Fietscultuur

 

The bike shed at the school

Who knew that it would be a bike to change my life. The travel, the language, the history here in Holland has all been wonderful, but the biking has struck me to the core.

My first morning in this house, I heard them coming: the disembodied voices of school students laughing and talking. Naively, I could not understand how they could be coming so quickly. Then, out of the early morning mist, they passed me, 20 at a time, on bicycle. Lean and fresh and beautiful, these children bike to school in a country where public school busses do not exist.



On Sunday mornings, elderly men and women put on their Sunday hats and coats and bike to church. They ride gracefully, elegantly pushing off with their right foot while standing with their left foot on the pedal.  They then then ease onto the seat in one effortless movement.



The bikers here smile for no apparent reason other than the joy of being alive.



Moving bike for hire in Haarlem

The Dutch will bike carrying almost anything. Sometimes I think they challenge themselves to see what they can bring home by bike and then brag about it to their friends. “Of course I bike to class with my yoga ball.” Or, “That 2 meter tree I just planted? I brought it home from the nursery by bike. Took me a while to figure it out, but I got here.” Maybe it is understood that you would first work out how to bring some impossibly large item from point A to point B by bike. Is it an admission of defeat for a Dutchman to use a car?

I recently saw a man on a bike towing a small trailer for his golf clubs. Now there is a dedicated sportsman. By the way, it was pouring rain.

Friends on a Sunday Outting

Business men in suits, soldiers in camouflage, and policemen in uniform pass me on the bike path each morning. In the afternoons, I might see an officer riding home with a bouquet of flowers for his sweetheart strapped to the book rack of his bike .

Lovers of all ages hold hands as they bike side by side.

When I first arrived I hadn’t been on a bike in 20 years. Now it’s hard to remember a time when I drove a car.

My Beloved Bakfiets

 My bakfiets seats four children, or two children and five days worth of groceries. It is my minivan. I prefer my bakfiets to the car in every circumstance and weather, except high wind or ice. The beautiful thing about this bike is the more weight you put in the box, the better it rides. Really.

The gas station I passed yesterday offered regular unleaded gasoline for 1.49 euro per liter. At today's exchange rate, this works out to $8.10 per gallon. Hmmmmm. Biking is good for more than just my health.

Audrey and I have conversations as we bike from place to place. I point out the animals we pass on our way. Swans, both black and white, swim silently in the canals. Gray herons hide in the reeds. Occasionally we will see a huge stork searching for frogs and snakes in the long grass of a field.   On the bike path to the preschool there is a lovely children’s farm complete with goats, pot-bellied pigs, sheep, and chickens. There is always something to talk about.


Along the path to the beach

Our beach is 5 km away. There are two small parking lots for cars. On a beautiful sunny weekend day, the road to the beach becomes gridlocked. Sometimes the police have to close the road due to traffic. The bike path, on the other hand, is wide, easy, and completely separate from the road. It offers views of the wild and windswept dunes. The scent of roses, horses, and  the sea hangs thick in the air.

My car sits in front of our house collecting sap drippings and pinecones from the blue spruce above it. I smile.

“From my cold dead hands,” my friend Nicky told me when I first arrived. What? I must have missed her meaning.  “They will take my bike from my cold dead hands,” she repeated.

And I understand exactly how she feels.



The Mommy Bikes at the school shed

  












 

White Nights

Spring here in Holland has been cool and breezy. The evenings have slowly grown longer, until now the evening and the morning almost, but not quite, meet around 2 am. At 10 pm it is still bright and sunny, at midnight, you could describe it as dusk.

My kids are sleep deprived. It is so hard to convince them they need to go to bed when the sun is still out. Jack is crushed that I won’t let him back out to play after 8 pm. I would, but I know I wouldn’t see him again until ten. Our house came with these beautiful room darkening curtains in the bedrooms. I don’t think my children would sleep at all except for them.

Today is the last day of school. Jordan has a small graduation ceremony. Jack gets his report card. They are both free at noon. We are off to the beach with friends for the afternoon and then to a Pancake House for dinner. The kids have loved the school. We all will miss it this summer, no matter what Jack claims.

