended. I just spent like a half-hour playing with my camera, and I have deduced that it was afflicted with a strange malady that caused it to duplicate an existing picture when the shutter button was pressed instead of taking a new one. This means I now have two copies of images 0412 through 0451, but no pictures of Luxembourg. This is really too bad, becasue there wer a couple of breathtaking things I saw on that trip. The trip was in two parts; first, we visited a ham plant. This is, we are told, typically Luxembourgish. This means we visited the salting, drying, and smoking rooms in this ham plant, accompanied by explanations from our Luxembourgish guide. I assume he was a Luxembourger, anyway, because he used "we" to mean "the people of Luxembourg." Anyway, this tour really made me want to eat this ham. I took these great pictures of these beautiful carcass-legs hanging in rows in perfect perspective on their drying racks, but my camera, instead, duplicated a picture of, I dunno, the Tuschinski Theater (which is, by the way, my Millionaire Mansion). That was the first breathtaking this I saw: that beatiful meat. I never would have thought death could look so good. Oh, it was amazing. There was the smell, too. Oh, I just wanted to lift a corpse-leg off the shelf and take a big bite out of it. It was amazing. That was the first breathtaking thing I saw in Luxembourg. The ham. What's more; my wishes were granted. REally, the place was a combination hamery-brewery-restaurant, so we had a meal of the Luxembourgish ham with Luxembourgish beer. It was, in all honesty, probably the best ham I've ever eaten. It had a very rich flavor. That's the best way to describe it; rich. IT seemed to me that it wasn't just the "ham" flavor that Oscar Meyer has popularised; it went really deep. If it didn't taste any better than Oscat Meyer, granted, I would have been sorely dissapointed. Those guys don't put any ham on the shelf that hasn't been in preparation for at least a year. One year of salting, smoking, and drying. With the salting, they put a whole mess of salt on top of the ham in question, then they leave it in a temperature-variable room; I think 2 to 12 degrees (celsius) was the varation. They do this because this causes the porous ham to expand and contract, thus allowing the salt to penetrate to the bone. IT stays in the salting room for two or so months, then passes thorugh various drying rooms at various temperatures, which I have not bothered to remember. They dry for a long time "Becuase we sell ham," said our guide, "not water!" This ham is expensive, too, so the buyer should be happy that he or she is getting the most ham for his or her buck. Oh, that was some good ham. But then, onto the next part of the trip: the city of Luxembourg. Luxembourg is not, as I was previously led to believe, a city that was also a country. It's a small country named after its one and only big city. I have to say, I really liked the place. I feel like I could live in Luxembourg. Of course, I just spent a day there and didn't interact with any of the locals. For all know, the Luxembourgish culture would destroy me if I actally tries to live there, but I got good vibes from teh place. The second breathtaking thing after the ham was this one view of Luxembourg; the city is buyilt across a valley, so there's city on either side of a valley, which also has city in it. Standing up on one end of the valley and looking out at the town below and on the other side was really something else. I loved it. That;s the thing; it's a big city, but it mangages not to feel too big. That's what I like in big cities; a feeling of not-a-big-city. That;s why I like Liege so much. And Luxembourg just felt really good to me. It was very pretty; I really wish I had all those pictures I took. Sorry. I want them, too. There was a fairly large concrete complex, but there was also a bit of more open greenery (not to mention, like, the valley) that made it feel less oppresive than the vibe I get from skyscrapers rocketing up on both sides of me. Sadly, I don't really have more to say aboput Luxembourg; it was really pretty, and I'd like to go back. Oh, wait! We took a tour in a tourbus with an audio guide. This meant that we were all issued earbuds that we plugged into the bus's wall, and a recorded voice talked to us. I never knew what it was talking about, sadly enough. But, if the voice was to be believed, Luxembourg is very welcoming; it has a thriving immigrant population. I think it even said that there are more Portugese living in Luxembourg then there are Luxembourgers. Also, Luxembourg is known for being trilingual; people there speak French, German, and Luxembourgish. Newspapers run articles in all three languages side-by-side, and law courts see use of all three in the course of the same trial. The verdict is read in French, in keeping with Napoleanic tradition. So I like Luxembourg. Next!
