Sylvia's Journal

All day we walked, along the wide and endless beach of Schiermonnikoog. We could see seals play in the breakers just off shore. The wind was in our back blowing us fast and far for a very long and slow return. Just at the right time a small dune restaurant appeared which had hot chocolate with whipped cream ready plus countless other goodies for tired beach walkers.

Inside we found another part of our family clan, already ‘on the coffee’ as we say in Dutch. The Dutch love their coffee (and apple pie and, again, whipped cream). The only reason the Dutch aren’t all overweight is because of the bikes. That was another activity we could have done. But by the time we returned from our very long and windy back (against the wind back) we were too pooped for a bike ride. I fear that all the calories we did consume will be showing.

For our evening meal the hotel had given us a separate room far removed from the regular dining hall. I am not sure if we asked for it but we had been so noisy that some of the other guests may have complained.

After singing every birthday song known to mankind in two languages we had a most delicious meal. There were speeches in Dutch and in English from ‘the warm side’ (the direct descendants of my father and mother) and the ‘cold side’ (those who married into the family) and a side that has no name (those who are friends of the family). After the last dishes were served Saint Nicholas showed up and brought me presents, quite an honor as usually I always had to go to Saint Nicholas to get them.

At midnight there was another birthday and we sung again but by then many had gone to bed, especially those belonging to the older generation (that is us now) and some of the people who had been walking for 5 hours.

Most of the clan took the first of three possible ferries back to the mainland, one in the morning and two in the afternoon. From the Manchester clan only Tessa and Steve stayed in a suddenly very quiet hotel.

We parted from Sita and Jim who headed back to Amsterdam with their cousin who is graciously lending his apartment to them as he move sin with his girlfriend. Tessa and Steve are by now also in Amsterdam with another cousin on the other side of the city.

After our goodbyes we left for the east of Holland to my brother’s place, stopping along the way in a tiny museum, beautifully crafted in the lowland landscape, full of art from Friesland’s best modern and contemporary visual artists. The museum (Belvedere in Heerenveen) is situated on a large estate that is open to the walking and biking public.

We arrived in the dark at my brother’s house and were treated to a French dinner consisting of tartiflette (potatoes, reblochon cheese and bacon), a salad and tarte tatin (apple pie) for desert.

Afghanistan is still very much part of my life. On this day, my 60th, my first congratulations came over Skype from Kabul. M called and it made my day. I am sitting downstairs in the sitting room of the old hotel where my siblings and most of their offspring gather yesterday. The calm and quiet of the living room (I am the only guest from the entire hotel) with the extreme noise of us dining together last night.

The calm and quiet and warmth also contrasts with the howling wind and rain outside. The weather is even worse than I had imagined. All night the wind was like a wild animal nipping at our windows, banging into the roof of the hotel where we sleep under the eaves. But when I planned this trip this is exactly the weather I was longing for in hot, dusty and dry Kabul.

Our clipper ship experience was great albeit a bit cramped as we slid into our berths. The next morning we walked all over Groningen center to admire the city, visit the market and trying to unlock our phones. That it was a young man from Kabul who did this and sold Axel a new phone is hardly surprising. Fate keeps pushing us in the way of Afghans or Iranian. I have had more chances to practice my Dari in the last 2 days than in the last 2 months.

We drove to a tiny town north of Groningen to pick up my grandmother’s restored cookbook. The restoratrix introduced us to her husband, a doctor who used to live in Ken, who is now a coin collector. She herself used to be a biologist specialist in penguins but found bookbinding to be more than a hobby. She did a great job and I can now use the cookbook again.

We were received by the couple as if we were family. We got a tour of their enormous barn and living quarters and marveled about this beautiful moneypit. We got some glimpses of what the house may have looked like nearly a century ago.

By the time we arrived at the ferry terminal it was dusk. So I never quite saw where we arrived. Now it is dawn. In addition to hearing the bad weather I can now also see it.

All day I was a tourist in my motherland seeing and visiting sites I never had. After we picked up our rental car at the airport we drove to a neighborhood in Amsterdam that is called ‘Het Schip.’ It’s a vestige of and testimony to social housing efforts that took place about one hundred years ago. The housing cooperative ‘Eigen Haard” (meaning ‘own hearth’) hired architect Willem de Klerk of Amsterdam School architecture fame.