We’ve been biking everywhere. The bakfiets has been such a gift. Shopping for the groceries, or a new rake, or a ton of beach toys is all possible. Last night the kids were rammy after dinner. I piled them all in the bike (with Jack up front for balance) and rode all the way to the Leiden town limit. The bike path leads through these wonderful farm fields, fields without fences, only canals penning the animals. We saw cows, of course, as well as goats and little black sheep. They were close enough to talk to, and we did. Today, my legs are TIRED, but the bike was easy to ride the whole way. People keep asking me if I’m going to join the local gym. Ha!

I’ve continued to marvel at the Dutch on their bikes. I believe if they are not born with a bike, they get one before they can crawl. The Dutch girl down the block is four years old. She rides more confidently than I do! Last night I saw a man reading the NEWSPAPER while riding his bike home. Last week I saw a woman riding a bakfiets like mine on a cell phone towing a kyack! I, of course, am unable to let go of either handlebar without ending up in a canal. I went for a bike ride with a lonely and forlorn Dutch nanny a few days ago. She rode beside me on the bike path. In true Dutch style, she rode 2 centimeters from my left side the whole way. I’m just not that steady on that big beast of a bike. She was taking her life in her hands.

The kids continue to make friends in the neighborhood. At one point during the weekend we had eight different kids in the house in addition to mine. There is a young Dutch family down the street with a five year old boy named Peter and a four year old girl named Laura. They speak no English. We speak no Dutch. Still, they wait in their yard until we come home. They bike to our driveway hoping to entice my children to ride around the block with them. Peter has become quite enamored with Jack and describes him to friends at school as, “my new English friend”. One evening I saw Peter and his mother, Peter on his bike and wearing an American bike helmet. His mother pointed this out to me. She said he wanted to wear a helmet “just like Jack”.

All the good things aside, there are days here that are very frustrating. T-mobile has turned off my cell phone each month on the 7th. This month they were unable to turn it back on for a week. Our bank placed a block on any automatic withdrawls from utilities. They were not sure why. My creditors were not amused. There was the night we returned from a restaurant to find that the parking garage where we parked the car had closed and locked our car in. There are still days when the TOM TOM, our GPS, takes us to an open field instead of the birthday party. Baking and cooking are an everyday challenge. I’ve confused buttermilk for 2%, yuck. All the meats are a mystery. Sometimes when Jack asks me what’s for dinner, I honestly don’t know the answer.

I am tired. The white nights have left me going to bed much too late. The enthusiasm of coming to a new country has faded into the exhaustion of still not knowing how to get simple things done. We are looking forward to coming back to Philadelphia as if it were a month at a spa. I think I might break down and weep when I finally get to a Target.

Our New Home

Sorry for the delay in getting this letter out. We moved into our new house last week and things have been hectic!

The house is amazing! It is so bright and airy and cheerful. We have enough room, but no room to spare. Those little rooms filled up so quickly, especially after I realized that we had no closets whatsoever and would be needed wardrobes. Still, the furniture fits so nicely. With the 10 ft ceilings, the house gives a nice sense of space despite the small rooms. It has a little wedge shaped garden in the back with tall hedges providing lots of privacy. I’ll attach some pictures.

The kids are enamored with the house. As soon as we moved in, children from the neighborhood started coming over. I frequently find children (and one time a dog) in the house that I’ve never met. Our kids tear outside almost as soon as they come home. Hide and seek is the current favorite game choice. The kids might be gone for 2 hours. I have given them two rules: they cannot cross the street and they cannot enter anyone else’s house unless I know where they are. This works out well since the other children seem to have the same or very similar rules.

From the third story of the house I have a good view of the yards behind us. Our block is nearly a circle. All of the houses on the block are connected by walls or garages. Our backyards fill the circle within, making wedge shaped gardens lined with tall hedges. In the very center is a HUGE oak tree. The Dutch are very serious about their gardens. All of the yards are filled with flowers, Wisteria vines, hedges, and espidrilled fruit trees. It is quiet and pleasant here.

The kids are doing well at school. Since all of the children are from somewhere else, there is very little in the way of “cliques”. Most children seem anxious to make friends. Jack and Jordan are both thriving.

