Summer!

Summer...

Summer vacation begins today.  We've got a whirlwind six weeks of summer fun ahead of us before the next Dutch school year begins on 29 August.  It has been a long week here in Amsterdam.  While The P has been focusing on packing and planning our trip to Texas I have been packing and planning for our cycling vacation when we get back.  Upon our return to the Netherlands we'll have forty eight hours to adjust to the time change the best we can before hopping on the bikes and heading out camping for a couple of weeks.  The distance and duration of the journey I have charted is quite a bit more ambitious than I would have suggested, but The P, of her own accord, and to my great surprise, announced some weeks ago that we should go for it.  So with that clearance I mapped out a sixteen night ten leg trip that will take us through five of the Netherlands' twelve provinces, on bicycles, sleeping in a tent the whole time.  I will wait to describe that further until after the fact.  I'm sure when summer break 2022 is all said and done I will have plenty to say about all of its ups, downs, ins, outs, joys, pains, laughter, tears, and sore asses.  

Monday morning began with The C going to school, The P going to Utrecht for work, and myself going to volunteer.  It was an uncommon volunteering activity, the annual buurtlunch.  If you're wondering what that is, buurt means neighborhood and lunch means...you get the picture.  It was a catered event for three hundred fifty guests in the field of the 1928 Olympic Stadium.  The size and scope of it came as a total surprise to me, but I just did what I was told and things worked out just fine.  

My workday began by riding to a fellow volunteer's apartment and picking up the electric cargo bike.  I then followed him to a local community center and picked up four gigantic pots of vegetable soup that he and my boss had prepared the night before.  My charge was to ride very carefully to the stadium and deliver the pots without spilling the soup.  It would be about a three minute ride under normal circumstances.  Safely transporting twenty gallons of sloshing soup made it an arduous journey of close to ten minutes.  

I did not know where I was supposed to go specifically, or at all to whom I was to deliver my charge, but both questions quickly answered themselves as I turned into the field level entrance of the stadium.  On the far side of the field, across the center of the oval track, was a large pavilion covering a big stage, with dozens of tables arrayed in front of it.  Someone I recognized was waving at me before I had the time to take it all in.  I delivered half of the soup to a serving station on one side of the seating area and the other half of the soup to the other side.  I didn't spill a drop.  

I spent a few minutes hanging out and getting a look at the facilities.  They were extensive, with catering and beverage tents, ad dishwashing tent, large decorative plants, lighting strung everywhere, and a top notch PA system with a covered sound board.  Apparently the setup is being used to host concerts by Dutch artists throughout the summer.  The scene looks something like the following image from 2021...  

I didn't know anything about that, but it makes a lot of sense.  A for-profit concert series uses their private setup in a public facility to host a free lunch for people in the neighborhood.  Whether that's a tax write off of some sort, a condition of getting to use the stadium all summer, or an act of pure charity by the organizers I do not know or care to speculate.  

After dropping off the soup I was told to head back to the other volunteer's apartment to pick something else up.  I met my boss walking into the stadium as I  was pedaling out.  She was by no means the boss of this big shebang, only one of the many organizers, but I don't work for anyone but her.  I will immediately make a liar out of myself.  She asked me what I was going back to the other volunteer's apartment for.  I said I didn't know, someone had just told me I needed to go pick something else up.  

That took me like ten minutes round trip, and it turned out that I was picking up a piece of a large advertising banner for the stage. For the record, I find transporting things from one place to another by bicycle, for reasons I don't even pretend to want to comprehend, some of the most pleasant activity I know of.  I would be a bicycle courier still if the job offered health insurance, retirement, and decent pay.  A few minutes after returning from my second delivery of the day I was sent on my third.  

