Archive for January, 2018

Dance as if everyone is watching

Published January 31, 2018 Holland , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags:

On Sunday morning we moved out of our cozy boutique hotel in Leiden and went to its opposite, an enormous and posh beach resort in Scheveningen,  one of the old grand seaside hotels from another century.  Axel thought they used the adjective ‘luxurious’ a bit too often and our upgrade to an executive suite made us feel special until we saw the room which seemed more of a run-of-the-mill room than anything ‘executive.’ An enormous seagull greeted us, clearly expecting some kind of offering as s/he was used to. There was none to be had.

We took a long walk along the beach, bent over against the strong winds which are common during this time of the year. Contrary to our neck of the woods where the seas are empty, here there was a lot to see: there was a race of large sailboats in the distance and nearby there were the windsurfers (storm surfers I’d call them) and kite surfers. The latter were fun to watch as they raced to and from the beach making enormous jumps into the air. I would have been ready to sign on for a lesson if I’d had the necessary gear.

In the evening we attended another show, Good (old) Times: Into My Arms with my older brother as a performer (of of three men, the most to the left in the picture). It is a modern dance performance of an amateur group of 55+ year old dancers, on the theme of discovering self and being at ease with whatever the state, shape and size of one’s body. This was the second time I saw him perform. My brother started (modern) dancing late in life. He is now 70+ and I am mighty proud. It was a moving performance.

On Monday we met up with friends who we first hang out with in Beirut in the 1970s and who have now settled down in Scheveningen. We visited a fairly new (private) museum of modern art (Voorlinden) that I had first visited in November and was anxious to show to Axel. It’s one of the rare musea not easily accessible with public transport. The stormy and rainy weather ruled out renting bikes, and so the ride with our friends worked out perfectly. The museum reminded us a bit of Mass Moca in North Adams (MA) – a combination of playful and reflective art.

Monday night we visited my nephew the theater technician, his Scottish wife and their young son who is completely bilingual, the only one of my siblings’ grandchildren with whom Faro could talk right away – we hope one day to bring them together as they’re roughly the same age.

By Tuesday the end of our whirlwind trip to Holland was in sight, regrettably. We packed up and made our way to my friend’s house in Aalsmeer, at a stone’s throw from Schiphol airport for our last dinner and night, early rise and check in for our very empty flight back to Boston.

Memories, mortality and a midsummer’s night

Published January 27, 2018 Holland , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: ,

Saturday morning I joined a three of my erstwhile housemates for a breakfast reunion. I am the only one still married – one has been divorced for a long time and the other two are widows.  The men we were dating when we lived together in our student house, and later married (and the one I divorced), have all died of cancer (intestinal and pancreatic) before their 70th birthday – that makes for a 100% mortality rates of our men back then.  Was it the enormous amounts of alcohol male students consumed? The smoking? Or simply bad luck and chance? It makes one think.

We visited our old house and dared each other to ring the bell to see if we could take a look. A young Irish couple now live on the ground floor. I think we woke them up. Nevertheless they were gracious enough to show us around, including their bedroom – something rather unheard of as I remember. Their front room was my first room, the bedroom was F’s. We giggled and exclaimed as excited old ladies can, pointing out where the first encounters with our now dead mates took place. For some it was an emotional trip down memory lane.

The next part of the day was devoted to the reunion of the women’s student association which merged with the boys’ club one year after I joined, thus making my cohort and the next forever the ‘young ones.’ I caught up with people I hadn’t seen in 40 years, found out who was retired, who was not and who was ‘playing’ Sinterklaas (Santa) with their own or other people’s monies, reinforcing once more my belief that there is no lack of money in the world.

We listening to a very inspiring ‘sustainability’ activist, a young woman who founded Urgenda, trying to get Holland to do more to turn back CO2 emissions and even took the Dutch government successfully to court for irresponsible behavior in the face of undeniable facts on global warming. I wonder whether this would be possible in the US – irresponsible behavior is rather blatant and our influence is big, much bigger than little Holland. I was very inspired by her practical and creative approach to get people to do their share of the effort that will and can turn back the clock. A familiar cabaret from the late 60s by a friend of my sister who started her professional cabaret career in Leiden and was now grooming the next generation, had us all pull out the stops to sing along the melodies and words we remembered. Afterwards we split into smaller groups and dined together for a more intimate reunion and catching up.