A tiny museum, that wouldn’t be on anyone’s list of ‘must-see’ museums in Holland, has the ticket counter integrated with the original post office in the building. At the time the state’s post office officials didn’t think illiterate and unschooled workers needed a post office but the socialists housing cooperative thought that was wrong and the architect threw all his creative and idealistic power into the design.

A young architecture student showed us around, pointing out delightful and playful details that the architect had inserted here and there for the uplift and education of the working poor. We walked around the building that was only later called Het Schip (the ship) because it resembled one.

According to our guide the design and execution derived from a wish to make people who would live there proud of their new home and lift them out of their very miserable existence. The apartments were tiny but built according to codes that had until then been considered unnecessary for the working poor: electricity, separate toilets, separate kitchens. Here too were small details that made every room a work of art and something to be proud of. Upstairs in the museum I saw pictures of the dwellings where these people had lived before – not all that different from the tenements in lower Manhattan at that same time.

There were public health considerations (separation of cooking and toilet space) and egalitarian considerations that inspired the whole enterprise. And it worked. I bet descendants from these first tenants are now white collar workers who earn a good living.

We then headed to Enkhuizen, an old fishing town in the province of North Holland where I had stayed lonely in a bed & breakfast on my return home from Sita’s wedding. The original plan to walk around was shelved when the rain started coming down in sheets. Instead we sat down in a fish store/café to a yummy fish lunch and watched how eels are caught, smoked and packed on a large TV screen. The eel trade is big in this town and the product considered a delicacy. So we had that, and haring, and salmon and fish soup and the fish equivalent of chicken nuggets.

Our next trip was across a dam with the Ijsselmeer on one side and the future Markerwaard polder (still water) on our right. But the rains came down as if a monsoon and the clouds touched the ground. It was naptime for everyone except the driver.

At the end of the dam is Lelystad, provincial capital of one of the large tracts of reclaimed land. We drove to the Batavia wharf where the four centuries’ old craft of ship building is being given new life by a small group of craftsmen and women. A replica of the Batavia, meticulously following the design of the original one, was built over a 10 year period. The original ship perished on a coral reef near Australia in the early 1600s. We visited the carving workshop, the rope-making workshop, the iron workshop and then walked up and down the ship itself.

Our final stretch of the day was the one hour ride to Groningen that turned out to be a bit longer, too long to the liking of our offspring who were already impatiently and tired waiting at the clipper ship moored in one of the canals where we overnighted.
We took everyone out to have a rijsttafel (a collection of Indonesian dishes), one of the many ‘must do’s’ in my playbook. On the way home we stumbled on a small store run by an Iranian refugee on whom we practiced our Dari in exchange for opinions about immigration policy that don’t make Holland look quite as nice as Americans believe it to be. He wants to come to America. We wished him luck.

My computer gadget countdown timer now says less than 24 hours till the big day. It makes me think of the time in Kabul when I was cooking this trip up and when the counter had more than a hundred days to go. Dreams do come true!

In exchange for spending time with his students I got my brother to get up this morning at 6:15 AM to drop me off at the train station so that I would arrive at the airport about the same time Axel and our friends from America did. I missed one train so I didn’t welcome them but they welcomed me, happily sipping their Starbucks coffee.

We took the train to Amsterdam and were whisked away to my friend’s house for a second breakfast of speculaas koek, tea, fabulous bread and cheese. We then set out to show Amsterdam to our friends – a walking tour towards the old Jewish neighborhood (the Jordaan) – and everyone realized we would need weeks to do a tour of Amsterdam. We settled for a day.

We met my niece the dancer at a lunch café and invited her to order whatever she wanted from the menu – it is not often that we can take her out and a dancer’s income is uneven and low. She’s off with her dance troupe to Germany to germinate a new dance. She will therefore not be able to join us on the island for the celebrations. She will also not see her American cousins, helas!