That run took me to the large corporate cafeteria where I pick up donations every Wednesday and Thursday afternoon.  My boss had gotten them to agree to prepare apple strudel for several hundred.  The agreement was to pick the donation up at 11:00, but my boss sent me early and I was there at 10:20.  After several months I'm getting to know most all of the kitchen staff, and feel pretty comfortable there.  The chef saw me and was like, "It's not eleven yet."  I was like, "I just do what I'm told.  You sent a picture of the finished product and my boss sent me."  He informed me that the strudels were still warm and that they would be damaged in transit.  Proud of his own work, he didn't want that.  He told me to go out to the cafeteria, eat and drink whatever I wanted, and wait for half an hour for them to cool.  I did so.  

Just after 11:00 I arrived back at the stadium with more warm apple strudel than I've ever had cause to imagine.  We sliced it and covered it and then had a team meeting.  That's when my boss asked me if I would stay to serve food.  I consented of course, having blocked out the whole day for this event, even thought that wasn't really what I'd signed up for.  There were serving stations on either side of the seating area, with the tent and bandstand enclosing the area to the east and the stadium's bleachers rising behind the dining are to the west.  I was assigned to work the south serving station with two other guys I know from previous volunteer work, and a young lady I had never before met.  She was actually there as a representative of a certain neighborhood initiative.  She set up her little information stand, but mostly just helped us.  

There was not much to do between 11:00 and 12:00.  During that time we set up our serving stations, offering water, juice, fresh fruit, krentenbollen (It's a very specific Dutch thing.  The Dutch love them, but most foreigners find them not nearly as tasty as the level of enthusiasm would warrant.), and soup.  

Stop!  Stop!  God dammit!  I said that this was going to be a busy week, but I didn't really have any idea.  I wrote somewhere last week that I was highly motivated to write something of substance here, despite predicted time constraints.  I wrote most of the above on Tuesday morning, and haven't had a chance to sit down and relax for more than a few minutes since.  Now it's Friday afternoon.  I can't put this off until tomorrow.  Against my better judgement we're going visiting tomorrow, and that's going to involve good friends, lots of laughs, and way more alcohol than I should ingest before having to be up at 05:00 Sunday morning and tackling Amsterdam's suddenly completely dysfunctional airport.  

I was even going to write an entire essay about the airport, and how fucked up it is, but didn't get to it in the last couple of months.  

Is that just the human condition?  More ideas than time, or tons of time and no ideas...?  

The kitchen timer is buzzing.  It smells like roasted eggplant in here.  Why in the hell am I preparing a quart of baba ganoush thirty six hours before we go to Houston?!  

See you in September.  Catch me if you can!  

I finished a Dutch language book this week, Krukel van de Vallende Sterren.  It was the Dutch translation of Urchin of the Riding Stars, a children's book written by M.I. McAllister and published in 2005.  It was a two hundred seventy one page fantasy story about a kingdom of anthropomorphic small mammals.  It was okay.  The C read it a couple of months ago and recommended it to me.  "I think you'll like it." my child said.  To my slight chagrin, The C is dead-on in recognizing my Dutch reading level.  The C reads many books without recommending them to me, but then, out of the blue, insists that I read something.  And it's a perfect fit every time.  Curious, as well as annoyed, I asked The C how it was possible to gauge my Dutch reading level so accurately.  "It's how you speak."  Yeah.  Duh.  

After the summer I will be reading the other two books in the "trilogy", which The C has also read, and wants to discuss with me when I'm done.  It turns out that when I searched for the author, the "trilogy" at the time of the printing of the editions we have, is now a series of five.  My main purpose in looking up the author was to see what age range her fiction was intended for.  The internet tells me age nine to eleven.  The C is on the low end of that, age-wise, and, if the speed with which the three books were devoured is any indication, on the high end of that reading comprehension-wise.  What my child read one night lying in bed took me probably a dozen hours.  Not that learning a new language in my forties and having a kid who's a fast reader is anything to complain about...  

Other than that I am persevering with the Jane Austen anthology, in English, and still enjoying it heartily.  I will probably either finish it up or put it down over the summer vacation.  And who knows what else I will have gotten into by the time school gets back in session.  Whatever it is I will certainly tell you about it.  

Peace!