On the 16th, I went to see an opera: "Rigoletto" by Guiseppe Verdi. Now, I'd never seen an opera before, but I was kind of familiar with the way that opera recordings sounded like, so I was prepared for the worst. IT turned out not to be that bad in real life. I have to say, the distance between the performers and me doubtless contributed to my appreciation; the operatic style is designed to carry the farthest possible without other amplification than is provided by the human body. My theory is that when it is recorded, this "live" element is subtracted, and so it sounds even more ridiculous than usual. In person, it ended up being not that bad. The music, at least. Let's talk about the story. I feel kind of silly warning people about spoilers for an opera, but there you have it; if you don't want to find out how the opera "Rigoletto" ends, skip ahead, cause I'm gonna summarize the whole thing now. It's in Italian, but this performance was supertitled in French, Dutch, and German, so I was able to read th eFrench supertitles. It took a while to get used to, it really was hard to figure out how to read the supertitles and watch the action at the same time, but I was able to figure it out in the end. Anyway, the story seemed rather simple while I was watching it, but subsequent attempts to summarize it have made me realize that it's actually kind of sordid. Here we go: Rigoletto, eponymous character, is a clown for the local duke. He makes one to many an uncouth joke about some dude's family during one of the Duke's debaucherous soirees, so some geezer from that family lays a curse on Rigoletto. Rigoletto, surprised at how unsettled he is at the geezer's curse, meets an assasin on the way home from the soiree (this is a classic case of Chekhov's Gunman). He and talks to his daughter, who, as we learn, is Rigoletto's raison d'etre. The duke enters from the shadows; it turns out he's the mystery man that Rigoletto's daughter sees at church and is obsessed with. There's a love scene and a passionate embrace, then Rigoletto comes back, so the Duke scrams. Rigoletto fawns over his daughter some more (her mother is dead, by the way), and some of the Duke's courtisans, spying on them, think that Rigoletto's daughter is his mistress. They concoct a plan to kidnap her to play a prank on Rigoletto. They successfully execute the plan. Rigoletto, discovering this, is distraught. He goes looking for his daughter; the courtisans see him, and say, "Hey, Rigoletto, are you looking for someone? WELL, WE GOT HER! Ha ha! That's right! We got your mistress! Ha Ha!" to which Rigoletto replies, "You fools, she was my DAUGHTER!" So now the daughter is damaged goods (the Duke's courtisans are fairly debaucherous) and Rigoletto has a score to settle with the Duke for letting this happen on his watch. I want to add here that during the Duke and the daughter's love scene, the Duke claims to be a poor student because he overheard the daughter say that she wanted her mystery man to be one. The Duke isn't very scrupulous; his courtisans are no better. Anyway, Rigoletto decides to take Chekhov's Gun off the wall and hire that assassin. We see the Duke trying to pick two girls up at once, and it looks like he's doing a pretty good job of it, too, while he sings the opera's most famous aria about how capricious women are. then, the assasin's sister enters, because the assassin lures his marks into killing range with his sister. The sister, however, falls for the Duke, and tries to get her brother to let the Duke off easy. the assassin winds up saying, "Well, fine, here's the deal: if anyone shows up before Rigoletto comes back to pick up the body 'cause he wanted to be the one to dump it in the river, I'll kill that person instead and switch 'em." Rigoletto's daughter was eavesdropping; she still loves the Duke, despite having found out that he's a dirty, lying horndog, and decides to knock on the door and thus get killed to save th Duke's life. Rigoletto comes by to pick up the body, but while he's dragging it odd to dump it in the river, he hears the Duke singing the opera's most famous aria. He says, "Wait a second..." checks the body bag, and discpovers his own daughter, his only joy in this world, who still has the breath to sing a few words of goodby. Rigoletto then cries, "The curse!" Curtain.