We ambled a bit more through Amsterdam and marveled at the open display of various mind altering substances that were for sale in a regular shop. There was the ‘opium-like’ high or the ‘beginner’s light;’ there were mushroom products and seeds, all wares with wonderful names.

Under the guidance of our own Dutch Master’s expert we visited the one wing of the Rijksmuseum that is open to the public. The remodeling has been going on for many years now with no end in sight. The good thing is that one could actually do two museums in the time it would have taken us to do one.

After tea in the art nouveau and smoke (and time)-yellowed Café American we took in the Van Gogh museum on our way home where we broke bread with our hosts who had prepared us a wonderful thai dinner with birthday cake for dessert. We got deep into a discussion sharia law – a topic that my friend who is professor of law is very knowledgeable about. I learned a thing or two from our learned friend, for one that Sharia Law is a misnomer and that it isn’t actually law, and then some more.

We had dinner last night at Omar’s house. Omar and his family fled Afghanistan in the early 90s. Dad brought out the photo albums – one thing that I love about Afghan families and that they seem to love to do – showing the family picture albums. I wondered later how he was able to flee with these pictures that show mostly men in uniform, many of whom are not alive anymore, victims of one kind of violence or another. He was close to one of the presidents who was killed. He was lucky I suppose, or smart, or well connected or all of the above.

I got to practice my Dari which had rusted a bit but I could still understand mom who spoke only haltingly Dutch. The sons, both lawyers were fluent, without even the southern Holland accent I had expected. They also speak Dari, the language of home but admitted they cannot write or read their father’s tongue. Their mother tongue is Pashto but it is not the language of home.

The house was decorated in a way I had not expected; stark modern in white and red. Even the carpet was white – no trace of the Afghan origin of this family. I had brought some Afghan treasures, destmals (checkered cloths) for the sons, an embroidered purse for mom and for dad a Nooristani carved wooden box. Now the stark lines and color scheme is a bit messed up. I should have brought a carpet although later I understood that mom prefers the plain white rug.

The unafghan-ness of this family’s living space may have something to do with their last memories of their homeland. Exiting a place full of violence cannot be without consequences; being Dutch may be better. That is certainly true for the next generation: the oldest is a doctor, there are two lawyers and a nurse. One wonders what would have happened had they stayed.

We were treated to a wonderful Afghan meal that was complete except for the traditional bread. I didn’t think Afghans could survive without their naan but apparently they can. My brother and nephew had come along. The latter held out his empty plate several times to the great delight of our hostess. He overdid it a bit, he later told me, but he surely honored the cook.

Over the last two days I have spent some time at the university, introduced as the sister of the prof. There is even a hallway named after my brother the professor, a real street sign that says ‘Vriesendorplaan.’ Underneath it, in small letters, just as at real street signs with names of famous people their claim to fame – professor in law from this date to that date. Actually as of January 2012 he will be a part time professor and working the other time with a law firm. Just as presidents, professors are forever.

I met many students who are second generation immigrants, the ones whose fathers came to work in the mines and factories because we didn’t have enough Dutch people to do that. These young people were born and bred in Holland, are at least bilingual if not tri-lingual or quadri-lingual. They are bridges between two entirely different worlds. We talked much about mental models – it has great relevance both to their future professions and their family live. Many have illiterate grandparents who live in far flung rural areas back in Turkey and Morocco – who don’t understand why their granddaughter is going to study for a semester in the US and what/where is America anyways?

I could have spent many hours listening to their stories. Most surprising was that they look at the US as a success story when it comes to immigration, and to Europe as a failure. I believe it is simply a matter of time – for Europe the kind of immigration that the US has known for over a hundred years is still only a generation or two old.

Axel later told me I travelled on the most travelled day of the American year, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Somehow I didn’t think that many people travelled between Europe and the US at thanksgiving time with a logic that is probably too European: Americans wouldn’t want to go travel to a place without this most sacred of American holidays, and why would people who don’t have this tradition go in the other direction? Of course I was only thinking about the Boston-Amsterdam flight and not about the other 100s of domestic Delta flights. We could have known.