Walt returned from Malaysia last week just in time for the moving truck to arrive. The poor guy was so tired, but he was a trooper and helped with all of the moving arrangements, trips to Ikea, and assembly of bunk beds. It was not the best timing by any means, but it is over, and now we are settled in the house.

I went out last week and bought myself a boxfiets. It won’t be delivered for two or so more weeks. I can’t wait. I went to the big bike store in The Hague and test rode 5 different types and sizes. Audrey squealed with delight every time we took off on another tour around the block. I’m thrilled I’ll have a bike with a box big enough to hold three children or two children and the groceries. This is my new mini-van! If you’d like to see a picture, go to www.boxfiets.nl and look for the box bike with the “long” box.
This weekend we need to get bikes for Walt and Jack.

Oh, a funny story: Jack was invited on a playdate and the mom picked him up after school and took him to their house. Walt and I went to pick him up. The house was way out in the boonies. We ended up on a private road lined with gated houses. The house we were looking for had a closed gate across the drive way and one of those intercom boxes. The gate opened slowly, and before us was the BIGGEST stone mansion. We pulled up to the door to realize it was a TWIN! A twin mansion. I’d have never thought it would exist. Before Jack and I even reached the car, Jack said, “MOM! Did you see how big that house was?!!!”

I should add that most of the families I have met at the school are just like we are: middle income on an expat assignment that includes school tuition. It is the exception to find the diplomat or CEO of a major corporation. For that I am grateful.

Jordan would like me to tell you that yesterday they went on a field trip to a local farm. There were goats, cows, ducks, and sheep. She got to feed a one day old baby goat with a bottle. She was in heaven!

We will not have internet access at the house until May 28th. I will check my e-mail daily at the school, but I cannot check Facebook (they have the site blocked). Our magic jack phone line will also not work. Mom and Dad have our cell phone numbers if there is an emergency.

Queen's Day Weekend

We’ve had another action packed week here in Den Haag. The kids are making friends. We’ve had our first set of play dates. We experienced our first Queen’s Day. We’ve again had a chance to learn more about the Dutch.

Jordan and Jack are quickly making friends here at the American School. We took Jack’s buddy Tanner to the beach at Wassenaar after school on Monday. It had rained all day, but just as we left for the beach, the wind picked up and the clouds blew away. It was my first time at the beach where I could see the horizon. In one direction up the beach we could see Den Haag, in the other we could see Amsterdam. It was windy and beautiful with quick moving clouds racing across the sky. The kids built a sand fort in an attempt to hold back the tide. We stayed to watch the ocean wash it away.

Jordan has made friends with a sweet little girl named Norah. Her mother is Spanish, her father is Dutch, she was born in Germany. That means that Norah can speak and understand Spanish, Dutch, German, and this year, English. I am humbled.

Queen’s Day is a huge national holiday here. It celebrates the Queen’s Birthday. At 8 am on Thursday, every bell in Den Haag started ringing in honor of the Queen. Around our house there are at least four medieval bell towers. The bells continued ringing for 15 full minutes. The kids and I went out on the balcony to listen. It was amazing and overwhelming. I’ll never forget it.

Later that morning we went to the children’s flea market. Every Dutch child is encouraged to sell old toys or baked treats to make some money. We picked up a Chinese yo-yo for Jordan.

We spent the afternoon at the carnival near the parliament building. I should have known that something was wrong when I could not find anyone wearing orange (the Queen’s royal color) anymore. The lines for the rides were very short. The trams were empty.

It wasn’t until that night that a friend let me know that a maniac had tried to crash his car into the Queen’s caravan on parade in the town of Apeldoorn. In the process, he plowed his car through a crowd of onlookers, killing five instantly and seriously injuring twelve more. The driver has since died. No one really understands the reason why this happened. It is all so very sad. Please keep the injured and their families in your prayers.

The next day at the school, I spoke with three different American families. None of them knew anything about the incident. The expat community here seems to be very insulated from local news.