To complete the day I caught a ride to Scheveningen where I joined Axel and my nephew and his wife and child for an extraordinary performance of Purcell’s The Fairie Queen (based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night Dream) with music by the Dutch Blazers (Wind) Ensemble and the story told in a light-hearted way through enormous puppets. My nephew does is one of the technicians and provided us with complimentary tickets.

The good life in Leiden

Published January 26, 2018 Holland , vacation Leave a Comment
Tags: , ,

A week trip is actually only 6 days/nights, with the two transatlantic crossings, and so it went much too fast. On Thursday we settled into our lovely little boutique hotel on the main canal (Rapenburg) in Leiden, and then hurried to Scheveningen to see my sister and her husband in the construction site that will become their new house – only the heating system was installed, to help with the drying of the plaster. For the rest it required a great deal of imagination to see what they had bought. Decades long unpruned bushes had grown into large and ugly trees that towered the house. One had fallen over in the near hurricane that swept over Holland some weeks ago. But in this town you cannot just cut a tree, even if it used to be a small bush – once the diameter of the trunk exceeds a number of centimeters it is considered a tree, ugly or not, and you have to ask for a special permission which can take months.

In the evening we obeyed Tessa’s rules about researching where you are going to eat but the number 1 and 2 wouldn’t let us in without a reservation, and reservations wouldn’t be taken until Sunday night, when we would have moved on already. Later we discovered that it was a special ‘dinner’ week during which participating restaurants offer 3-course prix fixe dinners hoping to attract people to go out during what is otherwise a very dead time of the year. We learned our lesson and reserved for the next night in the first restaurant that was actually taking reservations – it was not participating in the week’s specials. It was the most expensive dinner I can remember, but memorable indeed, if not for the amazingly creative cuisine and skilled plating, then also for the young and inexperienced waitress who dumped a fancy champagne/liqueur cocktail over one of the guests. The girl was mortified and close to tears for the rest of the evening. We kept smiling to here, sending oxytocin her way in the hope of counteracting the high levels of cortisol; a practical application of all the neurochemistry I have learned this past year.

Peaks and valleys

Published January 21, 2018 Uncategorized Leave a Comment

It has been a month since we returned from New Orleans. I have only thought about my journal, not written. I was reminded of that by a friend this morning. I now will leap over an entire month, skimming the peaks of great experiences, missing the valleys.

Christmas came and went, and once again I vowed to be out of the country or at least out of Massachusetts for the entire month of December in 2018. I have set my eyes on South East Asia. I am going to put aside some money every month so that we can enjoy our month outside the US, ideally in a place that is warmer. It is hard to escape Christmas around the world; even in Afghanistan Santa was omnipresent, but as our New Orleans experience showed us, not being ‘at home’ makes Christmas palatable.

January has come in with a vengeance, the coldest weather I can remember. We were lucky that none of the storms knocked out our electricity and so we stayed warm and comfortable. We did go skiing one weekend, at our favorite NH cross-country ski area in Jackson, staying at the lovely Thorn Hill Inn, one of those selfish Christmas presents we give to each other. It was bitter cold but we have all the right clothes now.

It was the first time in one or two years we tried skiing again and I was a little worried about the problematic left ankle and Axel about circulation. I can no longer do the skate skiing that reminded me of the ice skating in Holland of many decades ago. And so I had to change skies. I tried out some demos and am now set up with a pair that puts Axel and me on roughly the same rhythm and speed. We skied a little on day one, to get used to the exercise, and then more the second day. It was wonderful to be out in nature for so many hours and be active. We vowed we will do more of it in February and have secured a place to stay with friends, further west in New Hampshire.

Sita gave me an introduction to glassworks for Christmas. yesterday was my class. I learned how to make beads and now have a better understanding how some of my African beads are made. I did not see the final products, don’t even remember how many I made, because the completed beads went straight into the kiln for drying, even before the colors emerged from the cooling glass. It was a lot of fun. I decided I want to go back an take another class and learn how to make marbles.

And now we are keeping our fingers crossed that the flu virus, which wrestled Sita and her family down, did not come visit us with them this weekend.  Saffi threw up several times during the night and so is not out of the woods while her mom and dad are still recovering. We don’t want to be the ones that take the virus across the Atlantic when we leave for a week of Holland on Wednesday. So far we have weathered the onslaught – hopefully the flu shots gave us at least some protection.

January 2018
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

Categories

Blog Stats

  • 136,508 hits
Subscribe to my feed

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 76 other subscribers