While standing in line I met a colleague who was on her way to Southern Africa and Tanzania. She was accompanied as far as officialdom let them, by her 2 year old daughter and husband. I remembered those days, with Tessa crying hard until I was out of sight and then later calling home and that she had entirely forgotten the unpleasantness of parting, and maybe even me.

Every seat in the plane was filled, including B-class, so no chance in the world that I might have been pushed forward. That too triggered a memory of those days when I had a friend checking in on the Boston side and on the Amsterdam side, both employees of Northwest. It worked most of the time.

In Amsterdam I discovered that my phone was locked and wouldn’t let me use my Dutch simcard. I hope that my interactions with a nice T-Mobile lady will produce the coveted unlocking code. In the meantime people have to call me in the US, even though I am here, and I am piling more charges on top of the Japan charges. T-Mobile did good by me when I bought a smart phone. I could have known.

I am preparing for my trip to Holland this evening while listening to the Bunwinkies’ first record. We had most of the band sitting at our Thanksgiving table. We returned from Western Massachusetts with the record – a real vinyl affair that we can actually play because we are one of these people who never got rid of our record player. The record sleeve is the result of a collective design efforts and includes all sorts of things from Jim and Sita’s house (spirograph pictures, the patchwork kitchen curtain, the wooden table, cardboard cutout letters, etc.). The music is wonderful and gets better each time I listen to it. It’s happy music – what better accompaniment to packing?

Yesterday we met our friend, Sita’s classmate and the principal of the school we visited in Sikkim. He is studying at Harvard and comes up to Beverly in the weekends. We were able to snag him for a walk on Singing Beach and talk about schools, facilitation of meetings and graphics. There is much networking to do after that visit, in both directions.

It was like a spring day with little moths flying around as if it was time to come out of hiding; little did they know. Axel said if this was spring we knew warm weather was something we would get more of. But now it was just a little respite from more cold and colder weather. We enjoyed it anyways.

After our beach walk we walked into town for a coffee and a visit to the Stock Exchange, a second hand store with the best stuff in town. Although we touched nearly everything in the store, and walked around with stuff as if we were going to buy it, in the end we put everything back, showing great restraint. We need to get rid of stuff, not get more. We are very proud of ourselves.

The trip to Holland is about to start, with various contingents getting on planes over the next few days until we all meet up in Groningen on Thursday evening for our overnight on old clipper ship moored somewhere in one of Groningen’s canals.

In the meantime I enjoy still being ‘fifty-ish.’

I recently listened to a show about the “Alzheimer tsunami” that public health specialist claim will hit the babyboom bubble in the coming years. Now, every time I forget or misplace something I remind our girls that this may be the beginning and they better start saving so they can take care of us.

We got up very early this morning to show up at Tessa’s at 7 AM for breakfast, a fast break before heading out to western Massachusetts where we had turkey duty. The size of the turkey required that we show up long before noon so that our Thanksgiving dinner would be served before midnight. A 16 pound turkey requires much cooking time.

Although we had made lists of what to bring, and I followed the list carefully in the morning when we were packing up, I didn’t follow it carefully enough. We also realized later that we had forgotten to put things on the list. Throughout the 3 hour drive west we kept discovering things we had forgotten, including the turkey baking pan and the white wine. Critical parts of our dinner.

Frantic calls around got a baking pan delivered by a friend and another brought a whole box of wine, a careful selection that included our missing whites. It helps when one of the dinner guests works in a wine store.

In the end everything worked out and we had a most spectacular thanksgiving dinner. We remembered the things we are thankful for but also the things we are not thankful for (mosquitoes, dead leaves, bad people, car trouble). Axel did his usual toast but forgot to read from the Tasha Tudor book of graces a relic from his childhood that he brought along. Still everything was full of grace, our hosts, the table setting, the food and even the cats.

Except me because I ate too much pie and whipped cream. Axel kindly took me out for a walk around the house in the dark to help with the digestion. Watching the stars in the crispy winter night sky was a good distraction.

There were few people in the office today, mostly those who had to get a work plan done in time, a work plan I didn’t have to construct but in which my name appeared for interesting pieces of work. The reward for hanging in there is interesting work with people I like to work with.