On a lighter note, Audrey and I have had a great time riding the trams this week. Walt being away has forced me to go and get things done for myself. I am becoming much better at getting around by public transport. At one tram stop a Vietnamese man started a conversation with us. Using his extremely limited English (better by far than my Vietnamese), he asked if we were from the United States. When I told him we were, he smiled a HUGE smile, gave me two thumbs up, and said “OBAMA!”.

I’ve seen lots of interesting things along the way. Did you know the Dutch love dogs? Dogs are welcome in restaurants (of course!) but not butcher shops. People carry their dogs on their bikes in large milk-crates in front of their handle bars. I’m not talking about little dogs, either. I saw a full grown golden retriever carried this way. Fancy dogs have little dog trailers that tag along behind their owner’s bike. Dogs are welcome to ride the trams and busses, too, if they have their own canine ticket (no joke!). They are not allowed to take a seat though. I guess they have to draw the line somewhere.

We are still keeping track of interesting things seen on a bicycle. This week’s prize winner was a portly sixty year old man riding his bike wearing nothing but a speedo thong bathing suit.

It is time for me to go. The kids are making paper airplanes and sending them down the two story stairwell. I need to help them with some design work.

Back to School

We’ve survived another week here in The Netherlands. Things are slowly coming along, but this place won’t really start being like a home until we move into the new house. Right now we are waiting. Luckily it should only be two more weeks and we will have the keys to the new house and hopefully a shipping container full of our stuff.

Jack’s birthday was Monday. At school, they sang “Happy Birthday” to him in five different languages! After dinner that night we went to the beach. It was so windy! You could almost lean in to it. They were “kite surfing” off the beach. I’d never seen anything like it: they get on a small surf board, launch this HUGE kite, and they are off! They really haul across the water. I guess the trick is figuring out how to get back to the beach!

Jack received some money for Easter and his birthday. He decided that he would buy a “Diabolo” or Chinese yo-yo. I found the one shop in Den Haag that sells them and programmed the address into the Tom Tom. I thought I was so smart! Traffic was horrific. For the second time that week we found ourselves stuck in gridlock, unable to even turn around. The two mile journey took almost an hour. We got there, purchased our yo-yo and started the drive back. This time Tom Tom took us a different way and I ended up missing the entrance to a tunnel. I spent 10 minutes driving around the bus terminal trying not to get hit by a tram as we looked for another way home. Tom Tom, it appears, is useless when you are driving over the tunnel you are supposed to be driving through. I think at some point during the ride I might have said something like, “NO ONE SPEAKS AGAIN UNTIL I SAY SO!” Grrrrrr. Mean mommy. I was lucky, though, and I did not get hit or a ticket for driving in the tram lanes and the wrong way up one-way streets to get back to where we started. Eventually I did get through that tunnel. When we finally did get home, I had sparks coming off my hair.

I’ve decided, the Dutch do not ride bikes for the health benefits or because it is environmentally friendly, they do it because it is FASTER!

For the record, though, Jack LOVES his Diabolo. He’s been practicing with all of his free time and even offers to entertain us after dinner each night. I’ll attach a video somewhere.

Thursday I went to a New Mom Coffee up in Wassenaar. It was all moms from the school. I met my new next door neighbor, Kathy from Chicago, who has a daughter in Jack’s class. I met a woman from Hockessin, DE, who’s husband worked with Walt at Valero. It’s a small world. Once again, I received lots of phone numbers and offers for help if needed. The school, indeed, has been a soft place for me to land.

Walt loves the job. Each night after the kids are in bed, we have a beer and he tells me about the people he meets. His office is like the United Nations. People are from Holland, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Malaysia, Nigeria and Oman. The engineering work is extremely academic and advanced. He is one of the few guys around with actual field experience, though, so he feels he has something to offer the team. They continue to explain about the Dutch concept of work/home-life balance. His boss Jaap is teaching him to bill his hours in such a way that he can take days off after he returns from a trip abroad. I am so very grateful.

Last night our friends Betsy and Ben came for dinner. Ben and I were friends from my time in Pittsburgh. Betsy is his darling wife of almost 10 years now. They live in Tilburg, about an hour away. I can’t tell you how nice it was to see familiar faces. Betsy, a Dutch native, spent a long time trying to teach me to pronounce our new street name correctly. Who knew that saying a Dutch street name could be so difficult? I think we might need a few more dinners and a few more bottles of wine before I get it right.