Still spoilers. The only conclusion that I can pry from this piece is that it's a Greican tragedy, with, as a moral, "life sucks. I'm sorry, but it's true." Rigoletto's life sucks; he hates his job (he has a bit of a monologue talking about how he hated being a clown because he doesn't like wearing a fake smile when he wants to cry), he seems to liove kind of destitutely, he has no one in his life except for his daughter, for whom he exhibits an unhealthy obsession, his boss is a jerk, some people can't take a joke, so they take to laying curses on him...the guy just gets screwed! His daughter gets abducted and raped, she's lied to and betrayed by the man she loves (though she is, admittedly, an idiot for loving him eve nafter she witnesses his attempts to pick up two other girls at once), and she dies for this hopeless love. Throughout the play, I can see him only as the victim of his circomstances. He doesn't do hardly anything wrong. He's a clow, and, befitting the jester's role, tells the truth no one wants to hear, which merits him a curse; his daughter, of her own accord, falls in love with an absolutely uncaring horndog, a love which merits her her death (this could be framed as a consequence of Rigoletto's overprotectiveness [he never lets his daughter out of the house for fear she'll get 'damaged' psycholofgically or physically], but that seems unlikely, especialyl considering how much love there is in opera without it); and the Duke, the cause of all this disaster and heartbreak, gets away scott free! The whole message of the opera seems to be, "Damn, Rigoletto sure got handed a raw deal, huh?" It seems really morally nihilistic from my point of view. "The libertine, disposign of a fortune not earned, gets all the pleasures of the world, while the lowly, heartbroken jester, after all his years of struggle, gets everything taken away from him for no reason. Oh well-- **** happens." I also feel like the opera ended at its climax; I feel like Rigoletto's reaction to his daughters death would have been the single most important thing the opera could have provided us in terms of some sort of message or interpretive indicator, but instead I'm left feeling utterly without denoeument (this, by the way, is a French word that litterally means "unknotting"). One definition of a "climax," delivered to me in the fifth grade by Katherine Greyle, is the scene in which the protagonist makes a choice. This definition has stuck with me, and has helped me to identify some climaxes where they would otherwise not have been evident; knowing which choice it is that the protagonist makes can be a key indicator of what a piece is really about. In "Star Wars: Episode Four," Luke makes the climactic choice of using the force instead of his computer guidence system to blow up teh Death Star. In "Star Wars: Episode Six," Darth Vader makes the climactic choice to sacrtifice himself to kill Palpatine in the smae blow. I had imagined that the opera was about Rigoletto; most of the scenes focus on his state of mind and chonicle the developement of his thoughts and feelings. I thought that, thusly, how Rigoletto chose to react to the death of his daughter would be the key point in the opera, becasue the opera is about him and this is a traumatic event in his life. His reaction would have been the climax. Instead, this scene is at the very end of the play, and instead of getting little denouement, we get none. This leads me to re-interprate the thing, particularly with the Greek " tragic fate" thing in mind; the daughter's death, which is simultaeously the death of Rigoletto's reason to live, would logically be the very end of the denouement, because it's the last thing that happens. The daughter's death would be the result of the climax, which triggered the sequence of events that led to the tragic finale. What was the cause? "There is no cause," you might say, "**** just happened." Hah! WRONG! FATE! FATE is the reason, as it typically is in these things--but Fate does not need to remain abstract in this opera; it has a very real agent in the form of the Curse. The Curse. The climax of the opera would seems to be the first scene, when Rigoletto gets the Geezer's Curse. This isn't really a choice, unless you call it the geezer's choice to curse Rigoletto, thereby siccing Fate on him, and actually, that seems about as reasonable a thing to think as any. The climax is when Rigoletto gets to uppity and tempts Fate too much, which then proceeds to take everything from him. so there you have it, the moral of the opera: "Don't tempt Fate; Fate will win." This closely mirrors the Greek's classic: "Yeah, you know, the Gods are just playing dice with your lives." Whatever. I like how my versoin would have been better, with some real closure. Too bad Verdi's dead, or I'd send him a letter.
Okay, that's it for opera. Third thing, the one I jsut remembered in the first paragraph; last Saturday, the 20th, I went to an arboreal obstacle course. It was basically a tightrope-walking course, but safety'd-up so much it wasn't really tightrope-walking. We all had harnesses attatcehd to a safety wire and there was always something to hold on to so you didn't actually need to be able to balance on the rope (well, wire; there was no rope at all except for some rope nets, it was all wire, which was a bit hard on the hands). Still, it was really fun when we didn't have major traffic jams. Basically, is was just one "get across" course after another, going from tree to tree. It was really enjoyable, though; I like being in trees. It wasn't terribly difficult or challenging, I didn't think it was even scary, but it was still a seriously good time.
Okay! That's it! I'll see you in April, with a bunch of stories about Hungary and Greece! I've made sure my camera is working, so barring any wierd and stupid duplication bugs my camera might contrant, I'll have some pictures, too. Till then.