A few more people now know about my predicament of the last few months and there is some incredulity. We are a big place and much is not visible to others. I am a squeaky wheel now and think I am being heard. Maybe after this someone else’s transition from the field is going to be easier.

We have all received our Thanksgiving cooking assignments from master chef Jim. For this reason I hastened home. Axel and I are responsible for the turkey basting, the wine, the mashed potatoes and at least one dish that is not a variant on brown/yellow/orange. We are pushing the limits and are doing not only the green beans with toasted almonds and ginger routine but also a new dish with Brussels sprouts in a Thai dressing that I picked up from the radio yesterday. It is a bit of a trust fall.

My specialty, pumpkin pie, I cooked for internal consumption when I got home. Four other pies were already claimed by others with whom we will share the Thanksgiving meal at Sita and Jim’s house.

We met up with Tessa and Steve at Al’s café in Manchester. The place is closing on January 1. I had never been there so I got in under the wire. The cafe is really a bar that has long since stopped serving food after the stove broke down. The interior is unadulterated 50s with nicotine stains of 60 years on the paneled walls, several TV screens with games going on, wobbly booth furniture without the booth, sticky vinyl and the only visible bathroom for guys only.

It is not really my kind of place but I get the nostalgia thing. It is the place where Axel took our daughters to when they turned 21 – a manly kind of initiation into the world of authorized drinking.

According to one of the locals some rich people in town banded together and bought the place, just to get rid of the Budweiser sign in the window. The café will become a restaurant, a wine and tapas bar to be precise. Some people think it will be more fitting than a Budweiser place; others think something will be lost. Having never been there I had no opinion. Now I know something will indeed be lost. I didn’t mind the sign.

Back home we celebrated Oona’s first puppy birthday – she is a big dog and doesn’t look like a one year old until you ask her to do things that require serious mental processing. Unlike her older sister Chicha, Oona had no idea about how to unwrap a birthday present and quickly lost interest, letting Chicha complete the job.

For a while she teased her older sister with her new toy but lost interest. That toy was quickly dismantled when we were not supervising (the toy instructions, we discovered later, said that the toy was to be used under supervision only). Nevertheless Tessa will probably write an angry letter to the manufacturer, complaining about deceptive advertising. She likes those kinds of battles.

I am now presented with a new dilemma at work that has to do with gambling – gambling on being employed one way or another. I don’t think anyone can help me sort this out. I said yes to four weeks in southern Africa during the month of February…not a bad month to be in the southern hemisphere. Some people will say I shouldn’t have said yes because I am supposed to lead a team to win a proposal at that time. But who knows if it will come through when it is expected. Anything can fall through. So if I say yes to everyone, something should stick – but it will make others angry. Everything continuous to be rather tenuous.

With these dark thoughts I left work early as there wasn’t anything meaningful I could do. I arrive dback on the North Shore too early for my haircut so I stopped at the mall, looking for something I wasn’t looking for.

It is the only time before Christmas I will be there. It was utterly depressing to walk around the mall. The only good thing was that it was too early for the Christmas frenzy. Green and red colored ads were already up, mega discount posters tried to lure me into shops, Christmas music was spouting out of hidden loudspeakers and even Santa was already sitting pretty, ready for pictures in a snow covered North Pole hut.

In the food court it was quiet, too late for lunch and too early for dinner. The regulars were there. I could tell from the way they made the rounds of the fast food chains around the court and were being greeted by the staff. Dedicated caregivers were there with their charges, people who couldn’t hold their head still, or their hands, or both; people in bodies too old for their minds. I kept walking, as if I was simply exercising, slowly.

I did succumb to the attraction of food court fare: salt and fat and sugar – and as soon as I had ingested my fried chicken nuggets with honey mustard sauce I regretted my choice.

I left hoping that the haircut would bring me out of my depressed state – a wash, a rinse, a head massage. But my hairdresser rattled on about things I didn’t understand. Everyone talks about Thanksgiving and I try to force myself to be thankful in between bouts of anger and self-pity.

The only thing that made me feel better today was making contact again with the owner of the clipper ship whose email I had lost and watching a documentary about van Gogh told by himself. And then there was of course the haircut which removed a bit of the weight.