Walt is off to Malaysia tomorrow for a ten day trip. We will miss him, and I am more than a little anxious on how I will solve problems here without his help. Still, it is an opportunity for me to become more independent here. I think as long as we don’t have to shop for any more yo-yo’s, I’ll be fine.

Spring Break

We’ve had a busy week here. The kids were off from school and we’ve been making day trips all around. It worked out well. I can’t think of one place we went that wasn’t worth the effort. We’ve learned lots more about getting around and getting things done.

The first thing you notice when driving around Holland is that everyone seems to be on a bicycle. To pass the time, we’ve been keeping a running tab of things that can be carried by bicycle here in The Netherlands. In the last two weeks we’ve seen people carry on their bikes: yoga balls, cellos, bass (as in “bigger than a cello”), and my favorite, a disabled person in a wheelchair (the bike was fitted with a ramp in the front for a wheel chair, no kidding!) Walt’s personal favorite is the women who ride their bikes wearing short skirts and high heels with another similarly dressed friend sitting side-saddle on the back.

Dutch moms can carry up to five children on their bikes. Most moms have a seat on the handle bars for babies and a seat on the back for toddlers. There is a special brand of bike called bakfiets (or “box bike”) which is literally a large wooden crate on the front of a bike for carrying 3 preschoolers or all of the groceries. I’ll attach a picture. I’m hoping to get one once we get settled. Since they can run up to $2,500, I’m hoping to find one used.

Jack has had a good week, but you wouldn’t know that by asking him. He is responding to the stress of being away by refusing to leave the house. He begins every trip the same way, “I don’t want to go!” He’s SURE he doesn’t want to go. He yells. He stomps his feet. He pleads to stay home.

One such trip was a walk to the grocery store. All the way there (1/4 mile), he told me how he was sick. He was tired. He wanted to lie down on the sidewalk and take a nap! Then we passed the kaashuis, or cheese shop. He stopped mid-whine and walked in. They offered samples. He tried one and then tried them all. He smiled. He laughed. He ran from cheese wheel to cheese wheel telling the kind shopkeeper how much he loves cheese. He was in heaven. The cheese here is not pasteurized, so it cannot be exported. I asked for the name of the cheese, but was told they simply name the cheese after the farmer that made it. We came home with half a pound of aged Dutch cheese made by Farmer Zacht. Jack announced, “That was the best trip ever!” Go figure. He’s said that every day this week.

Last night we made it to the 5 pm mass. I had looked up the time in the English Expat Church bulletin, but I should have known something was terribly wrong when we were the only people under the age of 75 in the church. There were only a handful of elderly parishioners there, and they smiled and waved to Jack as we took our pew. The Gregorian Mens Choir chanting Latin psalms caused me concern, as well. It seems we had found the Dutch mass with the full Latin Rite. Of course I had planted us square in the middle of the front row. There was no escape. A kind grandmotherly type offered us a booklet translating the Latin to Dutch. * Sigh* I was reaching deep for the lessons from Father Sabitini all those years ago, but I never did learn a thing in that class. Poor Jack. He leaned into me about 30 minutes into things and whimpered, “I don’t have any idea what’s going on.” Jack was so good. He even kneeled up straight for the first time ever, although he later confessed that the only reason he did that was because to lean back on the pew was so very uncomfortable. The mass was well over an hour. I don’t know how those Gregorian chanters put so many notes into so few words. We laughed all the way home, but Jack made me solemnly swear never to take him to a Latin mass again. That works for both of us.

Oh, Walt has found us a minivan that seats seven. We hope to have the sale finalized by Tuesday. The supposed “minivan” that we rented from Avis has been much too small. The kids have to sit three-in-a-row. All the way to any place, they bicker. “Stop touching me,” or, the ever popular, “You kicked me in the head!” are frequently heard from the back seat. The bickering increases with the distance traveled. Every time we arrive home, I remember that I need to start keeping Scotch in the house.